Hamas’s victory in the election threatens to touch off a million pessimisms in the western media. The questions are basically two. What happens to the Israel-Palestinian tangle, now that the Palestinians’ Islamist movement has done so well in the first parliamentary poll in a decade? Then, what does the strong showing of a group shunned as a terrorist organisation by Israel, as well as the US,

Europe and Russia, mean for Bush’s self-appointed mission to promote democracy in the world and in the Middle East?

Many have already proceeded to mourn the Hamas victory as the end of the possibilities for peace. But at least some others are tentatively setting store by the fact that an organisation best known for suicide attacks against the Israeli enemy, has entered the political process.

The hope is that the hardline, violent organisation might yet find itself transformed into a regular party with a manifesto. After all, over the past year, Hamas has largely adhered to a cessation of violence with Israel and its elected municipal representatives do coordinate with the Israeli administration. Also, its gains in the present election may reflect disaffection with the ruling Fatah Party, rather than any popular endorsement of its programme.

The tension between politics and resistance that this poll result is likely to bring, goes this argument, could unleash a creative force in the congealed conflict: Hamas’s parliamentary majority could mean that the Kalashnikovs and explosives belts will have to go.

But in Prospect magazine, a timely warning against drawing lines too neatly in the Middle East in the first place. Alastair Crooke, a former special adviser to Javier Solana, invoked his experience of negotiating with Hamas on the 2003 truce to argue that the tidy contrasts currently being drawn between Fatah and its challenger, Hamas, have been long overtaken by a shift on the ground. ‘‘Many of the younger generation of Fatah are politically closer to Hamas in politics than they are to their own leadership,’’ he said.

As far as Washington is concerned, the Hamas result underlines the unscripted complications that Bush’s democracy-promotion is bumping into all the time — both at home and abroad. In America, revelations about the Pentagon’s domestic spying programme are calling into question the president’s basic commitment to democratic liberties. In the Middle East, the Hamas victory comes on the heels of the balloting in Iraq that also yielded results far from orderly from Washington’s point of view. There, the US-backed secularists have performed poorly at the polls and Washington must now deal with Iranian-backed Shiite parties that did well instead.

DEMOCRACY may be an idea visibly in torment, but if an ambitious investigation in the Guardian is to be believed, another embattled idea is doing much better than is generally feared.

Last year, Leo Benedictus roamed the immigrant communities in London for the paper. His mission was to assess the city’s claim to being the most multicultural place in the world. What makes most people who come to London for money stay on, he concluded at that time, is not the tolerance of its people. It is their indifference. Londoners mind their own business and let you mind yours. While this is progress for a people who actively persecuted immigrants through the 20th century, Benedictus wondered whether it is multiculturalism.

This year, Benedictus paints a far more robust portrait of the idea. Travelling across Britain to meet immigrant populations in the course of a follow-up investigation, he found that ‘‘the great neglected truth of British multiculturalism is that every day, millions of different people across the country are actually getting along very nicely, while the bad news gets all the attention’’.