Hamas, which had been expected to do well in last week’s municipal Palestinian elections that were a run-up to the vote for a new Palestinian national legislature scheduled for July, has done even better than predicted. Although its success can’t be put in precise statistical terms, the results having been tabulated in terms of seats won on local councils rather than of percentages of the vote, one-third to one-half of Gaza Strip and West Bank voters chose Hamas or Hamas backed candidates. That’s roughly as many as supported Abu-Mazen’s (how quickly one has gotten used to not saying “Yasser Arafat’s”!) Fatah. That this is bad for Fatah goes without saying. But is it bad for Israel, too?

The conventional wisdom is that it is. Indeed, this seems obvious. Not only was Hamas the initiator and main executor of the suicide bombings that were the worst aspect of the recently ended Intifada, it has for years been a far more implacable enemy of Israel than Fatah. Whereas the latter, a semi-secular organization, has elements that are genuinely prepared to accept Israel’s existence, the Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas has consistently rejected such an acceptance.

Israel, Hamas has never ceased proclaiming, is an illegitimate creation that must be erased from the Muslim Middle East. At most, temporary truces with it can be made if they are useful and serve the Palestinian cause. Such, in Hamas’s eyes, is the “cease-fire” now in effect between Israel and the Palestinians, which the organization has more or less been observing.

Clearly, there is no chance for a negotiated peace settlement with a Palestinian Authority in which Hamas is in power or even a major force. Clearly, too, such a Palestinian Authority will never disarm Hamas, which will always have the option of deciding to renew hostilities. How can this possibly be good for Israel? And yet it can be.

To begin with, chances for a negotiated peace settlement between Israel and a Fatah-run Palestinian Authority are slim, too. Not only Ariel Sharon and Abu-Mazen, but Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, are too far apart on too many issues for a compromise solution to be likely – which is why there is considerable logic in Mr. Sharon’s determination to disengage unilaterally from most of the Palestinian territories while retaining those that Israel feels able and entitled to hang on to.

But disengagement – from Gaza, and at a later date, from much of the West Bank – is threatened not only by the settler movement and its sympathizers. It is also threatened by any Palestinian Authority that takes an ostensibly moderate line. A Palestinian government that makes conciliatory noises toward Israel, even if these aren’t backed by more flexible positions, will be able to come to the world and say: “Just look! At a time when we are ready to negotiate in good faith, the Israelis are imposing their own solution without asking us.”

If the world, and particularly Washington, is convinced by such an argument, there will be heavy pressure on Israel to drop disengagement’s second stage and enter into renewed negotiations, the resumption of which can only lead to more years of stalemate and acrimony. The Palestinians’ frustrations with this process will in all likelihood, sooner or later, push them over the brink of violence again, with Hamas this time, too, in the lead.

A Hamas-governed Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, will prevent this from happening, since neither the United States nor even Europe will ever take seriously any claim it might make to being genuinely interested in a peaceful solution of the conflict with Israel. Moreover, faced with disengagement in the form of a new West Bank border unilaterally determined by an Israeli security fence, such a Palestinian Authority will be less rather than more likely to resort to massive violence in response.

One reason for this, of course, is that any political group that finds itself in power rather than in the opposition has to be more responsible in its behavior. A Hamas that is accountable for all of Palestinian society, rather than for just its own fundamentalist constituency, will have far more to lose in another armed confrontation with Israel, both in tangible assets and in public support, than a Hamas that merely snipes from the side. Beyond this, the same radical Muslim outlook that has made Hamas rule out any permanent reconciliation with Israel will also make it more possible for it to live with the truncated, not-quite-enough-for-a-Palestinian state, Gaza-plus-most-of-the-West-Bank entity that disengagement will leave it.

Like all pan-Islamists, the ideologists of Hamas have never been unqualified supporters of Arab nationalism per se, its Palestinian variety included; no independent Arab state, to their mind, is anything more than a step toward a greater Islamic union that will one day embrace, first the Arab, and then the entire, world. For Hamas, it will not be a tragedy if the Palestinians, denied a state of their own, have to link up with Jordan and Egypt. On the contrary, since Jordan and Egypt, too, are takeover targets for Islamic radicals, the Palestinians can just as well, from Hamas’s point of view, function politically in them.

None of this is to say that a Palestinian Authority dominated by Hamas would be without its perils to Israel. It is simply to say that it would have its advantages too, and that these might be considerable. For years Israel has been calling for the democratization of Palestinian politics, so that the Palestinian in the street might have a say about his own future. Now that this is actually happening, there is no need to panic over its results.

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