Hamas clearly exists. And no one understands that better than the main participants in the Middle East peace negotiations that restarted here this week.

Yet the Islamist radicals, who now control the day-to-day lives of the 1.4 million souls living inside the Gaza Strip, were resolutely ignored in the florid, optimistic speeches beamed across the world from Annapolis, Md.

Only Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, when outlining the diverse flaws and weaknesses of Palestinian society as he saw them — terrorism, lack of governmental institutions and law enforcement, indeed, the absence of any real legal system, etc. — mentioned "the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip."

Palestinian Leader Mahmoud Abbas and President Bush made no mention at all of the Islamic Resistance Movement, otherwise known as Hamas. Which is probably understandable.

Hamas is a rather messy "fact on the ground," to use an old bit of Middle East jargon. It might not be the only Islamic fundamentalist group in the region with a tendency toward violent jihad. But it is the only one to ever win a parliamentary majority in free and fair elections.

In January of last year, Hamas whipped Fatah, the old, established party led by Abbas and which had come over the years to regard power as its vested right. Hamas took 74 of 132 seats. Fatah took 45.

By the standards of those in official Washington, who constantly urge democracy on a developing world, that result should make Hamas the legitimate representative of a good chunk of the Palestinian people. But of course that is not the case.

Uncomfortable revolutionaries

I should stop here and say I hesitate even to make this point. Like most journalists I know with Middle East experience, and I know quite a few, I understand how radioactive Hamas is as a subject for analysis.

Its members have slaughtered Israeli civilians — men, women and children — and quite a few Palestinians who have stood in their way.

Many Westerners, particularly supporters of Israel, the country Hamas has sworn to destroy, see the group as a form of pure evil. The very mention of its name, and especially its elected credentials, can provoke a torrent of emotional anger.

For those reasons, Hamas is anathema to most Western governments (Canada's among them).

Secular Arab parties like Fatah despise the fundamentalists, too. They regard them as a mortal threat. As well they should.

Because in a society noted for cynical corruption, the men of Hamas tend to be ascetics. I have been in some of their homes and they are threadbare, nothing like the spectacular seaside villas Abbas and his Fatah colleagues were somehow able to afford when they controlled the Strip.

What's more, unlike the comfortable revolutionaries of Fatah, whom I have seen treat ordinary Palestinian labourers like so much roadside garbage, Hamas ministers to the most basic needs of the poor, running orphanages, clinics and soup kitchens, all the better to draw them into the mosque.

Hamas at the table

That approach was ultimately what won Hamas its popular mandate, at least until the next scheduled elections in 2010. But no invitation to Annapolis.

Instead, Hamas stayed in Gaza, where it organized hundreds of thousands of protesters and threatened publicly to kill any deal Abbas might strike with Olmert. (Killing Abbas himself might not be out of the question for them, either. It was, after all, an Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas's parent organization, who killed then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 after he signed that original peace deal with the Israelis).

Nonetheless, a man who helped broker that deal thinks Hamas should be at the table. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser in Jimmy Carter's White House, feels it makes sense.

Yes, he says, he fully understands that Hamas refuses even to recognize the existence of the state of Israel. But he remembers the intransigence of an earlier Israeli prime minister, Likud leader Menachem Begin.

"I was in the White House when Likud came to power and the prime minister was saying there was no such thing as a Palestinian — that this is a fiction — and yet we didn't boycott [Likud], we didn't stop supporting it financially, we kept negotiating with them and in the end, the Likud accepted a two-state solution, at least in principle.

"The same process has to be applied towards Hamas."

Brzezinski also understands that the United States and Canada, along with many other nations, consider Hamas terrorists. But he argues that it does no good for governments to label other administrations, pointing to North Korea, a so-called terrorist state with which Washington is about to conclude an arms deal.

"Well look, one can always issue labels to people, and say, because of the label, I am not negotiating with them. But then you have to ask yourself why you are issuing the label in the first place. Maybe it is because you don't want to negotiate with them."

Meanwhile, on the other side

But Hamas is not the only force capable of torpedoing the fragile, tentative framework for peace that is the best hope of these negotiations.

Ehud Olmert might be the Israeli prime minister. But, in reality, he may be no stronger than Abbas back home.

Arrayed against him are influential religious and nationalist leaders, people who believe in a "Greater Israel," a biblical concept that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. (Which, incidentally, are precisely the borders Hamas envisions for Palestine).

These are people who regard the Hebrew Bible as a property deed and have little interest in the political aspirations or compromises of whoever is leading the latest coalition in Israel's parliament.

Leading rabbis have declared that God forbids ceding even one inch of Greater Israel. As well, as is often noted, many of the 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank are armed and have military experience.

I have seen them scream at, spit upon and abuse the Israeli soldiers who are in the West Bank at least partly to assure their personal security.

They deeply oppose the Annapolis talks. Already, they have been telling reporters they will never respect any deal Olmert might sign and that they will never, ever leave their homes in the settlements.

They've said that before, of course, and who knows what will happen this time. The Israeli army forcibly removed settlers from the Sinai peninsula after the deal with Egypt, and from Gaza when Ariel Sharon decided it was against Israel's interest to remain in the Strip.

But the Sinai and Gaza are not the West Bank. The religious and ultranationalists consider Hebron, in the West Bank, the original city of King David. The stony crags of the northern West Bank and the fertile fields of the south are, to them, eternally God-given Jewish land. Only a traitor, they say, would even think of giving any of it away.

Is this just talk? Perhaps, but Israel's security forces certainly take it seriously. It was, after all, one of their adherents, Yigal Amir, who shot and killed Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli politician to sign a deal with the Palestinians.

The settlers and their fellow travellers are, in fact, another messy fact on the ground, and they won't be at the table any more than Hamas will. The Western world much prefers to deal with moderates and wants to believe they can prevail. The history of the Middle East, however, would suggest otherwise.

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