Postponing the Palestinian Elections?

I'm actually of mixed feelings about this one: Egypt has urged that Palestinian elections be delayed in order to facilitate a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, and Fatah has accepted the idea. The elections are supposed to occur January 25.

The whole question of legitimacy in the Palestinian Authority has been in abeyance since the Hamas takeover of Gaza and the — de facto if not de jure — separation of Gaza and the West Bank as two separate entities. But is postponing elections merely the prudent thing to do (since there is no really practical way to hold them on time in both territories and expect a widely accepted result?), or is it further undercutting the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority by postponing elections called for by its own constitutional document? Sometimes I'm glad I'm an editor and blogger, not a diplomat. I think it's a judgment call and if Egypt (which when it comes to Palestinian issues means ‘Omar Suleiman) thinks it's the prudent way to go, it may well be.

But every time something is postponed for whatever reason, we drag out the timeline for trying to get real negotiations under way again, and I worry that, given recent indications that Netanyahu is not about to agree to anything that constitutes a real settlement freeze, the window for a two-state solution keeps narrowing. And unlike Jimmy Carter and some others, I'm not at all sanguine that any one-state formula is going to work if the two-state one doesn't. (That's too big a subject for me to opine on it right now, though.)