Paranoid?
"Hamas and Islamic Jihad feel they are being targeted, and so they have to bend a little bit and wait for this storm to pass," said Ali Jerbawi, a political scientist at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University.
"They are aware of the changes and afraid for their future," Jerbawi said.
For Abbas, the delicate equation includes contradictory trends among the Palestinian public, where desire for peace mixes with seething anger that fuels support for attacks against Israelis, as well as potential interference from a frustrated Yasser Arafat.
The Palestinian leader reluctantly appointed Abbas in April under international pressure. This week, isolated in his shattered headquarters in Ramallah, boycotted by the US and Israel, he watched Arab leaders gathered in Egypt give Abbas what amounts to a regional stamp of approval.
On Wednesday, Arafat confidante Saeb Erekat blasted the summit, saying he was disappointed Bush did not press Sharon for a solid commitment "about a cessation of settlement activities, period," and "removing all outposts established since March 2001."
Peace now
The Peace Now group, which opposes Jewish settlement in the West Bank, says 117 outposts have been created since 1998, 62 of them since March 2001. Israeli and US officials say there are about 100 outposts altogether.
In his declaration in Aqaba, Sharon said he "will immediately begin to remove unauthorized outposts" -- but Israeli officials have said that might only apply to some outposts, since some may be legal.
That held out the potential for drawn-out legal tussles. Deputy settler council chairman Shaul Goldstein insisted Wednesday that "most of them are totally legal and everything they want to do in court ... we are going to counter."
While Sharon did not mention the freeze on construction in veteran settlements required by the road map, he accepted "the importance of territorial contiguity in the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state" -- a formulation widely understood in Israel as accepting the need to dismantle some of those, too.
Parliament speaker Reuven Rivlin, a key Sharon associate, said the prime minister has already identified which veteran settlements he would ultimately take down to give the Palestinian area contiguity, according to an interview published Wednesday in the Haaretz newspaper.
Has Sharon
really changed?
It is unclear whether Sharon's current critics could actually prevent him from carrying out such a plan -- since he can count on some support on the right, as well as the pro-peace opposition whose agenda he would, to a certain extent, be furthering.
And while opinion is divided on the extent to which Sharon, the primary architect of Israel's settler movement, has undergone a transformation, his former allies on the hard right are clearly agitated.
"This day will enter the history of Israel as our national disaster," said legislator Arieh Eldad from the ultranationalist National Union party, a member of Sharon's ruling coalition.
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