27/01/08 "The Guardian" -- 25/01/08 -- Anyone with a sense of human solidarity must surely celebrate the demolition of the wall on the Gaza-Egyptian border on Wednesday and the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians starved of basic supplies of food, fuel and medicine by Israel's flagrantly illegal act of collective punishment. There was a further breakout today, when a bulldozer pulled down a new section of the barrier.

It has been first and foremost a human triumph. An occupied and imprisoned people has taken its fate into its own hands and broken a shameful blockade, enforced jointly by Israel and Egypt with the support of the Bush administration and the connivance of the US and Israeli-backed rump Palestinian authority in Ramallah.

But it is also a political defeat for the cruelly-enforced attempt to isolate and crush the elected Hamas leadership in Gaza. By tearing down the walls that held 1.5 million people in the world's largest open air prison, Gazans have broken the siege that had become the main weapon to bring the Palestinians to heel and impose a pliant leadership and an occupier's settlement.

Egyptian forces have been struggling to reseal the Rafah border crossing. It was closed last summer in agreement with Israel when Hamas took control of the Gaza strip (see the piece by Yaakov Katz, Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post of January 3 2008 on Israel's reaction to the recent more modest breach for Hajj pilgrims). Israel had meanwhile been sharply intensifying the squeeze on supplies through its own closed border crossings since it declared Gaza a "hostile territory" in September, with predictably grim consequences, as UN official Karen Koning AbuZayd spelled out in the Guardian on Wednesday.

But the point has now been clearly demonstrated that it can be re-opened at will. Hamas has been strengthened and the US-Israeli strategy of isolating the Palestinians' most recently elected leaders is in ruins. And the spectacle of Gazans holding candles in Israeli-enforced darkness this week - echoing Yasser Arafat's siege in Ramallah in 2002 - has returned the Palestinian cause to the centre stage of Arab politics.

There was some speculation today - for example, by the commentator Talal 'Awkal in the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam - that Israel appeared to be hoping for a reversion to Gaza's pre-67 status when it was controlled by Egypt, perhaps as a precursor to bringing the West Bank back into the Jordanian orbit. That followed the remarks by Israel's deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai on Thursday that the opening of the Rafah border could pave the way for Israel permanently to hand over all responsibility for supplying Gaza to Egypt.

Neither is a serious option. The Palestinian national genie cannot be put back in the bottle, despite current divisions. And Israel remains the fully responsible occupying power in Gaza, controlling its land access, sea and air space and conducting regular military operations in the territory at will.

Those "incursions" are supposedly carried out to end rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. If so, they are hopelessly ineffective. Benjamin Pogrund asked this week: what can Israel do to stop the rockets, which spread fear and demoralisation in towns like Sderot, even if - unlike Israeli attacks on Gaza - they rarely kill? The obvious answer is to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the refugees, ethnically cleansed nearly 60 years ago, (who, with their families, make up a majority of the Gaza Strip's population).

All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, whether they choose to exercise it or not. The dominant Palestinian view - though not that of PA president Mahmoud Abbas - has long been that negotiation without some element of armed pressure is, as was once said in a rather different British context, to go naked into the conference chamber.

Even signficant figures on the Israeli right - including Sharon's former security adviser Giora Eiland, former Mossad boss Efraim Halevi and ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz - are coming to recognise that the refusal to talk or deal with Hamas is going nowhere. And the argument (made, for example, by senior British ministers) that talks with Hamas will have to wait until the organisation has been politically weakened looks increasingly threadbare.

The same goes for the PA leadership. Waiting for Hamas to go away won't work. Only negotiations without preconditions for Palestinian political reconciliation can both restore national dignity and allow the Palestinians out of the dead end they have been forced into by relentless Israeli and US pressure. The magnificent display of popular power this week has shown that there are other ways ahead.