To Daragmeh, the semblant harmony of the city is proof that Hamas is interested in unity, not civil war. “Hamas never wanted to govern alone,” he says. “We always wanted a coalition and we said this after we won the election. An agreement with Fatah is good for the Palestinian people. We need to be united in order to stand against the occupation.” Indeed, Hamas campaigned on a platform of forming a government of national unity, but for a year it remained ambivalent about the matter. It took a billion-dollar inducement from the Saudi royals for Hamas and Fatah to agree to a deal. Daragmeh is quick to offer an excuse: Abbas and Fatah are complicit with Israel and the West in sabotaging Hamas’s ability to govern. “We’re the government,” he protests, “but 99 percent of the PA bureaucracy is still Fatah, and they want us to fail even though the people want us to succeed.”

Throughout 2006, the Western boycott effectively foreclosed on Palestinian society. Strikes and protests among educators, health workers, and civil servants caused deep cleavages. Israel stopped transferring tax monies ($700 million to $950 million per year) collected in the Palestinian territories for the PA, fearing that Hamas would fund violence rather than pay salaries. Dozens of Hamas lawmakers and cabinet ministers were arrested. But actions designed to cripple Hamas drove it toward alternative sources of aid, and Iran was only too anxious to assist. And when Haniyeh arrived home with the promise of just under $300 million from Iran, as if to demonstrate that Hamas would not repeat the mistakes of Fatah, he outlined where the money would be spent: $70 million to unpaid civil servants, $25 million to build homes, $6 million to farmers who cannot export their olive oil, etc. Nonetheless, Daragmeh is unsettled by his leader’s gesture, and by the prospect of becoming beholden to a new suitor. “We shouldn’t need Iran. Iran has nothing to do with us. The West should be supporting us because we are a democracy. We haven’t been given a chance to realize our goals. What else can we do? ”

I put that question to Professor Ali Jarbawi, a frequent commentator on Palestinian political affairs and the dean of the faculty of law and public administration at Birzeit. Though he is often critical of Hamas, the widely respected pragmatist was asked by Hamas to join a proposed unity government last November. He politely declined. Jarbawi believes that Hamas never really wanted to govern in a majority. “Heading into the elections, Hamas thought they could impose their agenda by being in the opposition. Winning made them change tactics. Of course, now they can tell people that things are out of their hands, [that] everybody put obstacles in their way.”

Many Palestinians have been willing to be patient with their new government, especially in the face of international opposition, but how long will Hamas’s political honeymoon last? According to Jarbawi, there won’t be another viable alternative to Hamas for some time. Fatah’s corruption and ineptitude cut too deep a wound, and Hamas’s campaign slogan—“Ten years of negotiations were futile. Five years of struggle liberated Gaza”—continues to resonate. “There is a basic difference between Hamas and Fatah,” says Jarbawi. “The glue of Fatah was personalized around Arafat. With Hamas, ideology is the glue. If there is a major compromise on ideology, there could be a split. But you won’t see this happening.”

But that “ideology” seems to be on shifting sands. During the 2006 election campaign, al-Zahhar insisted that Hamas would never co-operate with Israel and that the Qassam brigades would multiply. The next day, Hamas’s Jerusalem leader, Sheikh Abu Tayr, argued, “Hamas will negotiate with Israel better than others.” He then retracted his statement, cryptic as it was. Meanwhile, al-Zahhar said that negotiations with Israel were not forbidden. Another Hamas leader claimed no incongruity between Hamas’s electoral program and its charter, adding to the confusion; Haniyeh had previously said that Hamas would deliver a new platform after the election. “Even [Khaled] Mashal says he supports a Palestinian state [at] the 1967 borders,” notes Jarbawi. “This might seem extreme, but it’s really indicative of a very gradual process of change. Even if they change their charter, they’ll find a way to justify it with the people.” Or is it that the ideology is clear, the political calibrations murky; that Hamas is having a much more difficult time as the government than it ever had as a violent protest movement?

Is Hamas’s experiment in democracy doomed? miftah, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, is a Palestinian ngo dedicated to monitoring the government and educating the public on democratic citizenship. Founded by Hanan Ashrawi, miftah produced a damning report on the 2006 elections that criticized the public and the Palestinian media for failing to hold the political parties accountable for their ambiguous platforms. With respect to Hamas, miftah’s critique centred on the party’s lack of commitment to a two-state solution and a negotiated end to the occupation and its failure to answer a simple question: was the Islamic movement simply opportunistic in participating in a government it had boycotted for nearly two decades?

“When Hamas took office, Palestinian society became increasingly polarized. Now our work has become more sophisticated. In order to educate the public we have to get them to put ideology aside and really question their leaders,” says Rami Bathish, a former media director of miftah. But like many Palestinian intellectuals, Bathish is worried that Hamas’s new political savoir faire will be too much to overcome. Hamas’s victory, followed by the boycott, shut down most Palestinian civil society initiatives. The movement then set about fixing the problems it had helped create, and again Hamas is focused on providing welfare and access to health clinics, and many of the pre-schools, even in Ramallah, are run by Hamas-friendly groups. People turn to them for shelter from the chaos, and Hamas receives political support for the services it provides.

“One hand builds and the other resists,” rang another of Hamas’s campaign slogans, but despite the movement’s best efforts, polls indicate that Fatah is gaining back some of the trust it clearly lacked a year ago. The Mecca agreement strengthened Abbas, allowing him to dictate the Palestinian position vis-à-vis Israel in peace talks. When Condoleezza Rice visited the region in February, she met with Abbas and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and not, pointedly, any member of Hamas. The loss of Western support is hitting home, and the promise of its return is more than just a campaign wedge issue.

In a new election, Palestinians may choose Fatah for its promise of negotiating with Israel and reopening the floodgates of Western aid. Insisting that it needed to see how the unity government would unfold, in late February the European Union refused to lift sanctions. For the West, the stumbling block remains Hamas and its refusal to officially recognize Israel and renounce terrorism. At the same time, Russia continues to assert itself on the world stage, and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that the unity government is responsible enough and that Russia would push for sanctions to be lifted. If a situation develops wherein Russia and Iran are seen by the West, and particularly the United States, to be meddling in negotiations, the Hamas-Fatah conflict could have ramifications across the Middle East. In such a case, Hamas’s leaders may retreat to being a local protest movement, an ideology not rendered amorphous and contradictory by having to govern.

At Birzeit, Ayman Jarrar takes me to a large auditorium where we observe a student-government-sponsored event titled “The Palestinian Woman is a Chronicle of Jihad.” Seated on stage, fully veiled and wearing green Hamas headbands, are four female students. They pass a microphone one to another, each tearfully narrating personal stories of trauma under Israeli occupation. A sombre audience of fellow students breaks into applause only once: when one woman describes the brief contents of a letter her four-year-old son wrote to his father in prison. The boy wrote: “Hamas is our only way.”