Israel Sees Self Defending West Against Militants : Mideast: Tel Aviv calls itself the ‘first target’ of Islamic fundamentalists with aims beyond the region. Critics say such talk ‘demonizes’ a religion.

Israel, which for years won American and European backing as the bulwark against the spread of communism through the Middle East, is now projecting itself as the West’s defense against militant Islam, a movement it is portraying as even a greater danger.

In the Israeli view, Islamic fundamentalism is already sweeping across the Middle East, North Africa and now Central Asia, and will soon challenge Western influence in regions far beyond, as Muslims try to make the 21st Century the “Islamic century.”

And while Israel considers itself the “first target” of militant Islam, blaming the fundamentalists for an upsurge in guerrilla attacks on its forces in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and increased terrorism against civilians, top officials here are warning that a “holy war” will also be waged against the West.

“Our struggle against murderous Islamic terror is also meant to awaken the world, which is lying in slumber,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said last month in justifying his decision to expel 415 Palestinians as supporters of militant Islamic groups. “We call on all nations, all peoples to devote their attention to the great danger inherent in Islamic fundamentalism.

“This is a real and serious danger that threatens world peace in future years. And just as Israel was the first to perceive the Iraqi nuclear threat, so today we stand on the line of fire against the danger of fundamentalist Islam.”

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was equally grim in his portrayal of what he called “Khomeinism,” the militant, pan-Islamic fundamentalism espoused by the late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

“Since the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, we consider Khomeinism the greatest danger the Middle East is facing--not only us but the Arabs as well,” Peres told a press conference here. “It has many of the characteristics of communism. It is fanatic, it is ideological, it is religious and it claims, like communism, that the goal justifies the means. . . . Most of all, it has the same inclination to export its ideas.”

Peres said that for Israel, the threat from Iran comes not only in its support of Muslim militants among Palestinians but also in its destabilizing effect on Egypt and other Arab states, whose stability is important for Israel’s security as well as for peace in the region.

Israeli officials who focus on Iran say Tehran is providing money, weapons and political guidance in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as Egypt, in Algeria and Tunisia in the Maghreb, and in Sudan, several small Persian Gulf states and the newly independent nations of Central Asia.

But the greatest danger will come, they say, when Tehran acquires chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, along with the means to deliver them.

“Iran has to be identified as Enemy No. 1,” said Joseph Alpher, a former official of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service and now deputy director of the influential Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The whole Israeli political and intellectual Establishment, in fact, has been galvanized to put across this message.

“It is surely time that Washington, and indeed the West in general, woke up to the real dimensions and character of Hamas,” Israeli historian Shmuel Katz said of the Islamic Resistance Movement. “It represents and propagates the ‘Iranian revolution,’ and its methods are revolutionary and violent. It seeks to dominate, first of all, the Arab world and to become the leader of all Muslims. . . .

“Its ideological purpose is broader. It sees itself as the flaming sword of Islam, designed to exact ‘vengeance’ not only on Israel, but on the West at large. . . . It will not be long before the reach of those (Iranian) arms includes Europe.”

In meetings with Western leaders, in discussions with visiting Jewish groups, in academic papers and in background briefings for foreign correspondents, Israelis argue both for continued Western support, particularly from the United States, in combatting this threat--and for less pressure on their country in negotiations with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states.

“This is a message we have to get across to the new Administration in Washington,” Rabin told visiting U.S. Jewish leaders in a recent meeting, according to an American participant. “We are not sure that President-elect (Bill) Clinton and his team fully comprehend the danger from Islamic fundamentalism and the critical importance of Israel’s role in fighting it.”

The message of that session, one of several top-level meetings meant to put Israel’s views before the Clinton Administration as it takes office and formulates its policies, was “Don’t push us” in the negotiations, the participant said.

Rabin can produce, as he did both for the American visitors and in recent speeches, a series of frightening quotations from the “covenant” of the Islamic Resistance Movement and other fundamentalist declarations that Israel feels sum up militant Islamic fundamentalism. Among them:

* “It is the fate of the Jews to be slaughtered by our hands. We have taken upon ourselves to fulfill our obligation to society and to torture them because torture is the fate of the Jews.”

* “No Jew is innocent. All Jews must be killed. Throughout history they have only brought bad luck to the world.”

* “Israel will exist until it is destroyed by Islam, the same way it destroyed its predecessors.”

Rabin argues strongly to American and other Western visitors that “a bad agreement (on the Arab-Israeli conflict), the result of pressure” would destabilize the whole Middle East and sharpen the danger posed by militant Islamic movements to the West.

“We were left with the impression that, whereas Communism was rapacious, it was more or less rational, interested in its overall strategic position and concerned with direct benefit,” the American said after meeting Rabin. “Now, Israel faces rapaciousness that is irrational. That is, the nasty, old Middle East that we knew, if not loved, is being replaced by one far, far nastier.”

For Israel, however, the essential conclusion is that there is yet another enemy threatening its existence and against whom it will need Western allies to survive.

“In Islam, Israel is facing an existential threat,” a highly placed Israeli official said at the start of a recent briefing for foreign correspondents. “The state of Israel and the future of the Jewish people are in jeopardy. . . .”

Then he quickly caught himself in what his listeners took as an embarrassing exaggeration and corrected his statement.

“In Islamic extremism, this militant Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Khomeini, we see a fundamental danger,” he said.

Outside Israel, scholars of the Middle East, Islam, Arabia and Persia have warned recently against the “demonization” of Islamic fundamentalism, a campaign they see as directed at Islam as a religion. As for the movement itself, they don’t consider it a threat to Israel’s existence or that of the West.

Even here in Israel, there are some dissenting voices.

Ehud Yaari, a specialist on Palestinian affairs, warned in the current issue of the magazine Jerusalem Report that “Israeli officials show a striking tendency to exaggerate public support” for Hamas in comparison with the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization.

“Among the Palestinians, only a minority of 20% to 25% backs the movement’s terrorist methods and its fundamentalist rejection of any negotiations with Israel as non-Islamic,” Yaari contended. “The movement’s active membership is small. It is hard to imagine Hamas eclipsing the PLO.”

But, as Rabin said in another speech last month, the Israeli leadership remains convinced it is facing a threat in militant Islam.

“The Arab world, and the world in general, will pay if the cancer of radical-fundamentalist Islam is not halted at the academy of Khomeini and his followers in Iran,” he said.