COMMENT.(The Talk of the Town)

After the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the Israeli political establishment vowed that the existence of the state would never again be in doubt. Eventually, one bulwark of its strategic defense would be the construction of dozens of settlements in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip--first as small, stealthily built outposts, then as larger, more established "facts on the ground." As the rationale evolved, these settlements were intended to buffer a tiny state from foreign attack, to shift some population away from the coastal plain, and, finally, to undermine Palestinian contiguity. Over the years, Israel's principal leaders, both Likud and Labor, participated in the expansion of the settlements, but the most committed architect, the truest believer, was Ariel Sharon.

Sharon recognized that he could not build the new settlements by calling on the traditional secular elites, which were then in decline: the kibbutzniks, the intelligentsia, and the labor movements. Instead, he relied on a new breed of idealist. As he writes in his memoir, "Warrior":

By the 1970s the pioneering spirit that in the past had found its home among the Labor Zionists was fast declining. The drive to return to the homeland and reclaim and work the land that had been instrumental in the Zionist enterprise was simply not any longer the great inspiring ethos it had previously been. But now another stream of ideals had been generated, not from the socialist tradition but from the religious tradition.

Sharon made common cause with Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the leader of a Jerusalem yeshiva, whose teachings defied the traditional Orthodox thinking that the coming of the Messiah must precede the establishment of Israel. Kook's followers interpreted the victory of 1967 as a miracle, and believed that a Jewish return to Biblical lands could hasten redemption. They were the first to move into Hebron (to be close to the Tomb of the Patriarchs) and the first to go to Nablus (the Biblical city of Shechem). In time, hundreds of thousands of Israelis were living in the territories.

The majority of the Israelis who went to the West Bank and Gaza were hardly messianic. Among them were thousands of recent immigrants who moved to the occupied territories not to stake an ideological claim to a "Greater Israel" but to take advantage of cheaper housing and government subsidies; their dreams were suburban, not Biblical. Yet the most ardent settlers--the most political, aggressive, and self-regarding--portrayed themselves as players in an eschatological drama. Encouraged by politicians like Sharon (he called the settlers "the best of Israel"), they saw themselves as the true inheritors of the original Zionist spirit, pioneers willing to live in a hostile land that was theirs by right of God. Among the most radical, an obsession with land deemed sacred outstripped their respect for the state and its institutions. Over time, they became a divisive force, resented by many in Israeli society for the way they disdained the secular majority even while depending on its defense and its largesse.

So when, finally, Sharon told the nine thousand settlers of Gaza that their presence amid 1.3 million impoverished and hostile Palestinians was no longer tenable if Israel was to remain secure and a majority Jewish state, the shock was profound. The settlers were not merely unfortunates caught in a civil case of eminent domain, forced to give up the homes and the communities that they had built. Many of them simply could not believe that Sharon, who had run for office promising never to sell them out--who had said, "To abandon them would go against Jewish history and morality"--would act. He didn't have the right: the promises of God (as the settlers understood them) trumped the shifting demands of a ...