About the last thing the United States needs is another radical group targeting its citizens either at home or abroad. Yet that could be a result of Israel's assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin.
Even though the Bush administration seemed surprised and even dismayed by Monday's attack, surviving Hamas leaders vow they will go after U.S. as well as Israeli interests in retaliation. That would be a major shift for Hamas, which up to now has engaged in a nationalistic struggle against Israel alone.
"It's certainly foreboding," said Judith Kipper, director of the Middle East Forum for the Council on Foreign Relations. "The goal of the Palestinian groups is to have a state of their own and they have not targeted anything other than Israel, but that could change. The more these groups remain alienated, the more likely they are to lash out beyond their own constituencies."
Depending on the point of view, the killing of Yassin could not have come at a better or worse time.
Israel clearly felt justified in both timing and motivation. Last week, Hamas claimed responsibility after two teenagers from the Gaza Strip slipped into the Israeli port of Ashdod and blew themselves up, killing 10 others. That shocked Israel, whose rationale for constructing a security fence in the West Bank rests in part on the fact that a similar fence in Gaza had prevented any terrorist attacks from being launched from there in years.
Moreover, Yassin had long been a marked man as founder of an organization blamed for killing scores of Israelis since 1987. Before Israel pulls out of the Gaza Strip - as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he plans to do - it wants to "clean up" Gaza and rid it of extremist elements.
That could be impossible.
To most of the 3.6-million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas is a charitable organization that has helped them far more than Yasser Arafat's corrupt and inefficient Palestinian Authority. Hamas provides food, clothing and money not just to families of suicide bombers, but also to thousands of ordinary Palestinians.
Rather than wiping out Hamas, killing Yassin and other senior leaders is apt to increase support for the organization and give rise to a "much more radical, inexperienced leadership" that is less willing to negotiate with Israel, Kipper said.
"You take out two, three, four layers at the top, then it's like an assembly line, others pop into place," she said.
The killing is also certain to spark further attacks against Israelis, even if it takes more time than usual to organize them because of extraordinarily tight security. After Israel tried to assassinate Hamas spokesman Abdel Aziz Rantisi last June, Hamas followed a day later with a bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 16.
And whatever the justification, Monday's attack could hardly have come at a more sensitive time. Tensions in the Middle East already were high because of the first anniversary of the war in Iraq, and the killing quickly led to anti-Israel, anti-American rallies there and in Cairo.
Many countries condemned the assassination, warning it could cause greater violence. And while the United States avoided direct criticism, Israel angered the only two Arab nations with which it has diplomatic relations.
Jordan's King Abdullah, who visited Sharon's ranch just last week, said he was "pained" by the killing. And Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, canceled a visit to Israel by Egyptian officials planning to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Camp David peace treaty between the two countries.
"This is an embarrassment to Egypt," Dia'a Rashwan, an expert on radical Islam, told the Israeli daily Haaretz. "Egypt was directly involved in bringing Hamas and (Palestinian Islamic) Jihad closer to the Palestinian Authority and bringing about a cease-fire. Targeting Yassin is a direct blow to these efforts."
The killing might also have dashed hopes Egypt would help patrol the border with Gaza after Israeli forces withdraw.
But the overriding question is what Yassin's death will do to the "road map to peace," announced with such fanfare in June by President Bush and Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Kipper predicts it will survive, if only because both sides realize there can never be peace without compromise on such issues as Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements.
But, she also predicts, nothing will happen before the U.S. presidential election, meaning at least another several months of violence.
"The road map has a destination and everybody, including the most radical Palestinians, knows what the solution is going to be.... But they can't do it by themselves, they need a forceful, persuasive United States putting it on a piece of paper."
