Victory by Hamas dampens hopes of Israelis

NIR ELIYAHU, Israel -- Avi Zohar has spent a lifetime on this small orange-producing, left-wing kibbutz, convinced that Palestinians and Israelis alike really just want peace, and left to their own devices would reject the politics of their destructive leaders.

But the sweeping Hamas victory in the Jan. 25 Palestinian elections has sapped Zohar's optimism.

''Just one stray shooter can stay on that hill and kill everyone here," Zohar said, looking up from the yard of the kibbutz kindergarten at Qalqilya's apartment blocks, just a few hundred yards away across Israel's newest superhighway.

With fear and a dose of good humor, Zohar, 57, voiced the anxiety that has shuddered through the Israeli public in the wake of Hamas' unexpected electoral victory.

The candidates gearing up for Israel's own elections next month have already begun making political hay of the victory, blaming one another for failing to predict Hamas' rise or for underestimating the danger it poses.

A Hamas government next door marks a radical change for Israel; until now, the Palestinian Authority has been led by politicians who nominally recognize Israel's right to exist and have spent decades at the negotiating table even while fighting.

Hamas, on the other hand, has a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel and a global fight against Jews.

Israelis in small communities like Nir Eliyahu, a kibbutz sandwiched between the Hamas-governed Palestinian city of Qalqilya and the Mediterranean Sea, are acutely aware how fragile is the entente that prevents the outbreak of all-out hostilities.

Qalqilya, an urban hilltop that elected Hamas to lead its local government a year before the rest of the Palestinian territories catapulted it to national power, has long been a bitter battleground between Israeli security services and militants. Several suicide bombers that have struck the coastal suburbs north of Tel Aviv came from Qalqilya, and the Israeli Defense Forces regularly target Hamas and Islamic Jihad cells operating from the city.

Israeli officials call this coastal strip the country's ''narrow waist." Here Israel is about 10 miles wide and according to alarmed politicians, especially vulnerable.

Members of the rightist Likud party have taken to calling the Palestinian Authority ''Hamastan" since the election results were announced.

''Before our very eyes, Hamastan has been established, the stepchild of Iran and the Taliban," former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset the day after the Palestinian vote. ''It's in firing range of our airport, our highways and cities."

While the political debate in Israel over how to respond to Hamas seems likely to unfold for months to come, for ordinary Israelis the ascent of Hamas crystallizes concrete worries about another intifidah, or uprising, and the prospect of widening Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli cities.

Local security chiefs in a ring of Israeli towns around the Palestinian cities of Qalqilya and Jenin have met to plot new bomb shelters in the expectation of a new wave of rocket attacks, part of a ''ballistic intifadah," according to one security guard, Motti Stamati.

''It's a major fear now," Stamati said, adding that he expects a new outbreak of violence any day. ''If things change, we'll feel it here first."

Stamati guards the front entrance of Tsufim, a town in the hills north of Qalqilya. Tsufim is home to a more conservative crowd than the kibbutz down the hill; many of the town's inhabitants work in West Bank settlements, and expressed little of the soul-searching heard in other quarters of Israel.

''If it were up to Hamas, only those Israelis strong enough to swim to Cyprus would survive," said Israel Blonder, 48, a Tsufim founder who now works as the administrator of a nearby settlement.

Blonder said he was relieved, not worried, that Hamas would be in charge of the Palestinian Authority soon: ''Now I know who I'm facing," he said. ''Another intifadah is just a matter of time."

Israelis from across the political spectrum have struggled over the last week to make sense of the rising tide of public concern.

Danny Rubenstein, a columnist for the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, chided three academics at a postelection forum for ''trying to play down" the significance of the Hamas victory, an Islamist group bent on destroying Israel and refashioning Palestinian society along more religious and extremist lines.

''Some people say it's a blessing in disguise," Rubenstein said, dismissing two Palestinian panelists who said that Hamas might make a more straightforward and credible adversary for Israel. ''I only see the disguise. I don't see the blessing."

Normally optimistic Israeli analysts have also been in a grim mood.

''I apologize that this is the most pessimistic assessment I have ever made," Gershon Baskin, the Israeli cochief of a joint Israeli-Palestinian think tank, said at a Jerusalem conference this week before, ticking off the reasons why he believed Hamas' victory spelled the end for a productive peace process.

In an e-mail he sent out just after the election, Baskin reflected that a career spent building ''bridges of understanding between Israelis and Palestinians" might have hit a dead end.

''Personally, I will not engage in dialogue or try to engage in dialogue with someone who does not recognize my right to live and my right for self-determination," Baskin wrote. ''I will not sit with someone who wishes to kill me or to force me to leave this land."

On the other side of the country, Zohar, the security guard at the kibbutz Nir Eliyahu, employed a similar formulation of mixed despair and frustration.

Until 2000, he said, he used to repair his car at the Palestinian garages in Qalqilya, and he supervised Palestinian work crews to pick fruit at the kibbutz.

Now, though, he barely interacts with Palestinians in his day-to-day life.

''I don't understand the people in Qalqilya, the people in Palestine," he said. ''If they want peace, how come they vote for Hamas?"