HAWARA, West Bank: A new code was born here overnight. No one, it seems, belongs to Hamas in the West Bank anymore. They are all now "Islamists," a word that neatly, and maybe more safely, shears the political from the religious amid the uncertainty of a Palestinian people newly divided.
"I don't want to spend my life in jail!" a 35-year-old restaurant owner said, refusing to give his name after expressing pro-Hamas sentiments in an interview here.
Hamas, shrewd as it is deadly, has gone into hiding in the West Bank, which is controlled now by its secular rival Fatah and is the place that the United States, Europe and Israel are all supporting as the only workable Palestinian nation. Dozens of members of the militant Islamic group have been arrested in the past week, since Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza, the West Bank's smaller and more radical sibling. Men with beards - the symbol of the devout and, often, of Hamas - say they are sticking close to home.
But in scores of interviews in the West Bank, with people of all political shades, one thing seems clear: Hamas activists here may be kept in check by Fatah and the Israeli Army for now, but they remain a powerful presence even in the West Bank. This may be the key fact that Israel, the United States and others will have to absorb as they bolster the West Bank as a sort of trial Palestinian state.
"If Hamas doesn't like it, Hamas can destroy it," said Fais Hamdan, 34, a stonecutter with an "Islamist" beard in this village of 6,000 near Nablus, as he sat in the restaurant with the owner nervous about giving his name. "If they want to kill any political deal, they only have to attack a settlement or another Israeli target. Don't think that Hamas is very weak in the West Bank."
The central issue, as it has been for years, remains credibility.
Hamas crushed Fatah politically last year, sweeping legislative elections in January 2006, partly because Fatah was perceived as corrupt and nonresponsive to ordinary Palestinians. That reality, even many in Fatah complain, has changed little.
Hamas also remains, on paper at least, a strong political force, with the majority of legislative seats in Parliament generally, and in control of dozens of city and town councils around the West Bank. Israel has curtailed that as best it can: Of the 74 Hamas legislators, 40 are in Israeli jails - and many of its other leaders have been arrested since the fighting in Gaza.
But even that can have a counterintuitive effect possibly helpful to Hamas: Palestinian leaders often gain their contacts and political bona fides in Israeli prison.
More broadly, though, many Palestinians seem to hold little hope that anyone - the United States, Israel, or even Arab states fearful that Hamas's Islamism could spread - will actually make good on promises of aid to the West Bank.
That perception seemed reinforced Monday, after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel met with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, and made what Palestinians considered a paltry opening gesture: only a portion of the $600 million in withheld Palestinian tax money, and just 250 prisoners held in Israeli jails, among some 11,000.
"Look at the irony here," the restaurant owner said. "Abu Mazen says he rejects talks with Hamas but he sits down with Olmert. And Olmert isn't going to give him anything! Then Hamas leaders appear on TV and say: 'Fatah negotiated for 15 years with Israel and nothing happened. Israel didn't give us anything for 15 years. Why now?' "
"And people are listening," he added.
For the moment, political leaders and security officials say, the danger of the Gaza violence spilling with force into the West Bank seems remote. Fatah is stronger here, and unlike in Gaza, Israeli soldiers still occupy the West Bank, making regular raids, arresting militants and acting generally as a deterrent to Hamas.
At any rate, Hamas seems to have taken itself out of any fight in the West Bank - though its critics say this is not only because its members fear arrest.
"If they are hiding, then they are hiding for shame at the crimes that were committed in Gaza," said Ahmad Hazaa Shreim, a member of Parliament and leader of Fatah in Qalqilya, a Palestinian city of 40,000 close to the Israeli line.
Qalqilya, walled off almost completely by the Israeli barrier, presents a telling test case for the future of Hamas in the West Bank: Flags of both Fatah and Hamas still fly here, and in 2005 it shocked Israel, and surprised many Palestinians, by voting in a 15-member city council composed entirely of Hamas members (including the mayor, who was in an Israeli jail at the time, and last month was arrested again).
But then last year, the city bucked the trend, voting in a majority of Fatah legislators at a time when Hamas won elections around the Palestinian territories.
Now the two forces are locked in another standoff, more tense since the fighting in Gaza and with low-level violence, as all sides absorb what it means for Palestinians to be divided into two parts. Without doubt, Hamas is coming under verbal fire for pushing Fatah from Gaza.
"Hamas people always wore the clothes of religion," complained the 65-year-old owner of a shoe shop in Qalqilya, who like many people refused to give his name out of fear. "Now after what happened in Gaza, the mask has been removed from these people. Hamas showed its ugly face."
But Hamas supporters say that in recent days Fatah has been showing its ugly face, too: Amid arrests and violent overtaking of government and Hamas buildings around the West Bank, at least 23 people, most of them Hamas members, have been detained in Qalqilya alone by the Palestinian security forces controlled by Fatah in the past week. Fatah says that only armed men are targeted.
While a Fatah building was firebombed and a security patrol fired on, several shops owned by Hamas supporters have been shot at. At the edge of town, a small charitable factory that makes artificial limbs - and is said to be controlled by Hamas - was systematically demolished.
It was carried out, the factory's operators say, by 16 well-organized men in ski masks.
"Sixteen people?" said Tawfik Daoud, the charity's treasurer, who denied any link to Hamas. "Masked? They were not thieves. It's obvious who did it."
Since then, Fatah has come under much criticism here for the raid, though Shreim, the Fatah chief, who had been respected by Hamas because he spent 22 years in Israeli jails, strongly denies Fatah had anything to do with it.
Still, there is a rising concern among the West Bank's many religious people, even those who claim not to belong to Hamas, that the group may make life difficult all around for the religious. For whatever anger there may be at Hamas, the fear seems to be preserving its support.
"They are chasing Hamas people," said a bearded 27-year-old who gave his name as Abu Khaled. "The situation in town makes people sympathize with them."
It is tense too in Hebron, another religious city to the south. Local security officers say they are not expecting a fight with Hamas, but just in case, they have piled sandbags in front of their headquarters and built up gun positions around them.
Akram al-Himouni, a local Fatah leader, sees some hope if Hamas apologizes for its use of force in Gaza and allows Fatah back there. If Hamas does not "say sorry," he said, "then the story will become worse and there could be a military resolution."
But many others predicted some sort of reunion, if not from love then from an inescapable logic tied, as always here, by what the outside world decides to do.
-- Yoshie