Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

If you want to know the current reality in Israeli-Palestinian relations, listen to the Muslim fundamentalists shouting in Turkey recently: "Down with Israel and down with Arafat."

According to a top Israeli secret service official visiting San Francisco, that slogan sums it up.

If the religious zealots of Hamas were to kill Yasser Arafat and take over, the peace process would go into reverse.

Sure, both Arafat and Hamas have been responsible for terrible terrorist acts. And neither of them is to be trusted. But there is one crucial difference. Arafat's politics is rooted in secular opportunism. Hamas' politics is merged with religion.

Arafat has not grown wings and become an angel. But he has swallowed hard and accepted a reality: Israel is here to stay and the Palestinians can gain sovereignty over a place of their own only if they accept and negotiate with Israel.

If that reality were to change — if, for example, Israel would lose its military strength, become too soft in negotiations, lose American support — Arafat would change position overnight. But those changes are not about to take place.

A hint of the possible future came last week with news that the Jordanian government, for the first time, openly awarded a contract to an Israeli manufacturer for MRI equipment needed in an Amman hospital.

In contrast, the nonnegotiable religious doctrine of Hamas demands continuing war, whatever the consequences. If Hamas or another Iranian-backed fundamentalist force were to take over, Israel would have to send troops to reclaim land. That would be bloody and tragic for Israel.

As the Israeli intelligence official pointed out, this is the ironic reality for Israel: the ability of its people to get on with their lives depends on the survival of Arafat and the peace process, in the face of extreme fundamentalist rejection.

Of course, such fundamentalist rejection is not limited to the Muslims. There is the Israeli rabbi who called for the destruction of one of Islam's most holy places of worship, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Such Jewish zealots exist, but they are a minority among the reality-oriented Israeli people who, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, have moved toward the center on these matters.

So, religion might be cast as the enemy of peace in the Middle East. That perception would give comfort to those who have always thought of religion as the prime cause of cruelty and conflict through the ages.

Of course, America provides a different religious problem. Take a look at the Larry Flynt story. Flynt is a libertine by temperament and a pornographer by trade whose sleaze, which includes children and animals, strips humankind of its sacred qualities.

As a result, not only American religious leaders but prominent feminists as well have taken issue with the Academy Award-nominated film that glorifies Flynt as a national hero. In America, while religious fundamentalists have certainly battled Flynt, the struggle is broader. Flynt's philosophy also represents an affront to the mainstream religious values that have always sought to sanctify human life and thus to civilize our society.

However, in the Middle East — and occasionally in America — the fight is not between religion and anything goes, but between religion that humanizes and religion that dehumanizes.

The distinction is often difficult, and made more difficult by a tendency to be too reverent about religious fundamentalism, and even about the extremists it sometimes spawns. This reverence is one factor in America's squeamishness about squarely facing the dangers of a Muslim fundamentalism that is under the sway of extremists in so much of the Middle East.

Such reverence is based on the mistaken view that all fundamentalists are the "most religious" of people. Instead, we should begin thinking of the extremists among us — Muslim, Jewish or Christian — as not religious enough.

Remember the words of Jonathan Swift: "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."