Islamic Militants Make a Comeback

With Friday’s deadly bombing at a Tel Aviv cafe, Islamic extremists appear to have read the embittered political mood among Palestinians and reemerged as a force that threatens Middle East peace.

For nearly a year, there has been relative silence from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, militant organizations that oppose the peace process and use bloody attacks against Israeli civilians to try to derail it.

The two groups were said to be crippled by a Palestinian police crackdown, riven by internal disputes and suffering from a lack of public support.

Now, it seems, they’re back.

Still unclear, however, was whether Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, frustrated by recent Israeli actions, may have given at least tacit approval to the extremists to carry out such attacks. The Palestinian leader has denied the accusation by Israel, but his recent rapprochement with the militants--and growing Palestinian frustration with the faltering peace process--may have helped create the necessary climate.

On Friday, neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad issued an official claim of responsibility for the attack, which killed three women and the bomber and injured 46 others. But analysts here said it fit an established pattern for both groups: suicide bombings that take aim not only at largely civilian targets but, during politically opportune moments, at the peace process itself.

“They seize the right moment to carry out attacks that will restore public support to them. They also want to remind the Palestinian Authority that the peace process is not working and that people are angry,” said Ziad abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator and an expert on Islamic extremism, particularly Hamas.

An anonymous caller to an Israeli television station said Hamas was responsible for the attack. But Mahmoud Zahhar, a spokesman for the organization’s political wing in the Gaza Strip, said he had no information about the report--or the bombing.

Nonetheless, growing Palestinian anger over a series of recent actions by Israel has provided fertile ground for extremists. Many Palestinians have said lately that they see little benefit to continuing the peace talks. And they point to unilateral Israeli moves, such as the relatively limited scope of a planned West Bank pullback, and a decision to forge ahead with 6,500 new Jewish homes in historically Arab East Jerusalem.

A poll released this week by the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies showed that a clear majority of Palestinians continue to support the peace process, but it also indicated a relatively high level of support for armed attacks against Israeli targets.

About 38% of those surveyed said they favored such attacks, up from the 21% who did a year ago, after a wave of suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that left 60 people dead.

Previous surveys have shown that support for Hamas in the Palestinian community dropped after the bombings, in part because the attacks prompted Israeli authorities to seal off the West Bank and Gaza Strip, creating severe economic hardship.

But the organization has clearly rebounded in the months since.

Even some who seem the unlikeliest of militants now say publicly that they are finding common ground with Palestinian extremists. Alice Saad, a member of Arafat’s mainstream Fatah organization, said this week that the Palestinian leader’s failure to extract meaningful concessions from the Israelis had convinced her that “we are wrong and Hamas is right.”

Abu Amr, who teaches political science at Birzeit University in the West Bank, noted that an attack like Friday’s suicide bombing would not have required the organizational support of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The only necessary elements, he said, were a willing bomber--of which there is no shortage--some explosives and a little logistic help, such as transportation to the target area.

Groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad are skilled at reading the political mood, he said. “When the peace process is stalemated, it provides a reason for these groups to carry out attacks,” he said.

But Barry Rubin, an expert on the peace process at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University, said he had been at least partly persuaded by Israeli intelligence reports--before the bombing--that Arafat had given a “green light” to terrorist attacks by the militants.

“I believe that what has happened shows that Hamas is no longer Arafat’s enemy but his tool,” Rubin said. “I didn’t think it was true in the past but maybe now.”

Rubin and others pointed to numerous recent signals of reconciliation between Arafat and extremists within his Palestinian movement.

Most significantly, they said, Arafat met with Hamas political leaders in Gaza two weeks ago and later released several of the group’s top military leaders jailed after last year’s suicide bombings.