Victims Or Victors?

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.