The rise of Israel's pious warriors

Inside a stone citadel atop a panoramic hilltop, prospective Israeli soldiers at the Beit Yatir religious military prep school consult the Talmud on whether they should follow orders to evacuate settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

"In the Bible they have the same problem," says principal Moshe Hager, retelling the story of one of King David's generals who ignored an order to put down a rebellion and was executed for it. "We are speaking about these problems all the time."

When Mr. Hager's pupils are drafted into the army later this year, they may well find themselves caught in a firestorm that pits faith against fidelity to the army. If Prime Minister Ariel Sharon orders the military to carry out the withdrawal, it will be challenged by the rulings of some revered rabbis who say that observant soldiers must disobey a directive to dismantle settlements.

As recently as a decade ago, the predicament would have affected a tiny fraction of Israel's combat soldiers. But with the success of prep schools like Beit Yatir, there's been a dramatic increase in the percentage of religious soldiers taking up frontline assignments and joining the officer corps.

Hager founded Beit Yatir 14 years ago to help observant high school graduates better integrate into an Israeli military, which was seen as secularizing institution. By combining a year of Jewish text instruction with physical workouts, schools like Beit Yatir aspired to equip pupils with the moral and physical tools to serve alongside the sons of Israel's secular kibbutz farming collectives who dominated the army's combat units.

Though the army says it doesn't keep count, observers say "national religious" soldiers account for about one-fourth of combat soldiers and one-third of the junior commanders - numbers well beyond their 15 percent representation within Israel's general population.

"It's not that all the army is religious and the kibbutzniks have left, but it is a change that the army has to take into account," says Amos Harel, a military correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz.

Settler leaders appeared to take advantage of that shift when the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities in the West Bank and Gaza, recently warned of a crisis of insubordination if Mr. Sharon orders the dismantling of Jewish settlements without a national referendum. While the Yesha Council condemns insubordination, a fringe group said this month that it has collected thousands of signatures from so-called "refuseniks."

"According to the Torah, Israel is forbidden to relinquish territories," says Asher Ben Yosef, a reserve soldier who signed the petition. "Maybe I will go to jail ... but I'll be happy that I did something on behalf of the land of Israel."

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