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The Hamas Challenge
Ehud Ya'ari

Essentially, Yasser Arafat is choosing Sheikh Yassin over President Bush

Tension between Hamas and the Palestinian authority is rising quickly. �Understandings� about Hamas refraining from terror operations in Israel have collapsed. Brawls, complete with the cocking of rifles, have broken out between the Islamic militants and Arafat�s Fatah cadres at demonstrations after Friday prayers. Hamas supporters � usually with the aid of other Fatah activists � have prevented the arrest of members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The Islamicists� anti-PA rhetoric has turned venomous, even though the partnership-cum-rivalry between Fatah and Hamas continues in the framework of the Committee of National and Islamic Forces. Hamas mortar squads are ignoring Yasser Arafat�s appeals to halt their fire at Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and along its borders. They even distribute video tapes of their improvised �Qassam-1� rockets, with a range of a few kilometers.

Almost everybody around Arafat is urging him to take immediate steps to restrain Hamas.

But is a showdown near?

Arafat apparently believes it�s not in his interest to expedite a confrontation, although the United States has made it clear that he cannot sit on two chairs at the same time: one facing President Bush, the other alongside Sheikh Yassin. But Arafat gives the impression that he is prepared to endure the insult of effectively being defined as persona non grata in the White House as long as he doesn't have to shatter the facade of �national unity� at home.

Thus the PA has so far refrained from responding to the American demand to freeze the accounts of Hamas and its ilk and treat them as terrorist organizations in every way. Conveniently for Arafat, Syria had already forced Lebanon into being the first to turn down a similar American demand regarding Hizballah. He is trying to hide behind the backs of President Asad and President Lahoud in the hope that they � rather than he � will be the primary target of American pressure on the morning after victory in Afghanistan.

But Hamas is already gearing up for the showdown. From its standpoint, putting it off means risking that the PA will acquire massive international backing for a confrontation. Various sources confirm that Hamas's leadership tends toward the view that it's better to face down Arafat sooner rather than later. Hamas is not planning on trying to topple the rais or get rid of him with a putsch. Rather, it intends to make him realize he is incapable of destroying their movement. Hamas wants to cripple the capability of the PA security organs to move against it. Instead of being a movement tolerated by the PA, and available to be exploited in the intifada, it is striving to establish its standing as a political-military force that exists alongside the Palestinian Authority, not under its aegis.

And so, in a series of limited, local tests of strength � rather than an all-out confrontation � Hamas leaders have gradually succeeded in turning sectors of the Tanzim � the Fatah militia � into their allies against the PA's intelligence and security organs. For the first time, they have moved over to operational cooperation against Israelis in the field, with joint ambush squads consisting of Hamas and Fatah operatives and gunmen from other factions.

Hamas has also �conquered� precious air time on the official Palestinian radio and TV, supplementing this with appearances on the Iranian Arabic-language satellite station, Sahar. One evening, prominent Hamas activists were allowed to conduct a detailed discussion there about what kind of atomic bomb the Arabs should drop on Israel. (Which was, incidentally, a flagrant departure from the Iranians' usual caution not to so much as publicly hint about their nuclear aspirations).

In a number of refugee camps in Gaza, villages in northern Samaria, and even a few urban neighborhoods, it appears that Hamas has achieved predominance over Fatah. This may only be an optical illusion, but it has an infectious quality. A salient example: Gaza�s Preventive Security chief Col. Muhammad Dahlan, retreating into a sulk because of differences with Arafat over how to handle Hamas, �resigned� and took off for a week in Cairo. He has been arguing that in order to contend with the Islamic militants, it�s also necessary to make reforms in the PA. Through his control of the Tanzim in most of the Gaza Strip, Dahlan has detected an erosion in Fatah's preeminence. The same is true of his West Bank counterpart Jibril Rajoub�s reading of the situation in Nablus and Jenin.

But Arafat himself is less concerned. As the gap grows steadily wider between him and most of his close associates, they admit in private conversations that they�ve ceased to understand where he�s headed. He appears to be wholly undisturbed by Hamas's challenge. Essentially, he is choosing Yassin over Bush. On his orders, the official Palestinian media portray Hamas militants killed in clashes with the Israeli army as ordinary �civilians� who did nothing wrong and were �executed� through no fault of their own. Preaching in the mosques in favor of suicide bombings continues in full strength, and Arafat himself includes more and more Islamic motifs in his public appearances. Some of his most devoted aides have come to the conclusion that he just couldn't care less.

In other words, those in Israel who advocate � and there are many � that everything must be done to protect Arafat, lest he be replaced by Hamas, should take into consideration that Arafat Now means Hamas Tomorrow � at least as a de facto partner in the regime. Hamas is not an alternative in the foreseeable future. But downsizing it back to its former proportions may well become a far more difficult task than it was a few months ago.