The wrong dominoes are tottering in the Middle East

Two days ago Ariel Sharon gave a speech in which he boasted: "We got rid of murderer number one and murderer number two and the list is not short". He meant, to you and me, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantissi, the leaders of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas.

European politicians have rightly condemned the killings as unjustified, illegal and counter-productive. Yet, as an op-ed piece in the Israeli daily Haaretz suggested yesterday, Europeans might find that calling Mr Sharon "counter-productive" might be, well, counter-productive.

Nothing is better news for Mr Sharon, currently battling for his leadership of the Likud Party, than being condemned by Jacques Chirac, widely disliked in Israel for being too pro-Arab.

And nothing might tilt Israeli liberal opinion further to the right than calling "unjustified" the killing of the godfathers of Hamas, which the EU itself put on its list of terrorist organisations late last year (its paramilitary wing was put on the list years ago).

Nothing except, of course, the idea that Hamas might now control the Palestinian streets.

At the cemetery where Dr Rantissi was buried a few days ago, a Guardian reporter came across a man with his five-year-old son: "We get hit by Israel but it cannot hurt us. Look at the crowds. This makes us stronger and more united. For us death is life".

Since late 2000, the escalating conflict has killed some 2,800 Palestinians and 900 Israelis. Just before the first assassination, of Sheikh Yassin, one poll suggested that support for Hamas among Palestinians ran neck-and-neck with support for the secular organisation, Fatah. However, this support co-existed with a decline in support for suicide bombings. The polls seemed to suggest that the support for Hamas was really a declaration of lack of faith in Yasser Arafat's corrupt, ineffectual administration.

Just how much support for Hamas has risen since the assassinations, and whether support for suicide bombings is still in decline, has yet to be seen. The child at the grave of Dr Rantissi was wearing a green Hamas bandana. His father said: "I am here because he wanted to come. Palestinian children are born to be martyrs".

What justified the assassinations, for Mr Sharon, and what should make them unjustifiable for the rest of the world, is that their timing will help Mr Sharon save his political skin in his own party and win approval for his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. They also weakened Israeli liberals who are critical of Mr Sharon's policy and, according to another article in yesterday's Haaretz, imperilled talks (let alone agreements) between Palestinian factions to cease attacks on Israeli civilians.

Some analysts argue that the killings were justified precisely because they facilitate the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. A withdrawal on its own might have been mistaken for a sign of weakness and enabled Hamas to claim victory.

Thomas Friedman, of The New York Times, sees an unoccupied Gaza as an opportunity for Palestinians to build a thriving democracy, an alternative to Mr Arafat and an example to the rest of the Arab world. Gaza, coupled with a democratic Iraq, might then help repressive Arab regimes to be toppled like dominoes.

The problem with this theory is that it plays with the wrong set of dominoes. The Palestinians do not have the social and economic resources to be a viable affluent democracy. Mr Sharon's cantonises the Palestinian people and leaves fertile land and valuable water resources on the "Israeli" side.

With Palestinian communities poor and isolated from one another, the only kind unifying image that they can have will be the one of Dr Rantissi's mutilated corpse, broadcast by Al Jazeera. At the moment, the secular Fatah organisation, whose younger members want it to incorporate more women in its structures, cannot even organise a congress that its important members can attend.

True, public protests in the Arab street against the situations in Iraq and Gaza are making several undemocratic regimes shake. But the protests also seem to be strengthening the hand of militant Muslim organisations, at the expense of liberal democratic pressure groups.

The Muslim Brothers were behind the protests in Egypt last weekend. On Tuesday, Lebanese students began a protest outside the US embassy; the crowd included socialist, communist and progressive leftist groups but the protest became violent when it was taken over by various Islamist groups (including Hamas). If the dominoes fall now it is not clear that democracy will be the name of the new game.

European politicians might wring their hands and condemn what is going on in the Middle East at the moment. But if the EU's neighbourhood policy does not get better - more coordinated, more forceful - than that, the future of the Euro-Mediterranean is excessively ugly.