Elyakim Haetzni, an early settler of Kiryat Arba, and an inflammatory apocalyptist, told me that when the Jews of Tel Aviv—the cultural capital of Israel, a place poisoned by the dissolute culture of the West—try to force their hill-country cousins out of the settlements, blood will be spilled.

“The situation of Hanukkah is with us,” Haetzni said. Hanukkah, it should be remembered, commemorates not only the Jewish defeat of Israel’s Greek overlords but the defeat of Hellenized Jews by the Maccabees. “Now the clash is very, very near,” Haetzni said. “The battle is about Jewish identity. The battle is about Judaism.” For now, the settlers are outnumbered, by secular Israelis as well as by religious Jews—and there are many—who venerate life more than land. But the majority has not yet found a way to bend the minority to its will.

The most farsighted among the Palestinians now understand that settlements are good for their cause. Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian-American and Harvard-trained legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team, told me, “Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism”—a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. “I don’t care if they build more,” Tarazi said. “The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state.”

He went on, “The settlements mean that the egg is hopelessly scrambled. Basically, it is already one state. There are no signs saying ‘Welcome to Occupied Territory.’ It’s one country, the same electricity grid, the same aquifers. Except that the three million Christians and Muslims in Gaza and the West Bank don’t have the same rights as the five million Jews in Israel, and the Arabs in Israel are second-class citizens compared with the Jews. Now the cause is justice and equality.”

By justice and equality, he meant the dissolution of Israel as a haven for Jews. “This is something very fundamental,” he said. “Zionism in practice is about taking the land and getting rid of the people.”

Zionism, I argued, is, in essence, the liberation movement of an oppressed people. The settlers have tried to turn it into a fundamentalist theology, but Zionism, at its core, remains a liberal idea.

“Stop scapegoating the settlers!” he said. “I think you’re in denial, I really do. It’s very typical. You want to find a reason why all this is happening, but you don’t look at the practice of Zionism itself. . . . It’s true that the national-religious Zionists are dragging Israel in the direction of theocratic fascism, but the settlement enterprise is encouraged by the government. These people are just extreme strains. They say publicly what people think privately.”

Tarazi believes that the Palestinian strategy should change. “We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid.”

Israel is faced with two options: keep the settlements, and risk either apartheid or binationalism; or separate cleanly from the Palestinians, by withdrawing settlements and raising a wall between the two sides. In 2002, Israel began to build such a barrier. Its planned route veers deep into the West Bank, in order to encircle settlements. Some Israelis argue against a fence that tracks the Green Line for practical reasons: Israel might very well have to hold high ground, on the east side of the Line. Another argument, made by Dennis Ross, who served as President Clinton’s Middle East negotiator, is that a Green Line fence would reward the Palestinians for avoiding their responsibility to put an end to terror. “The message has to be ‘We know you don’t like where the fence is, but if you don’t fulfill your security responsibilities this is where it is. It won’t be permanently there unless you make it permanent,’ ” Ross told me. Ross may have a point, but it is one that will be lost if a fence designed to keep bomb-carrying murderers out of Israeli cities is turned, instead, into a tool for a settlers’ landgrab.

The argument against unilateral withdrawal is straightforward. The Palestinians will not be satisfied with the West Bank and Gaza, and will simply demand more. Even many leftists have come to this conclusion. In Jerusalem, I spoke to Ya’acov Rotblit, an icon of the peace movement—he wrote its anthem, “A Song for Peace.” He told me that he now thought that the movement had been motivated by “wishful thinking.”

I asked him how far to the right he had moved. “I didn’t move anywhere,” he said. “I was kicked. Listen, the whole world of assumptions, of beliefs, of hopes, of thoughts about possibilities collapsed totally with this intifada.” I then asked if he was sure that the Palestinians were interested only in Israel’s destruction, and not simply in a better offer than Barak had been capable of making at Camp David. “We give and they take and they take more,” he said. “The whole Temple Mount wouldn’t have been enough.”

He believed that the settlers had been misunderstood. “If these people behaved the way the world says they behaved, they would have done ethnic cleansing against the Arabs already,” he said. “They are very patient people. They don’t shoot back as much as anyone else in the same situation would.” The settlers, he has come to believe, are not the problem. “The first day the first Jew came back here, that’s the start of the problem. I was never pro-settlement,” he added. “But why shouldn’t a Jew live in Hebron?”

Many Israelis fear that the Palestinians would consider a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza as a sign of weakness. When Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon, four years ago, Hezbollah, Israel’s foremost Lebanese foe, declared victory, and argued that the continual killing of Israelis by Palestinians would eventually destroy the Zionist spirit. But much depends on the manner of withdrawal. “There is a right way to do it, without giving them the impression that we cower before terrorism,” Defense Minister Mofaz told me. There is also the possibility of going so far as to exacerbate the situation.

Ariel Sharon, after proposing what, for him, was a revolutionary idea—the pullout of settlers from Gaza—now seems bogged down, trapped between the Palestinians and the settlers. He is making moves against both. In mid-May, Sharon launched his soldiers and bulldozers in two directions. In Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, the Army began intensive operations that were designed, it said, to shut down weapons-smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. Dozens of Palestinians were killed, and a large number of Palestinian homes along the border were destroyed. Last week, there were more fatalities in Rafah, after the Army fired on a demonstration; at least four children were killed. And, in the northern West Bank, soldiers, with considerably more politesse, attempted to dismantle the Yitzhar Lookout.

These two operations have one thing in common: neither will solve the problem that was meant to be addressed. Sharon’s actions against the Palestinians will not stop terrorism, and his actions against outposts will not stop the settlement expansion. Both operations symbolize the Sharon government’s impotence, and its inability to grapple with the great issues before it.

There are Israelis who, unlike Sharon, believe that a withdrawal from Gaza and most of the West Bank could dilute the Palestinians’ urge to make war. “I believe that reality is stronger than everything,” Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a former chief of staff, told me. “When they have a state and when they won’t have the everyday reality of going through an Israeli checkpoint, they’ll have something to lose.” I asked him if he believes Palestinians would still dream of a greater Palestine, and he responded that “it is O.K. to dream.” He went on, “Israelis will still dream of a greater Israel.”

The Jewish settlement of Tekoa, on the edge of the Judaean desert, northeast of Hebron, is built near the site of the ancient Jewish village of the same name. The ancient Tekoa is best known as the birthplace of a shepherd and fig gatherer named Amos, the Jewish prophet. Tekoa was then part of the southern Kingdom of Judah, the rival to the northern Kingdom of Israel. Amos first heard the voice of God in Tekoa. The prophet left his sycamore trees and his sheep and carried God’s message to the northern kingdom—a place, the Bible says, of avarice and decadence and empty ritual.

When Amos arrived, he condemned the sins of foreigners but told the Israelites that God’s greatest anger was reserved for them, His own people. He said that they had “sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes.” Amos did not believe that the Jews were worse than their neighbors, but that being chosen by God brought with it a burden: the burden of moral stringency. Ritual worship would not please God, Amos said, when the poor went hungry. “I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not be appeased by your solemn assemblies,” he told the Israelites. Amos wrote in fire, “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Today, two hundred and fifty Jewish families, half of them Orthodox, most of modest means, live in Tekoa. It is average in size and appearance for a West Bank settlement. Among its residents is a friend of mine named Seth Mandell, an Orthodox rabbi, and his wife, Sherri, who brought their children to Israel seven years ago, from Maryland. One morning earlier this year, I met Seth at his house, on a vine-covered lane. It was a clear, cold day, and we went for a walk into a steep ravine outside the gates of the settlement. We followed a narrow path to a cave. Three years ago, Seth’s son Koby and a friend skipped school for the day and came to the wadi. They were fourteen years old. Their bodies were found the next day in the cave; they had been beaten to death with rocks. No one has been caught in connection with the killings. I had visited the cave before with Seth, so we didn’t speak much. The cave is low-ceilinged, dank, and dark. The remnants of memorial candles, hundreds of them, covered the wet stone.

On the way back to Seth’s house, we talked about Amos, who seemed to me to embody a different message from that of the men who conceived of the settlement project. Amos was a universalist, I said. His concerns were not those of conquering land but those of spreading justice.

Seth corrected me. He recognized the universality of Amos’ message, but he also remembered his audience. “We can reinterpret Amos into universal meaning, but Amos, just like Jesus, was talking to Jews,” he said.

But wasn’t Amos demanding universal moral behavior?

“Of course,” Seth replied, “but he was also telling Jews that the reward for righteousness was the land we’re on. The universalists don’t see the Zionism in Amos, and the hard-right Zionists don’t see the universalism.”

I asked him how he kept his faith. He said, “The world is full of pain. But without God it’s only pain. I can’t imagine a world without God.”

The rabbi of Tekoa is a man named Menachem Froman. He was once a paratrooper; now he is a teacher of the Kabbalah. Froman has formed his own peace camp, in a manner of speaking. He believes that the West Bank should become Palestine, and he has no intention of leaving once it does. He will stay in Tekoa, he said, and may become a citizen of Palestine, under the leadership of Yasir Arafat. Froman has met Arafat, and refers to him as a friend. His meetings with Arafat have caused many of Tekoa’s residents to call him a fool. Seth Mandell, who is a man of moderation, does not consider Froman his rabbi.

“I’m the village idiot,” Froman said, happily. “I’m the primitive rabbi, the primitive Jew. But I’m a realist. I accept reality. I’m not talking about utopia. I accept what I see. There is a Tekoa, and there is a Tuqua”—the Arab village next door. “I don’t want to change reality, I want to work with reality. And the reality is that there is a Jewish village and an Arab village. Here you have men who are attached to the land, and there you have men who are attached to the land.”

He went on, “If one of my children says, ‘This is my father,’ does it mean that I have only one child? Not necessarily. I’m the father of more than one child.” God, too, has more than one child, as does the land between the river and the sea, he said. “The Jews have a right to live in freedom, the Arabs have a right to live in freedom. I have my pride, they have their pride. I have independence, they should have independence. I don’t want to suffer, they don’t want to suffer.”