Victims Or Victors?

By LISA BEYER/GAZA STRIP

This should be a somber time for Muslim fundamentalists in the Israeli- occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Over the past three weeks, Israel has deported 415 alleged Islamic activists to Lebanon and jailed 1,000 others; dozens more have been shot in clashes with the army. But far from despairing, adherents of the fundamentalist movement are jubilant. "The Israelis," says a member of Hamas, the main fundamentalist organization, "have done us a big favor. We are the winners in all of this."

Nothing has brought Hamas more attention around the world than the frigid exile of the 415 men expelled by the Israeli government Dec. 17 and since stranded in a wintry patch of southern Lebanon, which refuses to take them in. Their banishment made them heroes in the occupied territories, stirring a sense among followers of the Islamic movement that their moment has come. Palestinian fundamentalists feel that they are on the verge of supplanting the secular Palestine Liberation Organization as the dominant force among their people and as the vanguard in the struggle against Israel. In part, Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad are riding the wave of Islamic fervor that has swept much of the Arab world; in part, they are feeding off the frustration of Palestinians who, after 14 months of relatively fruitless Middle East negotiations, increasingly believe that talk will achieve nothing. It is the peace process, rather than Hamas, that seems most imperiled by Israel's crackdown -- to the fundamentalists' delight.

Many in the P.L.O. acknowledge their rivals' ascendancy. "The balance is shifting rapidly to Hamas and away from us," says Ghassan Khatib, a member of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks. Some Israelis agree. "The fundamentalists," says Eli Rekhess, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, "look to be Israel's biggest challenge today, not the P.L.O."

That is troubling news for the Middle East negotiations, or for any other effort to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. While the P.L.O. is committed to searching for accommodation with Israel, Hamas will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state, followed by the establishment of an Islamic Palestine as a precursor to a greater pan-Arab union. "Between Hamas and Israel," says Abdul Sattar Kassem, a political scientist at An-Najah University in Nablus, "it is a battle to the death."

First the fundamentalists must win their tussle with the P.L.O., and it has become almost an even fight. Leaders in both Palestinian camps estimate that roughly 40% to 45% of the 1.8 million Arabs in the territories are Hamas supporters. The name Hamas, an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement that literally means "zeal," first appeared on political leaflets in 1987, but the organization was not formed until February 1988, two months after the beginning of the intifadeh, in which Hamas would play an increasingly important role.

The movement's success has much the same source as fundamentalism elsewhere in the Arab world: the hunger for an escape from political and economic frustration and from the humiliation imposed first by Western colonialism and later by successive military defeats at the hands of Israel. Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip before his deportation last month, explained it this way: "We have tried everything. We've had Nasserism and socialism. We tried Westernization. They all failed us. Now we see that the only thing that can re-establish the dignity of the people is Islam."

Such reasoning has particular appeal in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas was born and remains strongest: there 780,000 Palestinians live on a cramped, barren swath of sand where jobs are few and living conditions harsh. Says "Omar," the 30-year-old product of a Gaza slum and now a Hamas activist: "I am a man with no home, no land, and so I have no identity. Islam gives me that identity."

So pervasive is Hamas' influence that nearly all the women in the Gaza Strip have taken to covering their head in the Muslim fashion. Hamas enforces Islamic prohibitions against prostitution and drug use by killing people accused of such transgressions and leaving their bodies in public places. In the beginning the executions were justified as "collaborator" killings -- the elimination of Palestinians supposedly cooperating with Israel; these days the fundamentalists have dropped that pretense and enforce Islamic law as they see fit.

Hamas' strength has made the Israeli army's job of policing the Gaza Strip more difficult than ever. Soldiers are constantly stoned and more and more frequently shot at; several deadly attacks on civilians inside Israel itself have been committed by religious Gazans. Many Israelis have begun to argue that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip and leave it to its misery.

Four Ministers in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's Cabinet recently proposed considering precisely that. Rabin refused even to discuss a move that would create an immense security threat along the Gaza border. But Hamas clearly has the Israeli government's attention -- a sharp departure from the past, when security officials believed the fundamentalists to be more interested in spiritual matters and social work than political or military struggle. The Israelis treated the movement with benign neglect and hoped that it would erode support for the P.L.O.

The shortsightedness of that approach became apparent in mid-1991, when Hamas, which had called from the start for a holy war to liberate all of pre- 1948 Palestine, turned to action. Militants began to strike at Israeli targets with homemade bombs. Hamas' military wing armed itself with automatic rifles and grenades smuggled in from Egypt, bought from Israeli criminals or stolen from soldiers. Head-on clashes with Israeli troops became more common. The events that provoked last month's deportations and mass arrests included two machine-gun attacks on army jeeps, resulting in the deaths of four soldiers and the kidnap and murder of a border policeman inside Israel.

Over the past year, Hamas has expanded its links to fundamentalists outside the territories who are willing to bankroll it. According to intelligence reports, Iran has contributed $30 million this year. P.L.O. activists complain that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also providing funds, and Israeli officials have even tracked funds from Muslim groups in the U.S. and Britain. Hamas can finance social institutions such as schools, medical clinics, charities and mosques that bolster its strength among the less religious. The P.L.O. still outspends Hamas in the territories, but the trend is in the fundamentalists' favor.

Both its military actions and its social programs have made Hamas ever more popular in the territories. Still, a sizable segment of those who vote for fundamentalist blocs in elections for Palestinian chambers of commerce or student labor unions do so less out of commitment to its agenda than in protest against the failures and foibles of the P.L.O. Palestinians are not only disillusioned by the organization's inability to bring them any closer to the dream of independence but also consider it to be inept and corrupt. Kassem estimates that 30% of Hamas supporters are true believers, while the remaining 10% to 15% are simply disenchanted with the P.L.O. Says he: "It is too early to say that there is a genuine Islamic revolution among the Palestinians."

Whatever its precise strength, the presence of Hamas poses a formidable challenge for Israel. While the gap between Israel and the P.L.O. remains large, it is potentially bridgeable: their dispute focuses on which part of the occupied territories should be under Palestinian control, to what extent and when. With Hamas, no such compromise is possible.

The only hope for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle lies in defusing Hamas' power. For this reason, a growing number of Israeli politicians, including a significant faction within Rabin's Cabinet, now advocate recognizing and speaking directly with the P.L.O. leadership. Beyond that, nationalists like Ghassan Khatib believe that Israel must offer Palestinians concrete proof that negotiations can pay off. "If there is progress in the peace talks, then the P.L.O. will be in a position to absorb Hamas," he says. "Otherwise it will be the other way around."

The Israeli authorities are aware of that eventuality. Says a senior military official: "We can keep a lid on the territories by applying pressure, but they will boil over again once we lift the lid. The solution is to deal with the fire underneath, through political means." Given the ferocity of the fundamentalist challenge, it is a fire best extinguished quickly, before it spreads further.

With reporting by Alex Fishman/Tel Aviv and Jamil Hamad/Gaza Strip