Throwaway remarks can reveal more about underlying altitudes than all the most polished political rhetoric. The President of Israel, Mr Ezer Weizman, recently justified Israel's measures of collective punishment against people in the West Bank and Gaza after the suicide terrorist bombing atrocities in Jerusalem. "If we cannot find the needle" of Hamas, he said, "we must burn the haystack" of the Palestinian population.
Unfortunately, such attitudes communicate them selves all too effectively to Israel's enemies, among them Hamas, which yesterday ordered its armed groups to recommence their attacks on Istaeli targets. Their suicidal techniques have blown huge holes in the momentum of the peace process which Mr Shimon Peres assumed would carry him to victory in next month's general elections. The Hamas statement justified the resumption by reference to the Israeli crackdown on Palestinians, which includes blockades on movement and employment and the demolition of buildings. The Palestinian authority has also cracked down on Hamas activists, in co-operation with the Israelis. But their protestations that collective punishments make their task all the more difficult have so far fallen on deaf Israeli ears.
With the election still many weeks away it's clear there is still a floating Israeli vote that will crucially decide the outcome between Mr Peres's Labour Party and the opposition Likud. The devastating evidence of insecurity underlined by the Jerusalem bombs produced a definite swing against the Peres Arafat peace process and towards Likud's convictions that it cannot deliver a secure settlement. But not by as much as Likud's leader, Mr Netanyahu, might have assumed. The absence of a convincing alternative put forward by his party has caused many floating voters to think twice about abandoning the peace process. He has had to remain studiously calm and statesmanlike in the face of the Hamas bombings, conscious that he could be seen to be taking advantage of them and wary of Hamas claims that they are precisely intended to engineer a Likud victory, in a ghastly polarisation between Palestinian and Israeli rejections of the peace process.
Mr Peres should seek out more opportunities to bolster the process by confidence building exercises that could help to establish Mr Arafat's authority among the Palestinians. This would include relaxation of blockades and employment bans, rather than ratcheting up iron clad security measures, which give Hamas excuses to revert to more terrorism, or inserting new conditions in the negotiations, such as holding a referendum before a peace agreement is reached. This case has been put strongly by some of the international parties to the peace process, notably the European Union, which has taken a different approach than the United States. President Clinton and his Secretary of State, Mr Christopher, regard a successful Middle East process as an important plank in their re-election campaign.
Given this threat from Ham as it is probably too much to expect Mr Peres to respond in a more accommodating fashion. Those who wish the peace process well must hope that he can maintain its profile as the best means of delivering peace and prosperity for Israel in a more stable Middle East, and that this latest Hamas statement is an acknowledgment of the pressure on them.