Gaza settlers face defeat, disillusion

In a last-ditch effort to stop the Israeli government from withdrawing from Gaza and portions of the West Bank later this month, tens of thousands of Jewish settlers gathered Tuesday, vowing to march toward the Gush Katif settlement enclave, and setting up a showdown with police.

But even as the battle escalates over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's landmark pullout from territories claimed by Palestinians as part of a future state, some settlers are already worrying about the evacuation's impact on a movement that has promoted the steady expansion of Jewish settlements for three decades.

For these religious Zionists who fanned out across the West Bank and Gaza, fancying themselves as model Israeli patriots, the calamity of the approaching withdrawal is provoking a soul- searching over whether they neglected reaching out to the country's mainstream while reclaiming what they considered a biblical birthright.

"We thought it was an Israeli national project and it really wasn't,'' says Rabbi Shlomo Bick, an instructor at the Har Etzion religious seminary in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut. "There was sort of a disengagement - a mental disengagement and a social disengagement - with the majority of the people in the country.''

Many of the 220,000 Jewish settlers who built new communi- ties in the territories conquered during the 1967 Middle East war live in remote towns seldom visited by the average Israeli. The settlements are often homogeneously Orthodox in religious observance and staunchly right-wing in political outlook.

The gulf could widen amid the disillusionment over the evacuation, leaving Israel's religious Zionists even more closed off and, in some cases, more radical.

"When you find that your basic goal - building the country - isn't being shared, there's a real crisis of faith,'' said Bick. "The potential exists to throw up your hands, and say let's retreat into our community, and wait 50 years for the Messiah to come.''

The segmentation has been highlighted throughout the protest campaign against the pullout. Though public opinion surveys suggest one-third of Israelis are opposed to Mr. Sharon's plan, the overwhelming majority of protesters hail from settlements in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, or are religiously observant Jews from inside Israel.

In the decades before Israel's establishment in 1948, religious Zionists initially bridged the gap between the secular Jewish nationalists who advocated settlement in Palestine and a rabbinic establishment that viewed two millenniums of exile from the holy land as a divine punishment.

Following the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yizhak Hacohen Kook, first chief rabbi of Palestine, who died in 1935, religious Zionists argued that establishing a Jewish state would be taking a step closer to the Messianic age.

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