HAMAS recently achieved something that Arab governments from Iraq to Jordan, Egypt to Pakistan, seem either unable or unwilling to do - they freed a Western hostage in the custody of an extremist gang. This should not be regarded as an act of little consequence or of cheap pandering for Western assistance. It sets them apart not only as what the West wants but of what it needs. They are a force of substance, true sovereigns within their domain.

Many despair of HAMAS’ takeover of Gaza. This is the wrong attitude. It is true that HAMAS has the destruction of Israel as a cornerstone of its platform. It is true that they take - or took - aggressive military action against Israel. But it is a mistake to consider these tenets and actions as critical to their political survival and power just because they are characteristic of their doctrine.

HAMAS’ true power emerged not as an instrument of terror against Israel but as hope for the Palestinian people. It is their public works, not their pugilistic demeanor, that won them such support as allowed them to sweep the elections in 2006. They capitalized not so much on the anger against Israel as the disillusionment the people had with the Fatah government. The proof of this is plain to see for the observer who looks beyond the rhetoric and into the actions of the Palestinian movements.

Fatah held power over the Palestinian destiny since its inception in the late 50s, and truly took the reigns after the Six-Day War. They embodied a unified resistance against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands that was both academic and populist, aggressive but scholarly. But rapidly, through the mercenary nature of professional terrorism that knows integrity of cause but not of function, their aims shifted from using their power to simply maintaining and expanding it. Their purpose became less resistance against Israel and more dominance of their people’s future. By the time Yassir Arafat became accepted by the world community as a broker of Palestinian power in the late 1980s, this was evident. Arafat did little to consolidate Palestinian leaders into a functional framework and instead focused on exploiting their loose alliance by offering himself as a source of foreign attention and aid. This led to the formation of an ironically-named “Palestinian Authority” that would sponge up UN and other forms of aid while making none of the internal sacrifices necessary to create an actual authority over the chaos of Palestine. He had all the trappings of a government and none of its coherence.

At Oslo, and later at Camp David, Arafat refused to move the peace process ahead any more than would give him legitimacy as a broker. He remained in power by showing up at the table, but did nothing to actually achieve the aims of peace that brought him there. Where it came to getting more aid and more recognition as a government, he would pursue these ends. But when it came to making the sacrifices necessary to work out a plan with Israel for an actual division of land, he balked.

And why shouldn’t he? He had no real control over the Palestinians, including those, like the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, that nominally swore allegiance to his Fatah party. He could no more make the basic concessions in the peace process than he could make sure that the concessions Israel made would go rewarded and not punished. He, like his sucessor, Abbas, ruled only in name and in numbers of aid dollars.

HAMAS, meanwhile, was as much a resistance to this kind of torpid corruption as it was to Israel. It used organic materials to help Palestinian agriculture while Fatah allowed it to languish. It circumvented Israeli restrictions on access to medical care by establishing community clinics. It found people work and formed unofficial governments in neighborhood communities Fatah only taxed, restricted and left to rot. In short, it did something. It did more than just suck up aid money and drizzle it out at a whim like Arafat did.

It is hard to remember now, but the world community - the Jewish community abroad as well - had high hopes for President Abbas when Arafat died. The feeling was that Arafat had become bloated and indolent, had proved himself unable to run his own security forces or enforce any peace, and had proved to be incapable of running anything more than a self-serving funnel for foreign aid and interests. Abbas, seen as more dynamic, could change this. Whether he could or couldn’t, he didn’t. He has been identical to Arafat in his ineffectiveness to realize the peace vision of the West or the freedom vision of his people.

HAMAS does have control of the people in Gaza, and they got it the hard way - having to work as an outsider, and build from the ground up. As grim and bloody and intolerant as their mission and terrorist actions have cast them, they at least have a foundation of power in the Palestinian realm that Fatah did not. Since their seizure of Gaza, they have proved it.

With the exception of an Israeli attack into Gaza intended to weed out rocket attacks, things have been relatively peaceful from HAMAS. Peaceful, that is, unless you are a terrorist group within their borders. For while HAMAS has little incentive to halt the rocket attacks on Israel that have become its hallmark assault, it has shown it will not do what Fatah and many other Arab states have, for years and at ghastly cost, done. It will not tolerate rival armed bands disrupting order in its territory.

BBC Journalist Alan Johnston, abducted on March 12, was held for 114 days. He had been investigating the HAMAS-Fatah conflict that was, at the time, brewing in the Gaza Strip. The source of the conflict was chiefly over HAMAS being refused the ability to join the defense forces of the Palestinian Authority, even though it could control all of Gaza and had the political legitimacy to do so. During the period of that conflict, diplomatic and violent, Johnston languished. Dozens of protests were held. Fatah talked often about doing things to get him free, and did nothing.

Then, as soon as Gaza was no longer ridden with strife between HAMAS and Fatah, HAMAS acted to free Johnston. First they tried swift negotiation, then threat of violence, and - after being deterred from direct action by Johnston’s Army of Islam captors placing an explosive belt on him - then took more innovative measures. They abducted Army of Islam members and affected, in essence, a hostage swap. It worked. It was not clean but, unlike under Fatah’s security tenure, it was quick and effective. Again, let me emphasize: It worked.

And that is what Israel needs - a Palestinian security force that works. For, whether that force is directed against Israel or against criminals like Johnston’s abductors, it is, unlike Fatah, directed. Fatah cannot control its supposed “allies”, most notably the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which has consistently broken cease-fires Fatah put in place and committed numerous atrocities. Israeli and Western politicians may not like HAMAS, but they must recognize that as atrocious as their deeds have been and are, they are better than Fatah spouting pretty words while proving utterly unreliable. A force that is directed, can be directed away. A force that cannot be directed is, at best, an irrelevant bargaining partner and, at worse as the Palestinian Authority’s track record has shown, dangerous.

Many condemn HAMAS summarily on the basis that they call for the destruction of Israel. But did Egypt do any different until Camp David? Did Arafat, before he was given a chance to accumulate more power for himself while never having to actually achieve the peace he was given that power to achieve? The direction leaders wield power in often changes, but their integrity in wielding it rarely does.

This much has become apparent: HAMAS has more in common than Sadat, a man who even worked with the Nazis, than it does with Fatah. Abbas has more in common with his predecessor, who feathered his own nest at the cost of prolonging his people’s agony, than he does with the HAMAS leaders who truly took “all measures necessary” to free Johnston.

And now Israel and its supporters must discern which is the better partner to broker peace with - the one that promises war and acts on it with total authority, or the one that promises peace and exploits its lack of authority to continue a war.

And for those who still see HAMAS as intractable, I would clarify two important qualities of peace making.

First, all peace talks have to be born of the brutality war.

And second, achieving peace takes more than just word.

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I found this Op-Ed piece by an Israeli scholar to be a brilliant observation of how HAMAS reflects the realities Israel must deal with in the peace process, not the agonizing fantasies that the policies of the West and Fatah indefinitely promote.