Hamas terror recruits inside Israel surface in nightmare for Barak

JERUSALEM -- For at least a decade, Israeli Arab politicians and activists openly supported the Palestine Liberation Organization. After the 1993, Israeli-PLO agreement, some of these politicians began to lobby for the Islamic opposition, such as Hamas.

Israeli officials were concerned. But the Arab politicians assured them that the support was rhetorical and would not translate into violence.

Over the last week, Israeli security officials said that support has turned violent. Israeli Arabs were recruited to launch two attacks against Jews in northern Israel. The officials are concerned that over the last few months Hamas, Islamic Jihad and perhaps Lebanon's Hizbullah have managed to establish networks of Israeli Arab agents prepared to carry out terrorist attacks.

The officials said the pool of recruits has come from the Islamic movement, a legal organization in Israel which officially does not advocate violence. Those involved in the attacks over the last two weeks were said to have been aligned or even members of the Islamic movement.

Officials said Sunday's double car-bombings in two Israeli cities realized their nightmare. Three young men from the Lower Galilee village of Daburiya drove cars laden with explosives in Haifa and Tiberias.

On Tuesday, an Israeli court released new details, asserting that one of the attackers, Nizal Karaim, came from the village of Mashad and the other two from Daburiya.

The bombs exploded prematurely, the officials said, killing all three. On Monday, five Arabs from the same village were remanded by a Tiberias magistrate to 15 days in prison as authorities investigate their role in the bombings.

Authorities said Israeli Arabs could be planning more attacks. Tiberias Magistrate Judge Ron Shapira, who issued a ban on details of the case, called it a "ticking time bomb."

Security sources said the five men currently in detention are believed to have prepared the bombs and sent the three to park the vehicles in crowded spots in Haifa and Tiberias. They said the three who died were not on a suicide mission and might not have even known that the cars they were driving were booby-trapped.

The Hamas recruitment of Israeli Arabs was godsend for Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, the security sources said. Now, Arafat cannot be accused of failing to stop Hamas or terrorism. Suddenly, the sources said, terrorism has become Israel's sole responsibility.

"I'll tell you the problem," Housing Minister Yitzhak Levy said. "It appears that Israeli-Arabs were involved in the latest attacks and as a result we can't go straight to Arafat with this."

Boaz Ganor, Director of the Herzliya-based Institute for Counterterrorism, said the PA must share the blame for the attack if it was sponsored by the Hamas leadership in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Ganor said that the PA has been holding a dialogue with Hamas since 1995 and has urged them to stop staging attacks from PA territory.

"I don't know whether this was a new agreement between the PA and Hamas or it's a new way by Hamas to avoid PA pressure," Ganor said.

PA officials and media have discussed the latest attacks openly, in contrast to when Palestinians from PA areas were involved. Palestinian newspapers ignored an Israeli court ban on the identification of the suspects in the bombings and published their names and addresses.

Some Israeli ministers blame the General Security Services, saying domestic intelligence failed to uncover what was clearly a Hamas recruitment effort that lasted months if not years among Israeli Arabs. They said that unlike limitations in the West Bank and Gaza, the GSS had complete authority in operating inside Israel.

Security sources counter that Israeli leaders have been aware of the rising influence of Islamic extremism among the nearly 1 million Arabs in the country. Former secular Arab politicians have joined the powerful Islamic movement. Arab weeklies publish flattering accounts of Hamas and its opposition to the PA. And, leading Arab politicians have been hauled to court on charges of helping finance Hamas in Gaza.

"This is clearly not an achievement for Israeli security,' Ganor said.

"Israel has liberal banking laws and the Hamas has used this to funnel money to and from Gaza," a senior security source said. "There's no question about it that Israeli Arabs have helped this effort."

Some security sources said Israeli politicians have played down the Islamic influence among Israeli Arabs for political reasons. They pointed to support by some ministers in the previous government of then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of construction of a mosque in Nazareth, an effort led by Islamic militants and opposed by Christians in that city.

For Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the prospect of Hamas recruitment of Israeli Arabs is more than a security nightmare. It is a political embarrassment. Israeli Arabs played a major role in his victory over the Netanyahu in May. Barak on Tuesday granted an interview to Israel Radio's Arabic service in which he stressed that the suspects arrested in connection with Sunday's' bombings did not represent the community.

"Israel's Arabs are loyal citizens of this state [who] proved their loyalty in very tough tests, and extremists severe as they are will be treated as individuals," he said. "There is no room for generalizations."

Israeli Arab politicians were quick to agree. "One must not cast aspersions on the Islamic movement or the Arab population," said parliamentarian Talab el-Sana of the Democratic Arab Party. "We're talking about individual cases."

Islamic Movement leader Abdallah Nimr Darwish, who in the 1980s served a jail sentence for sabotage, urged his followers to practice nonviolence. "I do not justify this, and all the bitterness that exists doesn't justify one denying the life of the other."

But minister Levy was not as sanguine. "We are becoming more aware of this problem in general," the minister said. "We have to give this issue a lot of thought."