The Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, sent a congratulatory telegram to Israel's Prime Minister-elect, Mr Ariel Sharon, yesterday wishing him "health, happiness and success" and hoping that 2001 would prove to be a year of "building with peace, the peace of the brave, in the best interests of the peoples and the states of the region".
Mr Arafat's generous sentiment is incongruous. Mr Sharon, after all, is the Palestinians' nightmare Israeli prime minister: the man indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatilla massacres of Palestinian refugees in 1982; the man blamed by the Palestinians for igniting the Al-Aksa Intifada with his visit to the Temple Mount last September; the man who won't so much as shake Mr Arafat's hand.
But while Mr Arafat is thus far evidently prepared to swallow his tongue and confine himself to gentle congratulations - the better to portray himself internationally as the ever-willing would-be peace partner if Israeli-Palestinian relations deteriorate still further in the imminent Sharon era - his aides are more openly reflecting the disquiet, even despair, that the Likud leader's dazzling election victory has wrought.
Mr Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator has been insisting that if and when peace negotiations resume under a Sharon government, they must pick up where they left off under the outgoing Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak. There's no consensus on where exactly they did leave off, but there's absolute consensus that Mr Barak was willing to concede considerably more than is Mr Sharon. Where Mr Barak was offering the Palestinians control of 95 per cent of the West Bank, for example, Mr Sharon says they will have to make do with the 42 per cent that they fully or partly control today.
Mr Sharon "can forget it", said Mr Erekat yesterday, if he thought he could have peace while "keeping the occupation of Jerusalem, keeping the settlements, keeping the Jordan Rift". Dramatic though such comments sound, there can be little doubt that Mr Sharon would indeed be more than willing to "forget it" if the Palestinians refused to return to the talks unless he met their terms.
On the Palestinian street, the comment heard most often has been that Mr Sharon's victory merely represents the replacement of one leader unwilling to meet Palestinian demands with another. "Sharon and Barak are just the same," runs the popular quip in Gaza. "They're both dogs."
But Mr Sharon and Mr Barak are quite emphatically not the same. Mr Barak put all that he had to offer on the table, and invited Mr Arafat to take it or leave it. No accord resulted. Mr Sharon will certainly take a more incremental approach, but will probably offer far less.
Mr Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank Fatah leader who has been at the forefront of the past four months' Intifada violence, has been crowing that, in electing Mr Sharon, Israel has made a "big mistake" that will see the Intifada escalate and the Arab world unite against the Jewish state.