There never can be peace.

• Author: ben-Tekoa, Sha'i
• Position: Worldview

ON AUG. 18, 1988, after eight months of riots in Israel that today are called the first intifada (uprising), the Arab leaders orchestrating the attacks against unsuspecting Jewish civilians went public with publication of their founding Covenant. Surprisingly, the leaders were not from the then already 30-year-old Fatah organization, but were a new, heretofore unheard of terror operation called Hamas, which, as a name, followed the template of its rival Fatah.

Fatah means "conquest" but, more precisely in its cultural context, connotes the "Islamic conquest" that results from a jihad against the infidel. When Yasser Arafat and seven confederates founded Fatah in 1959, they chose this name to satisfy the two factions. All of the original Fatah founders had been raised in the Muslim Brotherhood and half of them, Arafat among them, still saw themselves as Muslim Brothers--versus the other camp that admired the secular, nationalist political language used by the FLN's "freedom fighters," who, that year, were rebelling against French rule by murdering Europeans living in Algeria--at random--in acts of gruesome, terrorist atrocities.

Fatah was selected because it satisfied, on the one hand, the still-devout Muslims like Arafat who wanted an Islamic name, and on the other the four wanting something similar to the more modem, political, and nationalist language of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria. Fatah in Arabic also can serve as a (reverse) acronym for Palestine Liberation Organization, which pleased the secularists among them.

Now, though, a revival group had arisen that launched the first intifada. They chose hamas, which is Arabic for "religious zeal," but also can serve as an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya/Islamic Resistance Organization. Hamas in Islam is religious fervor at its most passionate, a fierce piety that drives a believer to make the ultimate sacrifice for Allah: murdering (in this case) Jews at random in blood baths while, at the same time, killing oneself. The reward for the shahid (martyr) is entry into a paradise that is a 24/7 drunken orgy, with 72 virgins who, after each violent deflowering, reconstitute their hymens so that the holy shahid can rape them again and again for all eternity. Hamas would specialize in--and become famous for--suicide bombers.

Ironically, Hebrew and Arabic are cognate languages. In Hebrew, however, the word hamas refers to the worst feature of humankind: man's inhumanity...