Israeli Arabs Reflect on Hamas Win

"When we hear people at the top political levels saying we are a threat, it can only make us very anxious," said Sarsur, who heads the Islamic Movement's southern branch. "The Judaization of the state threatens us. But we want to be Israelis in the civil sense of the word."

The Arab parties are a collection of religious Islamic parties and communist and secular-nationalist movements, and together they hold eight of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats. They exert influence on the margins, but sometimes in important ways. Arab support for Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last year helped ensure its passage in parliament.

Since the 2003 election, however, the threshold to qualify for a Knesset seat has been raised from 1.5 percent to 2 percent of the popular vote, raising doubts that the three Arab groups in parliament will keep their spots. Arab leaders say the Kadima party, the centrist group formed late last year by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is likely to peel off some Arab voters now that Sharon is unable to run because of a debilitating stroke. And the Labor Party will enter elections behind Amir Peretz, whose long tenure running Israel's labor federation, a bastion of Arab workers, has made him a popular candidate to many of them.

"The Arab political situation is very, very bad," said Asad Ghanem, head of the government department at the University of Haifa. The Arab parties' candidates, he said, "are seen by many in the Arab public as opportunistic, as politicians who only want to hang onto their seats. It may be that the Arab public will punish these Arab parties."

Like Hamas and the smaller radical group Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories, which lie about a mile east of this city's palm-lined medians and green-domed mosque, Israel's Islamic movement is split over the best approach toward a political system endorsed by Israel.

The movement's northern branch, led by Raed Salah, has urged followers to boycott Israeli elections. The longtime mayor of Um el-Fahem, Salah has been in and out of Israeli jails for the past two decades for having contacts with anti-Israel groups, including Hamas.

But Salah recently softened his message. Following the Islamic Movement's convention a few days after Hamas's Jan. 25 victory, the northern branch announced that its "followers have the right to take a position in the Knesset elections that is in accordance with our ideological understanding and our national feelings."

The statement could provide a boost to Sarsur's southern branch, whose base is this former farming community of 20,000 that now mostly provides cheap labor to the service industries on Israel's coastal plain.

Sarsur, a slight, garrulous man with a tidy gray beard, was born here in 1959 -- three years after Israeli border police killed 49 villagers for violating curfew at a time when the Arab population of Israel was living under military government. A dozen of his relatives were among the dead.

He studied English literature at Bar-Ilan University and hoped to teach in a high school. But he gave up after the Education Ministry rejected his application for nine years. He ran successfully for mayor and is now a civil engineer.

Campaign literature emphasizes Sarsur's title as "sheik," a religious leader. And three of the top five candidates on the list -- which includes the nationalist Arab Renewal Party -- are with a religious Islamic party.

"We have strong relations with Hamas in Gaza," Sarsur said. "And we can play a very constructive role in this process. We know the mentality of the Islamists in the occupied territories. And we know the mentality of the Israelis."

At twilight, Kamal Ibder, his bushy beard streaked with a white stripe, draped party banners around a traffic circle at the entrance to town. "Our power," the signs declared, "is in our unity."

When Ibder is not driving a forklift at a Coca-Cola plant near Tel Aviv, he is a foot soldier for the Islamic Movement. He ascribes what he believes is its growing support to the same kind of grass-roots social work that made Hamas popular among Palestinians.

"When it comes to the Islamic Movement, we're talking about a party that takes care of the needy, as opposed to the others who only care when the elections come," said Ibder, 43. "I am very optimistic."