Add another piece to the complex mosaic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the rise of rightwing Moslem fundamentalism among the Palestinians. Its looming presence may upset the calculations of the current Palestinian leadership in Israel and the occupied territories. And Israeli authorities seem willing, even glad, to see it take hold.
Traditionally, Palestinians have been the best educated, most Western of the Arab peoples. They have shown a longstanding religious tolerance and include in their numbers a large Christian minority. But now, more and more Palestinians are beginning to equate modernization with the Israeli occupation. They fear their very identity—already strained by mass exodus and military control—will be lost unless they embrace their Islamic roots.
The movement has scored its biggest gains in the Gaza Strip, where 600,000 Palestinians crowd an eighty-square-mile stretch of land. Permanent residents are outnumbered by 400,000 refugees and their descendants, people uprooted from their farms and villages in the 1948 war who have lived ever since on the world's handouts. Here, says Pari Sabati, an American teacher of Iranian extraction, women with dark complexions risk being stoned if seen jogging, or even driving a car on a side road. Here, too, the Israeli-appointed mayor of the city of Gaza has opened an Islamic Cultural Center, apparently with funding from Saudi Arabia. Many of the city's 260,000 inhabitants view the Center as a giant boondoggle, considering the dire poverty they see everywhere else.
The extreme Islamic Right is also on the rise on the West Bank. In January, at Najah University in Nablus, a Palestinian nationalist professor was attacked by a mob of militant Islamic students. And a young instructor at Bir Zeit University narrowly escaped assault by a dozen extremists during her lecture on Darwin's theory of evolution. With attacks on left-wing nationalists reported almost weekly, many students have learned to fear the Islamic Right as much as the Israeli occupation forces.
Their adversaries are not just fringe groups. The Moslem Brotherhood controls the student council at Najah and won 42 percent of the vote in student elections in Bir Zeit, long the hub of Palestinian nationalism on the West Bank. It may win the Bir Zeit elections next time. Only four years ago, the Brotherhood was not considered a factor at all. Now, the pressure is on for dress codes, curriculum, and student life that follow a strict reading of the Koran.
It is difficult to estimate the size and influence of the Moslem Brotherhood. From its beginnings in Egypt in the 1930s and its spreading influence in the Levant in the 1950s, until its renaissance in Egypt and Syria in recent years, many groups have formed, coalesced, and dissipated under the Brotherhood rubric. Their loose ideological affinity reflects the constantly evolving pattern of other fronts and coalitions in Middle Eastern politics.
The Israeli government appears to be encouraging the Islamic Right's rise both in the Gaza Strip and on t h e West Bank. It lets the Brotherhood run its own radio station and circulate publications, while banning virtually all media favoring the PLO position. A Gaza teen-ager who writes an anti- Israeli slogan on a wall is apt to be surrounded by troops in minutes, but no one bothered a mob of Moslem extremists who sacked and burned a PLO social welfare office—even though the police station was right across the street.
In January, three busloads of Moslem rightists from Gaza came to Bir Zeit for a demonstration, passing through several Israeli army roadblocks. No other Palestinian demonstrators have pulled off such a feat; they are always arrested or forced back first.
Why the apparent Israeli collaboration? Mary Khass, the Palestinian director of a kindergarten program sponsored by the United Nations and the American Friends Service Committee, believes "the Israelis would rather have the Palestinians praying in their mosques than agitating on the streets."
She also sees something for the Israelis in the Brotherhood's conservative stance on women: "If a woman cannot be liberated as a woman, she cannot be a full human being. And if she is not a full human being, she cannot be politically mature enough to be involved in the struggle. So unless women are liberated, the whole people cannot be liberated."
Palestinian nationalism has traditionally been split: "Rejectionists" would see the Jewish state dissolved and a democratic secular state created, while more moderate forces advocate two nations, with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Though the PLO charter still advocates the former position, most PLO leaders appear ready in practice to support the second.
The Moslem fundamentalists reject both. They want a Moslem state, like Khomeini's Iran, in all of what was formerly Palestine. The degree of freedom such a state would grant Christian Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and the integrity it would permit their holy places, is questionable.
Islam, like its two monotheistic counterparts, Christianity and Judaism, has both its progressive and its reactionary elements—its William Sloane Coffins and Arthur Waskows, and its Jerry Falwells and Meir Kahanes. Some Islamic theologians, like Ali Shariarti, have led the way to ideologies as profoundly revolutionary as those of the activist priests in Latin America. But in the
Middle East today, the rule seems to be violence, intolerance, and reaction.
Thus, Israel's apparent efforts to divide and conquer the Palestinians may backfire. If the Islamic Right continues to build, it could nullify the PLO's growing moderation. The Israelis would then be up against a far more militant, irrational, and uncompromising force than they face now.