THE suicide bombing campaign carried out by Palestinian Islamist "martyrs" has demonstrated that radical elements, after a period of military inactivity and political drift, have seized the initiative to resume their jihad against Israel and a peace process.
The campaign, launched at a time when the Islamists were in disarray and sidelined, has apparently united the larger Hamas movement and the smaller Islamic Jihad group, which yesterday announced they would co-operate in the war against Israel.
The disarray was produced by Israel's policy of trying to decapitate the Islamist groups by imprisoning, deporting and assassinating their senior figures. As a consequence the groups have no unified leaderships, no political or military strategy and no serious plan for achieving their objective of establishing an "Islamic state" in the whole of Palestine.
This state of affairs has now made it possible for more radical elements to go over to the offensive.
Hamas and Jihad leaders now based in Damascus in Syria and Khartoum, Sudan, are far more violent than the pragmatists living in the Palastinian territories, who have been seeking a modus vivendi with the Palestinian President Mr Yasser Arafat, and his Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Indeed, yesterday Mr Arafat told students gathered for a peace rally in Gaza that the orders for the bombings "came from out side" Palestine, laying the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the exiles.
The radicals blocked an accord between Hamas and the PNA which was being negotiated during protracted talks broken off in Cairo last December. This accord would have permitted Hamas to organise as a legal political party in exchange for an end to its attacks on Israelis. But even if agreement had been reached the men of war were always in a position to outflank the men of compromise by activating "sleeping" bombers.
The present wave of bombings focusing on targets in Israel itself rather than in the occupied territories, would seem to be patterned on the campaign waged by Hamas after the signing of the first Oslo accord in September 1993. Then the acts of violence perpetrated by its military wing, the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades, and individual "martyrs", were designed to terrorise rather than to achieve a strategic objective like driving Israeli forces and settlers out of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
The fundamentalist aim today, as then, seems to be to blow up the peace process rather than to secure a state for the Palestinian people. But today the Islamists could achieve their political objective by wrecking the chances of Israel's "peace camp" securing a new mandate in the May poll.
