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Posted on 10/20/2001 4:34:19 PM PDT by Pokey78

There was a great deal of talk in 19th-century Russia about terror. But the issue then and there, as it is here and now, is not terror but revolution. In the Islamic world today there are the Trotskyites who want to export the revolution. And there are the "Stalinists" who say: let's make a revolution in one significant Muslim country, then see how we export it. Osama Bin Laden is a fervent Trotskyite, Ayatollah Khomeini was a Stalinist.

The idea is that in almost all Islamic countries there is a revolutionary situation. In all these countries, more than a fifth of the population is aged between 15 and 24 and too many are unemployed. In an important interview with the Al-Jazeera television station in 1998, Bin Laden said that these young people are the ones with the ability for jihad. Jihad (holy war) is the term Islamists use for what I call revolution.

Most of the Islamic countries, and especially the Arab ones, are run by what I call Mukhabarat regimes. Mukhabarat is a label for the establishment in charge of the internal security - the secret police. These are not military regimes, the armies in those countries are subordinated to the Mukhabarat. It doesn't matter whether the ruler is a monarch or a president elected by 99% of the voters.

America is perceived by the Islamists as the lifeline of all the Mukhabarat regimes. This lifeline, more than hatred of its lifestyle, is uppermost in the minds of the political Islamists.

The Islamic revolution is, first and foremost, an effort to replace the Mukhabarat regimes with the rule of the Islamic law (sharia). The trouble is that the political Islamists, like the Taliban and the ayatollahs of Iran, make such Mukhabarat regimes look good.

The Middle East is, indeed, a fertile crescent for an Islamic revolution, but those who work for such a revolution in the region are more often Stalinists than Trotskyites. They care first and foremost for an Islamic revolution in their own societies. This particularly holds true with Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement in Palestine which is making a revolutionary bid against Yasser Arafat's Mukhabarat regime.

Hamas acts on two fronts. Within the Palestinian authority it competes with Arafat by providing welfare institutions, nursery schools, food for the poor and many other community services. It does so partly because it cares and partly to present itself as an alternative to Arafat's corrupt and corrupting regime.

For the Islamic Trotskyites this is all "social work", good for do-gooders, not for serious revolutionaries. But the Stalinists of Hamas think that social work is terribly important for advancing their bid.

However, they are also fighting on an external front against Israel. Here they put themselves forward as the sacrificing avant-garde, the kamikaze of the Palestinian struggle. Their religious and political demands in the struggle with Israel are absolute.

To Hamas the whole land of Palestine, which includes all the land on which Israel sits, is an Islamic endowment that is not up for any deal. In its eyes, Arafat's negotiations with Israel are a religious transgression and not just a grave political mistake. To make its point, Hamas sends its suicide bombers to Israel proper (Israel within the pre-1967 borders).

Secular movements promise "five-year plans". Religious movements postpone the time of delivery. It took Islamists more than 200 years to get rid of the crusaders - it will take that long for them to get rid of the crusading Jews, "the Zionists".

The dilemma for Israel, as Yitzhak Rabin, the late prime minister, came to see it, was either you deal with Arafat, problematic as he is, or you duel with Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, the spiritual leader of Hamas. A national conflict can be solved, a religious conflict cannot. At best it can be dissolved, but only after centuries of bloody religious wars.

Israel has its fair share of absolutists. A ferocious one, Rehavam Zeevi, a government minister, was murdered by secular Palestinians last week. This is part of the blood feud between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Zeevi believed that the only available solution to the conflict is "us or them".

He thought there was no distinction between Arafat and Yasin, apart from the fact that Yasin is honest about his aims and Arafat is a liar. In his view, there was no room for the Jews to compromise on the land of Israel: it is all Jewish by right.

Zeevi was all for stick and carrot policy. Make the Palestinians eat sticks and then hit them with carrots. He was an exceedingly intelligent man in the sense that Enoch Powell was. He was articulate, erudite and also capable of higher idiocy and mischief. Even for the right in Israel he was hard to stomach.

But Zeevi, eccentric as he was, came from a social circle to which Rabin and Ariel Sharon belong - in that sense he was very much "one of us". In a blood feud this matters a great deal, especially with Sharon. He is romantically loyal to his friends from army days.

So what I expect now is revenge. In the process there is a dangerous blurring of distinction between Arafat (who tried hard in the past month not to repeat the mistake of siding with Saddam Hussein, and thus to disassociate himself from Bin Laden) and between Yasin of Hamas.

The main urgent role of America in the Middle East is not to let the conflict between Jews and Arabs deteriorate into a fully fledged religious war. Such a war is the dream of the political Islamists: Trotskyites and Stalinists alike.

Avishai Margalit is Schulman professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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