There's an encouraging poll reported in today's Independent.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Policy Survey and Research, 67 per cent of the voters opposed last month's Islamic Jihad attack on a Tel Aviv disco, in which five Israelis were murdered. Only 29 per cent supported it.

That's very different from the figures recorded in August last year, when 77 per cent said they supported the double bus bombing that murdered 16 in Beersheba.

It's certainly not all good news:

Less encouragingly, the pollsters also logged an erosion of support for his mainstream al Fatah party and a slight gain for the radical Islamic Hamas. Support for al Fatah was down to 36 per cent from 40 per cent last December, and the Hamas vote went up from 18 per cent to 25 over the same period.

There are, however, other more positive signs. Last week, a senior Israeli Cabinet minister on a private visit to London told me that he, and the rest of the Cabinet, had been deeply impressed with Mahmoud Abbas' actions so far. The most striking example, the minister told me, was the tracking down by the IDF of a vast stockpile of explosives which, intelligence had discovered, was intended to blow up a school bus, and possibly a school itself.

What made the discovery remarkable was that the intelligence was not Israeli but from the PA, which co-operated fully and unreservedly with the Israelis in helping them to impound the explosives and track down the terrorists.

There is still a long way to go, but so long as Abbas demonstrates that he he is a very different leader from Arafat, there must be some hope of progress.