Like a war-hardened general rallying his eager young captains, Steve leaned in conspiratorially towards us and drummed home the magnitude of his campaign. "Look around you - at the land, at the reservoir, at the untapped potential of this place", he said, a grand sweep of his right arm taking in the verdant panorama from our vantage position on the hillside. "It's an area of great strategic importance, and one that we must stake our claim to now, before it's too late."

In every direction, teeming Arab villages bore testimony to Steve's assertion that the region required a swift injection of Jews, if it was to remain an incontrovertible part of Israel in the future. But this wasn't a contentious tract of land on the wrong side of the Green Line, and Steve is no rightwing zealot. This is the Galil region of Israel - the north of the state that bore the brunt of last summer's Katyusha barrage, and which is home to some of the most lush and fertile farmland in the country.

A few miles from the ancient city of Nazareth stands Kibbutz Hanaton, where Steve was holding court round the communal swimming pool. Founded 24 years ago, the kibbutz is going through something of a transitional period at present - and not necessarily for the better. A combination of factors have led the members to all but abandon the traditional socialist principles of kibbutz living, though they have grand designs for reviving the original way of life - and that is where we come in.

Nic and Rachel, childhood friends of mine from London, have been involved in protracted negotiations with the leaders of Hanaton for some time now, with regards to setting up an ambitious project in the kibbutz's education centre. They are both youth leaders, and in charge of two groups of gap-year students who are spending their time travelling and studying in Israel.

They are convinced that they could turn Hanaton's fortunes around by establishing a tailored educational programme for students from Israel and abroad, while at the same time fulfilling their ambition of living life on a kibbutz. The hope is that, within a couple of years, their friends will follow in their footsteps, bringing the manpower and drive to Hanaton that it so desperately needs.

To Steve and his fellow kibbutzniks, the new guard of Nic and Rachel, along with Rachel's fiance Akiva, are seen as manna from heaven - both for the kibbutz and the region as a whole. "We want to bring 500 families here eventually", said Steve, "in order to counter the Arab population growth in the area."

This is a different type of warfare, a different type of Zionism - guns replaced by babies, but a strategic battle all the same. Steve wishes no ill towards his Arab neighbours, but recognises that - in order to strengthen the Jewish claim to the Galil region - the demographic war must be won, and soon.

"For every one child born here", he said, "they're having five over there" - pointing towards Nazareth and its satellite villages. His point was that if, in 50 years' time, there's a discussion over whether this land should be handed over as part of a final settlement, it is imperative that the Jewish presence is by then too large to be ignored.

It's easy to forget the conflict in a place like Hanaton - azure skies, acre upon acre of flowering meadows, and not a checkpoint in sight. Save for the sporadic bursts of gunfire on Friday night, it was like being in the tranquil Devon farmland of my youth - but talking to Steve brought the struggle back to centre stage. Born and bred in South Africa, Steve moved here 12 years ago and displays the same kind of passion for the state that led my friends and me to move here ourselves a few years back.

He, like us, isn't interested in more annexation, nor with subjugating the Palestinians and making their lot an even harder one to bear. Instead, he wants the chance to raise his children here in peace - which, to him, means ensuring their manor remains as Jewish as possible forevermore.

As for Nic and Rachel, they're the ones to watch in terms of the future of Zionism. In Linda Grant's The People on the Street, Ophir - one of the subjects interviewed describes Zionism as: "Dead. It served its purpose and is now (over 50 years) obsolete." He describes himself as "not a Zionist - I'm an Israeli", dismissing Zionism as "a concept word, a movement word that has run its course".

But, for youth groups in the Diaspora, who spawn children who become leaders and then move to Israel, Zionism is anything but dead and buried. Nic and Rachel are idolised by their teenaged charges, in the same way that Nic and Rachel worshipped their own leaders 10 years ago - and when the upper echelons of the movement move to Israel, chances are the next generation won't be far behind.

Nic and Rachel do their bit for Israel by promoting it as a viable alternative to life in England or the US and, now that they have the Galil in their sights, it seems likely that Steve's dream of bolstering the area's Jewish presence will come to fruition sometime soon.

In the meantime, the ever-churning production line of willing and able immigrants to this land ensures that the hopes and dreams of the present batch will be implemented by the next. And, on a small kibbutz in the heart of the Galil, the swords may have been replaced by ploughshares, but the Zionist dream is the same.