Stripped of all it once had  houses, a pool, streetlights  Homesh, with its overgrown weeds and stray bits of concrete, feels today like the remnant of a nuclear winter.

But that has not dimmed the devotion of those who keep coming or their conviction that doing so will change the strategic equation.

“We never leave Homesh empty,” said a man who gave his name as Zvi Yehuda as he prepared surreptitiously to spend the night there, revolver on hip. “The creator of the universe gave us this land. It is a commandment to live in it and settle it. Anyone who stands in our way  whether pharaoh or Obama  will be punished by God.”

There are 300,000 settlers in the West Bank (another 200,000 Israeli Jews live in East Jerusalem) and they are not monolithic. A third are politically and socially indistinguishable from most of Israel and moved there for suburban-style housing and close-knit communities. Another third are ultra-Orthodox and do not consider themselves settlers or Zionists, wanting only to live together in an appropriate environment somewhere in Israel.

The remaining 100,000 are ideologically (and, most of them, religiously) committed to staying. They have a fairly uniform view of the situation: most believe that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation; that if the world wants a state for Palestinians, it should set it up next door in Jordan; that all of the West Bank, which they call by the biblical name Judea and Samaria, is a central part of the Jewish homeland; and that Arabs will do everything they can to destroy Israel in any borders, so staying in the West Bank is a matter not only of history but of security.

Salvation Through Land

While the ultra-Orthodox say life comes above all else, ideological settlers say that holding onto what they consider the entire land of Israel is the essence of life; through redemption of this land comes Jewish salvation.

But half of them live in settlement blocs close to the boundary with Israel that are likely to remain in a deal involving land swaps with the Palestinians. Ideological settlers who live deep in the West Bank number about 50,000.