Jews Fighting Jews? Israeli extremists are planning to resist Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza--perhaps even violently.

Byline: Dan Ephron

They call it summer camp, though no one on this pearly stretch of beach in the Gaza Strip was running underwear up a flagpole or draping toilet paper over the girls' bunk. Instead, about 25 Israeli teens trained for four days last week to fight off troops who might try to dismantle settlements in Gaza next year under the "disengagement" plan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some locked arms to simulate a police cordon while sprinting campers practiced crashing through it. Others scaled an abandoned house to taunt imaginary soldiers from the roof. The secret camp was run by followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and his outlawed Kach group--religious extremists who preach ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and confrontation with Israeli authorities. The camp was located near the Gush Katif settlement bloc where most of Gaza's 8,000 Jews live (among 1.2 million Palestinians). "We're here to make sure no settlements are ever uprooted," says 18-year-old Coby Ernstoff, one of about 200 campers to attend Kach "sleep aways" this summer. "And we'll fight to the end if we have to."

This is Sharon's worst nightmare. Though the Kach campers are part of a small right-wing fringe repudiated by the mainstream of Jewish settlers, Israeli authorities are worried they could light the match of Jew-on-Jew violence when the withdrawal from Gaza is scheduled to begin next summer. The pullout plan itself is still mired in political uncertainty. Sharon faces a showdown with rebels from his own Likud Party this week over the plan even as his top deputy, Ehud Olmert, talks about the need to dismantle many more settlements. But while military strategists continue plotting the evacuation of 21 Gaza settlements (and four in the West Bank), intelligence officials warn that security alerts about potential right-wing violence are piling up. One Israeli diplomat has suggested that extremist groups might one day even employ Jewish suicide bombers. "The number of people who are going to act violently is not large but when the violence begins, you never know how it will unfold," says Yaakov Perry, a former chief of Israel's Shabak security service. "That's why we have to watch some of these people."

Since its founding by Kahane in the 1970s, Kach has been the most violent of Jewish extremist groups, with a strong presence in Hebron where a settler doctor killed 29 ...