Hamas Reviled, Revered for Terrorist Actions : Mideast: Attacks are scorned by international community, but supporters see bombers as martyrs.

JERUSALEM —  Cradling a Galil assault rifle, Saleh Abdel-Rahim Hassan Souwi looked straight at the home video camera and calmly announced his intention to kill himself--and as many Israelis as he could.

“We (are) left with no alternative or choice but to make the entire Jewish people a captive of fear and terror,” Souwi said, committing himself to the bombing of a Tel Aviv bus last week that killed 23 people, including himself.

“If our humane demands are not met, we will continue our heroic missions, for there are many young men who love jihad (Islam’s holy war) and would love to die for the sake of God.”

For nine minutes, Souwi spoke, quoting from Islamic scriptures, addressing his parents and his brothers and sisters, and urging his friends “to carry out God’s words and be kind to each other, be truthful and cleanse your souls and do good deeds . . . (but also) be harsh with your enemies and fight them.”

“Heaven is yours if you die in the name of God, and if you are killed fighting in the name of God,” Souwi said in a plea for others to follow him into a zealot’s martyrdom. “This is the ticket to heaven. The only solution of the plight of Palestine is jihad. So why hold on to this secondary world? We must not love this world and hate death.”

Souwi concluded with a promise to meet everyone in heaven--the reward of the moujah e deen, those Muslims who fight for their faith.

His testament recorded, the 27-year-old former baker and construction worker, regarded by his friends as shy and quiet, headed for Tel Aviv, boarded a bus filled with Israelis on their way to work and, once it reached the city’s commercial center, detonated an estimated 45 pounds of dynamite in an explosion so strong that it lifted the bus about five feet off the street.

Souwi’s motivation for one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in Israeli history was not hard to find.

The eldest of nine children from a poor Palestinian family, Souwi was born the year Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War, and he grew up under an occupation that fostered, rather than suppressed, Palestinian nationalism.

A younger brother, 14-year-old Hussein, was shot in the neck and killed by Israeli soldiers in September, 1989, during one of the many protests against the occupation in Qalqiliya, a militant town in the northern West Bank.

Arrested six times during the intifada, the rebellion begun in 1987 against the occupation, Saleh Souwi had been detained twice without charge for six months and had been on the run for nearly a year from the Israeli security police, Shin Bet.

The most important factor, however, was likely his education in a Qalqiliya school affiliated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which gave birth seven years ago to the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas.

Today, Hamas’ adamant opposition to Arab compromise with Israel poses the gravest threat to Middle East peacemaking efforts, because its attacks on civilian and military targets alike raise the question among Israelis of whether peace with the Palestinians will bring security--or whether it is even possible.

“Peace initiatives are a waste of time and acts of absurdity,” Ibrahim Yazuri, executive director of the Islamic Center in Gaza City and a Hamas founder, said last week, quoting from the 1988 Hamas charter. “The land of Palestine is an Islamic trust for each Muslim generation until the Day of Resurrection. It is forbidden to give up any part of it.

“Thus, for us, the only solution to the Palestinian problem is jihad, because when an enemy occupies Muslim lands, jihad becomes obligatory for every Muslim.”

In a terrifying escalation of that struggle, Hamas’ military wing, Iziddin al-Qassam, has struck three times this month with attacks in the heart of Israel.

On Oct. 9, Hamas gunmen opened fire on Sunday evening cafe-goers in the heart of Jerusalem. That same evening, other Iziddin al-Qassam guerrillas kidnaped a 19-year-old Israeli soldier. They killed him during an Israeli rescue attempt five days later. On Wednesday, Souwi blew up the No. 5 bus in central Tel Aviv.

“In my opinion, there will be more attacks,” Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, chief of staff of the Israeli military, warned over the weekend. “I don’t want us to delude ourselves. We are in a very long struggle. The enemy is tough and persistent.”

On Sunday, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered Israeli security forces to broaden their sweep of the occupied Palestinian territories for Hamas leaders and to break up the support network for the Iziddin al-Qassam units. Several dozen arrests have already been made, Israeli sources said, and the campaign will be stepped up.

There were also suggestions, however, that Israel try to pull Hamas into the peace process and encourage the Palestine Liberation Organization to develop its political ties with Hamas.

“The Hamas organization is an organization . . . that uses the cruelest terror,” Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin said. “But within it there are certainly those who are less extreme, and if those want to enter into a relevant discussion with us, I am not sure it’s our job to say. . . . It’s forbidden for us to talk to them.”

David Kimche, president of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and retired director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, went further, calling for “a relentless war on terrorism” but discussions with Hamas’ political leaders.

“We have to live in peace together with Islam,” Kimche said. “Islam is a religion of peace--absolutely no question about it. We live in a sea of Islam, and we need to come to terms with it.”

Several Hamas leaders were also reaching out, differentiating between Hamas’ community work and Iziddin al-Qassam’s military actions, and suggesting that Israel and Hamas agree not to attack civilians.

“Things are happening within Hamas,” Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo said over the weekend, “and the more moderate leaders, who favor a political solution, perhaps are being challenged through these military operations by those who fear they have gone soft.”

Although Hamas linked its recent attacks to Israel’s refusal to release 5,000 Palestinian prisoners and to the slayings by a Jewish settler of about 30 Muslims in a West Bank mosque last February, it is committed to a broad fight against Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank.

“As long as the Israeli occupation continues, resistance will and must continue until the Palestinian people gain their rights,” Sheik Ahmed Bahar, a lecturer at Islamic University in the Gaza Strip and a Hamas leader, said last week. “The Islamic movement did not sign this agreement with Israel, and we are not bound by it.”

Hamas also has long-term goals of turning a future Palestine into an Islamic state that in time would supplant Israel completely and then help forge a single, giant, Pan-Islamic nation across the Middle East and beyond.

“Our struggle is not for today or even tomorrow, though we do what we can,” said Mahmoud Zahhar, a Gaza surgeon and senior Hamas leader. “Our focus is really on the future of the Arab and Islamic people, and for that we are ready to make very great sacrifices, including our lives.”

Martyrdom in the battle with Israel is indeed popular among the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip’s fetid refugee camps and increasingly in the towns of the West Bank as Hamas gains popular support.

The guerrillas of Iziddin al-Qassam are lionized in songs and epic poems. Videos of the exploits and last testaments of the “martyrs” circulate like the latest Hollywood movies. Street vendors sell portraits of the young men, and parents name their children after the latest to die.

Shrines to the Iziddin al-Qassam dead in the mosques, schools and other institutions affiliated with Hamas further portray them as being highly religious, good students, athletes and devoted to their families and communities--sons who make their mothers even prouder with their deaths.

And the word Hamas itself is an acronym meaning “zeal” in Arabic.

“Don’t consider those who died for the sake of God as among the dead but among the living, for they will find their fortune with God,” a Hamas poster in the West Bank town of Hebron proclaims.

Each Hamas attack is designed to send specific messages both to Israelis and to Palestinians, according to Hamas members. “We want to build up our people’s morale and will to resist as much as we want to hurt the enemy’s,” a Hamas leader said in Jerusalem. “We do our calculations quite carefully.”

Even some who back the agreement on Palestinian self-government and profess support for the secular nationalism of the PLO acknowledge their respect for the strength of Hamas’ commitment.

“Hamas is still there fighting for our rights, and that is important,” said Yousef Sartawi, 44, a Gaza accountant who lives in the Jabaliya refugee camp. “The PLO is now the government and cannot carry on the armed struggle while building our state.

“I am for peace with Israel, but for a full peace--with the Jewish settlers all gone, with the Israeli army all gone and with our country fully independent. Only then should (Iziddin al-) Qassam’s men put down their guns.”

Hamas, however, has merged the Palestinians’ nationalism with Islamic zeal in a culture of struggle that honors a glorious death and rejects as sinful the compromises necessary for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Imad Akel opens his jaws to strike. The Nazi enemy is on guard,” goes a song by the Jabaliya Martyrs Band, referring to the 24-year-old guerrilla commander who killed 12 Israeli soldiers before being killed himself in November. “The commandos kidnap (Israeli) soldiers and kill them, kill them, kill them, kill them.”

Young men are recruited as members of Hamas from its network of mosques, schools, clubs and welfare institutions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

A soccer coach, for example, explained how his players, 10 to 15 years old, practice Sunday through Thursday on a Gaza City field and go to the mosque for religious instruction and political training Friday and Saturday.

“We develop our future moujah e deen with great care,” Zahhar said, “for this will be a long struggle, a struggle we will hand from generation to generation until Islam triumphs.”

Boys who show promise are assigned a Hamas spiritual guide, known as an emir, who oversees their religious and political development, arranges training in martial arts and later in guerrilla warfare and readies them for eventual assignment to one of the Iziddin al-Qassam units, according to Hamas sources.

Only the best, chosen on the basis of character evaluations stressing discipline, discretion and dedication, are actually promoted, according to these sources, and only the best of these join the Iziddin al-Qassam.

Hamas certainly has no more than 200 members in its military wing, according to Israeli security sources, and perhaps as few as 50. Grouped in small cells of three to five and in a few larger units of up to 15, they operate independently of the main Hamas organization with instructions from a leadership believed to be based partly in the Gaza Strip and partly in Jordan.

Supporting Iziddin al-Qassam units, however, are what Israeli security sources describe as “circles” of Hamas members willing to rent cars, find apartments, provide food and give money to the guerrillas while remaining outside the military wing.

“They have a queue of recruits ready to replace any (Iziddin al-) Qassam member we capture or kill,” a senior Israeli officer said. “There is a brilliance in their organization because by minimizing their (military) structures they minimize their exposure to infiltration. When they lose someone, he is quickly replaced. Each death draws more recruits than they can absorb.”

Hamas’ overall structure also includes branches for political work, for propaganda, for security and for its extensive community organizations--including medical clinics, youth clubs, athletic teams, kindergartens, libraries and schools--whose activities are the foundation of its popular support.

Its leaders--Muslim sheiks and imams, doctors and university professors, a few businessmen--are widely admired for leading exemplary Muslim lives in contrast to what Palestinians scathingly call “our imported deluxe leadership,” a reference to the PLO cadres who returned from exile with a taste for luxury.

Hamas has developed major centers not only in the Gaza Strip but also in Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Abroad, it has representatives in Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Sudan, according to Israeli military sources, and it raises substantial funds--as much as $30 million a month--in Saudi Arabia, conservative Persian Gulf states, Jordan, Britain and the United States, as well as in the Palestinian territories.

Formed at the start of the intifada in December, 1987, Hamas was the initiative of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic Islamic leader in the Gaza Strip. A longtime supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and its campaign for an Islamic revival and a Pan-Islamic state, Yassin wanted an Islamic role in the uprising against the occupation.

“The Muslim Brotherhood had sat on the sidelines for too long with its philosophy that Palestinian society had to become fully Islamic before it could succeed in the struggle against Israel,” said Ziad abu Amr, a political scientist at Birzeit University.

“Hamas was an effort to ensure an Islamic role in the leadership, identity and future of the Palestinian nation. If Hamas succeeded, the Brotherhood could claim it as a wing. If it failed, the Brotherhood could shrug it off. But in seven years, Hamas has actually eclipsed its parent.”

At its outset, Hamas enjoyed a measure of Israeli support. Rabin, then defense minister, saw Hamas and its predecessor, the Islamic Center, as a counterweight to the PLO in the Gaza Strip, allowed the establishment of its network of community organizations and even met with Hamas leaders to ascertain their views.

Rabin was “very, very cordial,” Zahhar recalled with a smile.

“Israel did not act against these (organizations), did not understand that social Islam would by necessity become political Islam,” said Raphael Israeli, a prominent Israeli specialist on Islam.

As the intifada grew, Hamas was outlawed, and Yassin was jailed on charges of ordering the killing of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian collaborators. His release is a principal Hamas demand.

Hamas nevertheless stepped up its military activities, and after a series of attacks, including the kidnap-murder of a policeman, Rabin deported 415 supporters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another radical group, to southern Lebanon in December, 1992.

Still controversial, that action appears to have strengthened Hamas considerably. The tent camp became a strategic planning center for the movement and a training institute for the men who were deported. Although handicapped for a time through the loss of so many of its leaders, Hamas attracted more recruits and developed a new generation of leadership.

“Our camp at Marj Zahour became a beacon in the dark for the Palestinian people,” said Sheik Hussein abu Kweik, a Hamas leader from Ramallah.

When the deportees returned, they were able to criticize the accord that Israel signed with the PLO on limited self-government for the Palestinian territories--and enjoy the freedom that this autonomy gave them.

Opinion surveys conducted by the Palestinian Studies Center in Nablus over the past year show that direct support for Hamas is about 15% but reaches 20% to 25% in the Gaza Strip. Fatah, the PLO’s main component, generally gets around 40% in the surveys.

Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, Hamas has been gingerly enlarging its role, discussing the establishment of a political party and the terms under which it would contest forthcoming elections.

But Iziddin al-Qassam’s continued attacks on Israeli targets have strained relations with the PLO, which is coming under heavy Israeli pressure to crack down on Hamas and arrest its leaders.

“The Islamic movement wants to ensure Palestinian unity above all else,” Bahar said. “We will avoid anything that threatens bloodshed among our people. We hope that the PLO and the Palestinian Authority will do the same, but the latest arrests made things very difficult and have showed people that the authority is simply Israel’s agent in continuing the occupation.”