Zealots Revel in the Role of Enigma

The imagery last week at Larnaca’s balmy seafront airport--officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization serving as mediators with the Islamic zealots who hijacked a Kuwait Airways jumbo jet--reflected the quantum shift in the Middle East political spectrum in recent years. It also demonstrated why many Israelis are more reluctant than ever to engage in peace talks. The basis for Israeli fears is no longer one-dimensional.

The Islamic zealots’ agenda is specifically to free their 17 brethren imprisoned in Kuwait and more broadly to rid the Middle East of foreign influence and to undermine the conservative regimes. Until recently this has been largely unrelated to the Arab-Israeli dispute over the issue of a Palestinian homeland.

Since 1979 the Middle East has been divided by two conflicts: the Palestinian issue and militant Islam’s challenge to the political status quo. Israel has experienced the wrath of both. While Palestinian guerrilla attacks were the first threat, fundamentalists have increasingly grabbed the limelight.

During its 1982-85 occupation of southern Lebanon, Israel faced unprecedented pressure from Islamic extremists. Indeed, the unrelenting crusade of the zealots led Israel to withdraw from occupied territory for the first time without a single security guarantee. In effect, the Shia Muslims accomplished in three years what the PLO had been unable to do for two decades.

The sight of the PLO negotiating with the hijackers symbolized Israeli concern about the merger of its two main opponents and the explosive potential.

The four-month Palestinian uprising has already been strongly tinged with an Islamic dimension. The first riots in Gaza on Dec. 9 erupted after a tense fall in which the local Islamic Jihad, which is composed of Sunni Muslims with no known connection to the Lebanese Shia group with the same name, had regularly confronted Israeli security forces. Seven youths, all alleged members of Islamic Jihad, were killed in the run-up to the uprising.

Islamic Jihad has since emerged as one of five groups in the Unified National Command of the Uprising, which has issued leaflets of instructions and organized a series of general strikes. Four of the eight Palestinians deported by Israel last week were fundamentalists from Gaza.

Religious radicals, both Sunni and Shia, are a far more ominous force than the PLO because their goal is not just the creation of a Palestinian entity, but to reclaim all of historic Palestine. And it is this that reinforces the fear of Israeli hard-liners about peace talks. They have long argued that the conflict will not end by turning over the West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli concern is fully justified. The growing dangers symbolized by events surrounding the hijacking are, however, the strongest argument in favor of moving forward on peace talks.

The hijacking demonstrates the common fears of moderate Arab regimes and Israel. Kuwait feels even more vulnerable than Israel in facing off the threat from Islamic extremists, who since 1983 have carried out the six bombings for which the Kuwait 17 were convicted, an assassination attempt on the ruling emir and a series of attacks on oil installations.

Kuwait is not alone. Saudi Arabia witnessed the emergence of Islamic fanaticism during the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Sunni zealots assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Morocco and Tunisia underwent riots in 1983-84 linked with fundamentalist extremism.

Even Algeria, to which the hijackers turned because of its relations with all political currents in the region, last year went through the largest trial in its post-independence history when more than 200 fundamentalists were charged with plotting to overthrow the one-party, socialist state.

Without a settlement in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the near future, fundamentalist passions could well gain momentum as a political force in the occupied territories and elsewhere. Fundamentalism is already growing among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but at this stage it accounts for only a distinct minority. And fundamentalists who turn to terrorism are but a smaller minority still; there is as yet little basis of comparison between the Lebanese Shias and Palestinian Sunnis.

The ideological differences between the secular PLO and the fundamentalists are, again at this stage, also much greater than their similarities, both in goals and tactics.

Unfortunately, Israel’s practices of beatings, widespread detentions and deportations are almost certain to fuel Islamic fervor. Israel’s reported responsibility for the assassination of PLO strategist Khalil Wazir, alias Abu Jihad, was also foolhardy. In the absence of traditional leadership, the mosque and the clergy are becoming the last refuges for organizing dissent. Israel’s best defense is not to unite its enemies.

The savagery displayed during the hijacking will certainly increase Israeli fears about the future. But the gruesome ordeal should instead demonstrate the urgency of peace--before the proliferation of Arab extremist groups and flash points for violence crosses the threshold of putting diplomatic resolution beyond reach.