Jerusalem, Israel - It is more than bricks and mortar Israel is preparing to abandon in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank this summer.
It is more, even, than the 8,000 Jewish settlers living in 25 armoured enclaves, who to this day remain bewildered that the man pulling them back to Israel proper is none other than Ariel Sharon, the chief patron of their life's work.
Disengagement, scheduled to begin in mid-August, comes with an overriding biblical dimension, a Torah-driven angst that is tearing at Israel's social fabric as never before.
In the centre is mainstream, secular Israel, reluctantly ready to give back Gaza, and probably more land later, if only to preserve its overriding need to remain a Jewish democracy. Most studies of the prodigious Palestinian birthrate predict that Arabs will outnumber Jews in as little as a decade. A great many Israelis now believe that the demographic clock is ticking toward a stark choice: Say goodbye to most of the Palestinian territories or say goodbye to democracy.
But way over on the hilltops of the West Bank and the sand dunes of Gaza, there is a different, deeply religious worldview that says, Never mind the Palestinians, we're on a mission from God. This is the messianic wing of the settlement movement, which since the Six Day War of 1967 has come to be the tail that wags the dog of Israeli politics.
It may be a minority, but it's one of extraordinarily fundamental faith and fortitude. Its reality holds that the rest of Israel has lost its way. It's not enough for a Jewish state to be just another ordinary country, its followers say. The real purpose of the settlement enterprise is biblical redemption and that ultimate reward: the coming of the Messiah. To give up so much as a single metre of land so sacred to Judaism amounts to a wholesale rejection of their core values.
Israel has left the issue open for a full two generations. But with the coming disengagement, one of these worldviews appears targeted for deletion. And you can tell who is winning by the increasingly desperate, alienated eyes of the messianic believers who continue to stand against withdrawal.
"Not only will the troops and settlers be coming home to Israel, Judaism may be coming home from messianism," says Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg, who is completing a book on the origins of the settler movement.
The shock that mainstream Israelis now appear ready to foreclose on their dream comes "like a clap of thunder on a clear day, creating the current deep identity crisis," according to Yehuda Ben Meir, a senior fellow at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
Last week, hard-liners who'd taken over a derelict Gaza beach hotel announced plans to billet thousands of like-minded settlers, many from the West Bank, to derail withdrawal plans.
They said they would passively resist in such great numbers that Israeli troops "will not be able to use force against us.'
Israeli security experts are braced for scenes of anguish, particularly since few of the religious Zionists' spiritual leaders appear to be preparing their followers for the possibility that the pullout will actually proceed. Divine intervention, they insist, is the focus of their prayers.
"It is not far-fetched to believe there will be divine intervention that will stymie the disengagement plan," the regional rabbi of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, Yigal Kaminetzky, told the Hebrew daily Ha'aretz. "A miracle here is no less realistic than the implementation of uprooting."
But more and more, as the withdrawal date approaches, Israelis are beginning to grapple with what happens the day after, when this volatile element of religious Zionism awakens to find no miracle has come.
Gorenberg foresees a population of lost souls. "For some people, recognizing that the state isn't playing the role assigned by messianism could be like a stalker realizing that the movie star really doesn't love him," he wrote recently in Jerusalem Report magazine.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center, cautions that Israel should recognize the coming months as a critical moment for the Zionist enterprise as a whole in order to avoid "a schism so profound that the Jews of Israel will no longer feel bound by a common destiny."
Writes Halevi: "For the tens of thousands who have been taught from childhood that Jewish settlement of the land of Israel is not only inviolable but central to a divine plan," the withdrawal amounts to "an inconceivable reversal of the nation's destiny."
The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a Jerusalem-based think-tank, recently went one dramatic step further, appealing directly to the religious Zionist community in an article written for a monthly settlers' journal, Mekuda. Titled "Do Not Disengage from Us," the article urged its readers to consider that a new Zionist mission awaits them inside Israel proper, where the work of state-building is far from complete.
The article led to a highly unusual encounter when the entire IDI staff was invited to the West Bank settlement of Kedumim for a late-night encounter with residents.
"We reached out because the settlers are feeling they are at a crucial moment, the beginning of the end of their enterprise," Uri Dromi, a co-author of the Mekuda article, said in an interview. "And our research shows there is a great danger many of them will seclude themselves when it happens.
"We have to do what we can to comfort them, to coax them back, to tell them we need them, that there is a life and a purpose and a mission for them inside Israel. Because all of it is true. We do need them."
At Kedumim, no punches were pulled during a heated debate that carried on until 4 in the morning.
Settlers vented their rage. And when it was Dromi's turn to speak, he invoked an analogy no Israeli likes to hear — the French occupation of Algeria.
"I was blunt," he says. "I told them there came a point in Algeria where the people of France would no longer accept 1 million of their countrymen acting as a law unto themselves among 9 million Algerians.
"The French settlers fought their own people to resist withdrawal. But when it was all over in 1962 and the settlers finally came back to France, they were shunned. People said, `You brought it on yourselves. The hell with you.'
"We're trying to reach out to the religious Zionists in the settlements before it gets to that point. To tell them they are needed here, with us, inside the borders of Israel proper."
Most historians trace the rise of the messianic settler camp to the euphoria that followed the Six Day War, when Israelis awakened to find themselves controlling vast swaths of land. The conquest extended beyond the Old City of Jerusalem to encompass the West Bank, Gaza, the Egyptian Sinai and the Golan Heights. Suddenly, Israel found itself basking in previously unimaginable victory, with the biblical towns of Hebron and Bethlehem, among others, in its possession.
"Suddenly, the war was over and we found ourselves holding everything that was historically significant and dear to the hearts of the Jewish people," says Dromi.
But messianic Israelis, until then a politically insignificant group inspired by the teachings of their spiritual master, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, took the euphoria further.
"They saw the outcome of the war as a divine event," explains Dromi. "It was God's signal that the redemption is really happening, here and now. And they decided they could hasten it, in an active way."
Young religious Zionists took up the call, throwing themselves into a mission obsessed with land. They began to refer to the occupied territories as Yesha, an acronym of the Hebrew names for Judea, Samaria and Gaza that also means "salvation."
Each gram of soil, each grain of sand was claimed from the Palestinians underfoot not just in the name of Israel but in that of Eretz Israel — the biblical Land of Israel.
Gorenberg estimates that only one-quarter of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank today count themselves in the messianic camp. The settler movement has since expanded to include a range of sensibilities, from ultra-Orthodox to secular, many with nothing approaching the religious Zionists' ideological baggage.
Others still were drawn to bedroom communities such as the controversial Ma'ale Adumim, a bubble of 32,000 Israelis on the eastern approach to Jerusalem, primarily for the cheap housing afforded by years of generous government incentives.
Many of the early settlements sprouted on the merits of a security argument — the idea that far-flung clusters of settlers in the Jordan valley, for example, could serve as a sort of early-warning line in the event of a sudden attack by Israel's Arab neighbours.
Two intifadas later, few Israelis still buy the argument. The Arab threat, at least in terms of conventional warfare, no longer exists. There is peace with Jordan and Egypt; Syria's military arsenal is comprised largely of Cold War-era rust buckets.
As Gorenberg says: "Israelis as a whole are now far more aware that they are sending their sons and daughters to protect the settlements, rather than the settlements protecting them."
But the decisive factor remains Palestinian demographics, according to the IDI's Dromi.
"The essential contradiction is that the main demographic factor tells us that, in a decade or less, there will be more Arabs than Jews in the land we hold. Fundamentalists obsessed with land are able to ignore this reality and think that somehow we will find another answer for the fact of 3 1/2 million Palestinians.
"But the rest of us have seen the light. If we want to protect our democracy, to fully realize the project of a Jewish democracy, we have to pull back."
The Gaza pullout is but a first step. And many doubt the distance to which Israeli Prime Minister Sharon will go when talk turns inevitably to additional withdrawals of West Bank settlements. Clearly, a large part of the new Israeli consensus sees the large population centres — including Gush Etzion, Ma'ale Adumim and Ariel — as non-negotiable.
"The question used to be: `Should we or shouldn't we give up land?' Now, the question is: `How much land should we give up?' That is a huge change in Israeli politics," says Gorenberg.
"That is why the religious Zionists are starting to sound so desperate. Israelis have moved on, to a point where the pragmatists on the right, like Sharon, argue for minimal concessions, while the pragmatists on the left argue for a fuller withdrawal closer to the Green Line (demarking the pre-1967 armistice).
"The tenor of the settler protests is becoming shrill, radicalized, desperate. They feel alienated, because if Sharon is the one doing this, it means they've run out of allies. It means they've lost."
But both Gorenberg and the Shalem Center's Halevi see a silver lining emerging eventually, once the clouds of disengagement clear. However long the process takes, withdrawal from Gaza could mark the start of a return to sober religion.
"What we're seeing is the beginning of the end of Israel's messianic wing. I see that as a hopeful process, because it is going to free up the significantly less extremist branch of religious Zionism to be welcomed back to Israeli society," says Halevi.
"The war of 1967 came with a negative spiritual consequence and that's what is being undone now. I'm not saying Israel will necessarily be going back to the borders of 1967. But religious Zionism is going back to its pre-1967 sobriety."