Mashaal presses Arafat for ‘calm’ and ‘wisdom’

Ouch. This must have been very painful for the embattled Arafat: to have Hamas’s Damascus-based head Khaled Mashaal urging him to restore calm and act wisely.
Th AP’s Muhammed Daraghmeh has a sort of catch-all piece out of Ramallah this evening listing all kinds of people and institutions–including the elected Palestinian legislature– that are urging Arafat to accept Abu Alaa’s resignation. And then halfway down, we have this:

The Syria-based head of the Hamas militant movement, Khaled Mashaal, telephoned Arafat Wednesday to urge him to restore calm.
Mashaal, whose organization has a wide following in Gaza, called for “a wise leadership handling to get out of this turmoil and for resorting to dialogue'” to resolve Palestinian differences, said a Hamas statement.
Hamas has sat quietly for the past week while factions of Arafat’s Fatah movement and his security forces sank deeper into violent rivalry.

Wouldn’t you have loved to have heard that conversation?
As I noted in this article in the April-May Boston Review, Hamas is the best organized and one of the best-respected and most popular political organizations in the Gaza Strip.
Last year, when Abu Mazen was PM, he urged Arafat to bring Hamas into the government as a follow-on to its agreement to participate in the ceasefire against Israel. Arafat refused. I think most of all he just hates that the Hamas people don’t kowtow to him as most of the people in his own entourage do. Plus, they are generally well-respected for not being corrupt, and raise trenchant criticisms of the corruption in his entourage. And compared with his lot–the wildly chaotic, many-faceted Fateh– they are a model of solid, serious, effective internal organization. Even with many of their leaders wiped out by Israel’s fiendish campaign of assassinations.
Well, here we are again: one year and many hundred Palestinian (and Israeli) casualties later.
I read the report about Mashaal’s call to YA as signifying both (a) that he’s making an overture that could well signal a willingness to open coalition talks, and (b) that he’s doing so from a position of apparent political self-confidence and strength. There’s something rather elder-statesman-ly, perhaps even fatherlike and/or patronizing, about what he is reported to have said to Arafat.
That’s what must have hurt.
Oh, did I mention that Hamas is on the U.S. government’s list of Terrorist Organizations?