When the Bolsheviki and their allies among the anti-war Mensheviks and Peasants Party seized power from the duly elected Kerensky government, Russians were against the continuation of the war, not for the totalitarian state. As we know, once in power the Bolsheviks laid down their arms, disbanded their militia, governing as liberals in a hurry.

When the Germans voted the National Socialist Workers Party into power in 1933, they were voting against the hyperinflation crippling of the Weimer Republic and the sense of nationalist resentment at the bitter humiliating terms dictated to a defeated Germany by the Allied Powers (in this case led by France) at Versailles in 1919. As we know, power tamed the Nazi Party and led to a modification of its extremist programs.

When the Baath came into power in Syria and Iraq in 1963 … well, you get the picture.

Now the Palestinians have voted Hamas into power with a sizeable majority. Hamas will not moderate. It will not disband its armed units which it considers the proof of its contention that armed struggle forced the Israelis out of the Gaza Strip. It will not flow into the Palestinian mainstream but rather is the undertow that reveals the Palestinian mainstream.

The Fatah movement, which towered above Palestinian political life since the 1960s, could not overcome the inherent contradictions between its nationalist and religious extremism and its avowed political posture of compromise. Their Palestinian Authority proved a failed state before becoming a state – a first for political science. Fatah should have had a few decades to evolve into a mukhabarat state – a state dominated by its national security organs, like Algeria, Syria, Egypt and Iraq (before the toppling of Saddam). Such states, with a keen sense of self preservation, have toyed with normalization with Israel.

But to become a mukhabarat state would have required the acceptance of a broad compromise with Israel over borders and populations, and especially over the Palestinians’ so called right of return, a right that stay firmly planted in the Palestinian imagination in large part due to the decades old complicity of the UNWRA policy which purposefully keeps Palestinians locked in their dispossessed state pending their return.

This Fatah was not prepared to do when it was able, or able to do when, fearful of the rise of the absolutist clerical fascists in Hamas, some within it became prepared.

The Palestinians are now under the control of a political movement that is for all intents and purposes the Palestinian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The goals are limited to the near term Palestinian and longer term Israel objectives, but in the longest term Hamas would comply with the reestablishment of a Sunni caliphate subsuming within it many current nation states, including the nascent Palestine. This is the equivalent of Italy skipping the Risorgimento and jumping straight into, well, not the European Union, but backward in time into the Holy Roman Empire.

Hamas, Iran, Al Qaeda all share a basic common denominator: the desire to see a reversal of the correlation of forces in the world away from the infidels and back toward Islam.

That is the key point about their shared commitment to the destruction of Israel. Israel was established as a consequence of the power order that emerged from World War II, another way of saying that its existence is essentially compatible with (ironically as it sounds) the U.N. system. The entire edifice of Middle East peacemaking has rested on the foundation of Israel’s existence as a legitimate nation state. What happens now when the Palestinians openly base their policy on a rejection of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and all the conferences, conventions, and protocols that emanate from them, which require Israel to surrender territory seized in the 1967 War and the Arabs (and not merely the Palestinians) to come to complete peace agreements with the Jewish state? Is it too much to ask that the international community – a euphemism for the power structure that stands challenged by Islamic fascism – rethink its headlong rush toward a Palestinian state under these circumstances?

This is a great clarification. The scales are off. Israel has no peace option with the Palestinians at this juncture. What will be in a generation’s time is anyone’s guess, and probably depends on many developments external to the Israel-Palestine axis. Hamas takes power in Palestine, not in a vacuum but as part of an historical shift away from the wave of Arab nationalisms that brought independence to many Arab states and toward a resurgent pan-Islamism. Pan Arab nationalism is already a relic, and local state nationalisms are weak, with the exception of a few strongly shaped states like Egypt.

Jordan has a “Jordan First” PR campaign that must compete with this worldwide convulsion now sandwiching them between Palestinians on the West Bank of the Jordan River and Iraqis on their eastern frontier. In Damascus, power hangs by a thread in the hands of the Alwaite minority, as a seething Sunni Arab majority waits its turn at the torturer’s wheel.

Beyond this is the rise of the Shiite arc of power embodied in Iran, with potential in southern Iraq.

This leaves Israel with fewer, though better clarified options. Essentially, the dovish proposition that under the right circumstances a full-bore peace treaty can be negotiated with the Palestinians lies in ruins, for now no more useful than a Crusader castle. The major dispute among Israelis will be between those in Kadima, arguing for a better deployment vis-a-vis the impossible-to-deal-with Palestinians, and the Likud, arguing for a stand-pat, change-is-weakness strategy.

Readers of this space well know I favor the Kadima view out of a desire to separate from the Hamas reality.

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