In Peace Talks’ Shadow, Islamic Group Fights PLO for Place in Sun : Gaza Strip: Just as in former colonies in Africa and Asia, political rivalries are intensifying as a Palestinian state looks more possible.

Written in blood-red paint, the message on the wall of the mosque was a taunting battle cry: “To Fatah, the cowards and surrenderers: Where are your bullets, and why are they not aimed at the Israeli occupiers? Or are your targets the sons of our own people?”

Signed by the Islamic Resistance Movement, the message was aimed at the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mainstream Fatah group, and it appeared calculated to provoke further clashes between the two movements’ supporters.

“Fatah is being unmasked,” said Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, a Gaza surgeon who supports Hamas, or Zeal, as the Islamic Resistance Movement is known from its Arabic initials. “Fatah pretends to fight, but it attacks not Israelis, but Hamas.

“Fatah says it is the vanguard of Palestinian nationalism, but actually it is in retreat. Fatah says it speaks for the people, but through this ‘peace process’ it actually collaborates with the Israelis in perpetuating our occupation.”

The Hamas challenge is real enough. Its rivalry with Fatah has resulted in street battles, firebombings, abductions and outright assassinations. A cease-fire reached in July broke down last month, and a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, mosque-by-mosque, school-by-school struggle for domination of the area resumed.

“The Islamic resurgence is rising with the power and the inevitability of the ocean tide,” Zahhar said, “and once people commit themselves to Islam they remain committed. . . . We will have an Islamic government here in time.”

But Tawfiq Abu Khousah, a journalist jailed previously by Israeli authorities as a senior Fatah cadre, dismissed the Hamas challenge as “a childish diversion” from what he called the main Palestinian issue, “establishing our own state in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.”

“Hamas wants the peace process to fail so it can replace Fatah and the PLO, and so it attempts to divide us and sap our energy with these attacks,” Abu Khousah said. “But Hamas itself will fail. The masses support Fatah, and the masses recognize that the most effective strategy we have now includes the Washington talks.”

On an initial level, Hamas’ sustained challenge to Fatah, not only in the Gaza Strip but across much of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem as well, is over Palestinian participation in the U.S.-sponsored Arab-Israeli negotiations, which Hamas opposes.

“This so-called peace process is not something the people favor,” Zahhar said. “It does not take us where we want to go, it will leave us bound even more tightly by Israel. The Washington talks will come to nothing, we are certain, so we say, ‘Well, let them try . . . ‘ while we prepare for the final struggle.”

But Fatah, Hamas and virtually every other Palestinian organization are, in fact, looking beyond the Washington talks--and the agreements they believe will ultimately be reached there with Israel--toward an independent Palestinian state.

“The struggle for power you see today between Fatah and Hamas is the struggle for position and power within the future state,” said Younis Jarro, a lawyer who supports the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist faction within the PLO. “Fight today, rule tomorrow--that’s what they believe. . . .

“This is also a struggle over the future of the Palestinian state, its character, its vision, its very spirit--whether we will be secular or Islamic, for example; what the principles of our democracy will be, what the relationships will be with other Arab states.”

The clashes between Fatah and the fundamentalist Hamas in the Gaza Strip reflect the sharpened competition among all the Palestinian political groups to establish their claims to leadership of the nation prior to Palestinian autonomy, now under negotiation, and later full independence.

“It is the scent of power and, inevitably, of money,” Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, chairman of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, said in Jerusalem, “and it makes people want to fight.”

The scenario is familiar from the British, French and Portuguese colonies of Africa and Asia where, as their nations approached independence, rivalries deepened among the local political groups, becoming frequently bitter and sometimes violent, and often destabilizing the new state at birth.

“People are in a very anticipatory mood,” Jarro said. “Although people don’t see anything coming out of the negotiations yet, they still expect a lot. That’s true of political groups too, and it has increased the factionalism in Gaza and elsewhere.

“There are strong parallels to the pre-independence colonial environments, but we do not even have what they did--a normal situation in which parties and movements can struggle with each other politically, with the winner assuming power on independence. Will we even get our independence?”

The struggle here is often carried out in armed confrontations by the local guerrilla groups that support Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Sometimes the fight is over control of a section of Gaza’s sprawling refugee camps, sometimes over possession of a mosque, sometimes over a strike one group has called and the others do not support.

“This is nothing new,” said Tawfiq Mabhouh, speaking of the political conflicts here. “We are aware of the bloody struggles in other countries, and we know the danger they hold.” Mabhouh is a leader of the pro-Communist People’s Party in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, whose tightly packed shanties house 70,000 people.

“But we believe we can put aside our differences for a very basic reason--the masses in overwhelming numbers support the PLO and will entrust the PLO as a whole, as a coalition, as a partnership, with shaping the state and holding power,” he said.

But Mabhouh’s People’s Party, which draws support from Gaza’s poorest residents and from many middle-class Palestinian professionals, is looking toward elections--perhaps as early as February, but perhaps not for a year from then--that will launch the proposed “Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority.”

“Every group is building its strength in anticipation of the elections,” Mabhouh, another onetime political prisoner, said. “Some parties buy support with money, others use military parades to demonstrate their power, still others organize public rallies.”

The People’s Party sponsors mobile medical teams in places that would rarely see a doctor. It sends 18 agricultural technicians to advise local farmers and provides seeds and fertilizers for them, and its party workers try to calm the community when rival groups begin fighting.

“We have been here in Jabaliya for years, from the beginning,” Mabhouh said, recalling how his farmer parents fled their village in Israel in the 1948 Mideast War when he was 4 years old. “But we are seeing new groups just arriving, just being born, that think, ‘Aha, peace and power are just around the corner,’ and they send in money and their cadres.”

Much of the money can be seen in the new construction--mosques, community centers, stores, factories, housing--that abounds in the long-impoverished territory between Israel and Egypt along the Mediterranean coast.

“Votes are being bought. At least that is what the donors hope will result,” Jarro said. “Money is flowing in heavily from places like Saudi Arabia that would like to see us go Islamic. Other organizations also have their backers abroad. And Fatah is not so poor itself.

“What everyone wants to show is how prosperous Gaza would be under its rule. Unfortunately, not that much of this money gets into people’s pockets here.”

The competition is also bringing forth new Palestinian leaders from a generation that largely has come of age politically since the Israelis occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1967, that grew up in West Bank and Gaza refugee camps rather than in neighboring Arab countries and that generally spent a number of years in Israeli prisons.

Zahhar, now 47, was still studying medicine at Cairo’s Ain Shams University when the Israelis seized Gaza from Egypt in 1967. Jarro, 52, also Cairo-trained, was a young government lawyer in 1967. Mabhouh, 43, was just out of school and going to work for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which runs the refugee camps. And Abu Khousah, 32, the journalist, was just starting classes.

“There is very much a feeling that our time has come,” Barghouti, a Moscow-educated physician, commented in Jerusalem. “Certainly, there is the determination that we, this generation, will build the independent Palestinian state, though not as fast as we want.”

Every Gaza leader has his own estimate of the relative strengths of the political groups, and until elections are held, no accurate assessment is possible.

Mabhouh said that, of Gaza’s 750,000 people, 40% to 45% support Fatah and its allies in mainstream Palestinian nationalism, 25% support the “progressive left,” including his People’s Party, and fewer than 20% support Hamas and the other fundamentalist groups.

Zahhar, however, put the strength of the Islamic groups at 45%, based on voting patterns in recent elections for chambers of commerce and similar groups throughout the occupied territories, and perhaps as high as 57% in the Gaza Strip. “Fatah has lost its majority,” he declared.

But Abu Khousah maintained that, “by any measure, Fatah commands overwhelming popular support, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad have no more than 10% or 12% between them.”

For Jarro, the divisions are over the peace talks--between those groups that supported the PLO decision to negotiate and those that rejected it--and divisions are shifting over the way the negotiations are being conducted by Fatah.

“At the outset, the majority supported the peace process, for it promised peace, a Palestinian state, a new life,” Jarro said. “That support has declined over the year of negotiations for the lack of progress, and opposition forces have gained on the street.”

When elections are held for the autonomous Palestinian administration, however, Hamas and its allies are likely to boycott them, believing the new authority will be so circumscribed by the peace agreement that it is bound to fail.

“The struggle for changes in the attitudes of the people from secularism to Islam--this is the main aim of the Islamic movement,” Zahhar said. “Once that is achieved, then political power will flow naturally to us, and then, inshallah (God willing) , we will have an Islamic government.”