Former President Jimmy Carter has broken a Bush administration and Israeli government taboo and met with representatives of the Palestinian Hamas party.

When someone asked the legendary bandit Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is." Hamas is where on the Palestinian side the money is in moving forward in the Middle East peace process toward an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

This has been the case for some time. Late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was rightfully vilified for not accepting a nearly-all-the-Palestinians-were-asking-for proposal from the Israelis in 2000. The argument was that it was the best offer he was ever going to get and even if it wasn't absolute perfection from the Palestinian perspective he should take it. Instead, Mr. Arafat refused it.

Various reasons were attributed to him. One was that he was, as the British would say, hopelessly bloody-minded. Another was that he liked things the way they were. The Palestinians were eternal victims. On that basis they were extracting large amounts of money from the Arab states of the region, through their feelings of guilt, blackmail and, finally, to save money. The Arabs would have been on the hook to resettle the Palestinians back in the part of their old homeland that the Israelis would give back to them.

These reasons were considered cynical and ignoble and reflective of some stupidity on Mr. Arafat's part. But there was also another reason. Intra-Palestinian politics have always been very fruitful ground for a level of extremism that verges on nihilism. Roughly it runs, "I get everything I want or I will blow myself up and you too." Mr. Arafat apparently believed that if he didn't hold out for everything the Palestinians wanted, the more extreme groups would reject his leadership at the least and kill him at the worst.

The leaders of Hamas were among the extremists that Mr. Arafat feared. Now they are probably not the most extreme among the Palestinians, particularly since the Israeli pull-out of Gaza and their own victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections left them with the hard task of governing Gaza with little or no money.

The Israeli government and the Bush administration in support of that Israeli position have tried to choke Hamas to death, even though the party won free, democratic elections in 2006 and then whipped the losing party, Fatah, on the battlefield last year. It hasn't worked. Hamas has survived -- all they have to do to win is survive. Hamas has also embarrassed the Israelis, sending rockets their way, killing a few of them, even breaking down the barrier between Gaza and Egypt for a time.

That approach on the part of Hamas, while understandable, is truly lamentable in that it makes the achievement of peace even more difficult than it is in any case.

What is worse, though, is that the United States has persisted -- with good or bad faith -- in trying to put together a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians without Hamas. That is -- in Willie Sutton's terms -- to try to carry out an impossibly difficult hold-up of a laundromat that doesn't keep cash.

The United States and Israel -- although I have always believed that the Israelis were going along with President Bush in this endeavor laughing all the way -- have been trying to negotiate an agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, the losers in the elections and on the battlefield, leaving Hamas out of the process, trying to pretend they don't exist. I don't know how either the Bush administration or the Israelis do it with a straight face. It would be like the Pirates and the Tampa Bay Rays meeting to discuss where the first game of the 2008 World Series between them should be held.

Jimmy Carter has now broken the glass and had talks with Hamas at a senior level, in Damascus. He then announced what he had done in Jerusalem, in the King David Hotel, expressing his belief that Hamas was ready to talk turkey with the Israelis and the Americans. Specifically, Hamas proposed an initial 10-year truce with Israel if it withdraws from the lands it seized in 1967, comprising implicit recognition of Israel as a state.

Israel either is -- or is pretending to be -- furious with Mr. Carter for having cut through the nonsense and game-playing which for Israel, the United States and Mr. Abbas' Palestinians has constituted the Middle East peace talks for the past seven years.

Mr. Carter is someone who through his actions shows the advantages of being old. He doesn't want anything. He doesn't care a whole lot what anyone thinks of him. What he is after here is peace. It should not be forgotten that he was the godfather of the Israeli-Egyptian agreement at Camp David in 1978, a very major breakthrough. Former President Bill Clinton's attempts to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians built on Mr. Carter's work but got serious too late in his administration to be able to bear fruit.

Some Israelis undoubtedly appreciate what Mr. Carter has done. No one likes Hamas, but it is folly to imagine that peace can be made when Hamas can blow any agreement sky-high with a well-placed rocket or suicide bomb. The Israelis are the first to understand that.

As for Washington, it is almost amusing that Mr. Carter has put the Democratic candidates on the hook by his bold end-run almost as much as he has the Bush administration and putative Republican nominee John McCain, who went to the area and didn't even meet with the tame Palestinians. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both want the Jewish vote and campaign contributions so they are scrambling now to figure out how to play Mr. Carter's breakthrough.

For those who continue to want to see an agreement reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- land, peace and security for both peoples -- Mr. Carter's visit to the region and his meeting with Hamas has to be seen as a real tour de force. God bless the guy. It's now up to the other parties involved to follow up on what he has achieved.