The story is told about Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol that, when he made his first trip to the banks of the Suez Canal after the stunning Israeli blitzkrieg in Sinai in 1967, he flashed reporters what looked like a “V”- sign. “Is that for Victory?” he was asked. “No,” Eshkol answered. “It’s for oyVay.”

It is likely that the Hamas leaders who are flashing V-signs in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah feel the same way. They have won a sensational election victory that they did not expect and probably did not even want. They are not prepared for the responsibility of running the Palestinian Authority and have no idea of how they intend to do so. They are going to have to think very fast.

For Hamas, the ideal outcome of Wednesday’s Palestinian elections would have been to finish, not first, ahead of the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, but a close second, leaving the running of the tottering Palestinian Authority to Fatah while reaping the fruits of a strong showing. As a militant national Opposition in control of numerous municipalities and local councils in Gaza and the West Bank, it would have felt satiated from a feast that it could then have proceeded to digest at its leisure while Fatah was stuck with the headache of having to continue to function as a Palestinian government.

Now, the headache belongs to Hamas. It has inherited a bankrupt, anarchic, corrupt political structure whose scathing critic it was until yesterday and that it will have to start governing tomorrow, and it has not even begun to ask the questions that it will need to find answers to. How will it deal with an Israel that it does not recognize? How will it pay civil servants and keep basic services running if Europe and the United States cut off financial aid to any government it heads? How can it continue to operate an underground military and terrorist wing when it itself now must function entirely above ground? What will it do about its program of imposing Koranic law on a Palestinian society large parts of which are Westernized and not about to submit to Islamicization?

It is a safe guess that Hamas’ immediate response, while it tries to figure out a governing strategy, will be not to rock the boat and to sound as reasonable as it can so as not to lose Western financial support and have the Palestinian Authority classified as an international outlaw. It will make moderate noises without officially moderating its positions and hem-and-haw in answer to the hard questions.

Will Hamas recognize Israel? Of course not – the Zionist entity has no right to exist – but on the other hand, it does exist – and since by acknowledging that it exists, Hamas has recognized it already, why be asked to recognize it again?

Will Hamas cease to commit acts of terror and lay down its arms? No problem! It never committed any acts of terror to begin with, only acts of legitimate resistance, so why should it start committing them now? And it will be only too happy to lay down its arms by issuing Palestinian police uniforms to all its arms-bearing members, who will then no longer be its arms bearing members.

Will Hamas impose Koranic law? Allah forbid – certainly not until the Palestinian people are ready for it. Meanwhile, however, it will do what it can to help them to get ready.

It is greatly to be hoped that Europe and the United States do not fall for this. Already the inevitable voices of reason are being heard to say that if only Hamas makes a few statesman-like proclamations and behaves itself for a week or two while in power, the world can go back to doing business with the Palestinian Authority as usual.

This would be a dangerous mistake. Terrorist organizations that call for the destruction of a neighbor state do not cease to be what they have been within a period of a week or two. Precisely because the Palestinian people has exercised its democratic right to choose its leaders (and there is no denying it: the Palestinian elections were surprisingly orderly and fair), it should now be expected to take responsibility for whom it has chosen.

If these leaders are radical Islamists who want to dance on Israel’s grave, let them get their funding and diplomatic support from Iran, not from the United States and the European Union. And if this means more chaos and poverty and misery for the Palestinians in the years ahead, or more destruction because Israel has to respond with cruel force to Hamas violence, so be it. The next time they have elections, if Koranic law has not by then made this decadent Western invention superfluous, they’ll know better.

For Israel, it’s the Eshkol joke in reverse. On the face of it, it’s “Oy vay!” Actually, how ever, Hamas’s victory is not necessarily a bad thing for Israel at all. It may even constitute a golden opportunity.

For the last five years, since the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel has been in an absurd position. On the one hand, it has had to deal with a feeble Palestinian Authority that encouraged or condoned terrorism, was unable to control its own population, and could not possibly have kept any peace agreement it might have signed. (Just suppose that such an agreement had been reached, that Israel had carried out all the concessions called for by it – and that then Hamas had come to power!)

And yet on the other hand, even as Israel, sobered by the knowledge that its two opposed dreams of peace with the Palestinians and annexation of the disputed territories were both equally unrealistic, was coming to the sensible conclusion that it must act unilaterally to establish its own borders along demographically and militarily viable lines, Europe and the United States have clung to the fiction that a negotiated settlement via President Bush’s “road map” was possible. The fact that the road map led nowhere, and that a unilateral Israeli withdrawal to the security fence now under construction against Palestinian protests is in the best interests of everyone, was too politically incorrect for the world to acknowledge.

But the mask is now off the Palestinian Authority at last and the road map can be thrown into the wastepaper basket – and with it, the 1993 Oslo Agreement and everything that stemmed from it. There is no longer any reason, from their own perspective, for Europe and the United States not to say openly: “Since the Palestinian people has elected a leadership that no Israel government can be expected to deal with, we will in the absence of a better alternative support an Israeli withdrawal to the security fence and recognize that fence as Israel’s de facto border.”

Such international recognition is precisely what is needed to convince Israelis that, despite the colossal political, emotional, and logistical difficulties involved, such a step is worth taking. The time has come for a deal between Israel and the world. Once it is made, Hamas can ask for its commission.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.