Zionists suffer 'crisis of faith' on eve of settlement pullout

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TEL AVIV -- Israel's impending withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank has prompted an emotional and ideological self-examination for many religious idealists, who for three decades believed that by expanding settlements they were reclaiming the nation's biblical birthright.

Long accustomed to seeing themselves as model patriots, these Zionists now are asking whether they somehow neglected to share their sense of mission with the country's mainstream.

"There is a feeling that people have spent 30 to 40 years doing what they wanted to do, with support of the government. We thought it was an Israeli national project, and it really wasn't," said Rabbi Shlomo Bick, an instructor at the Har Etzion religious seminary in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.

"There was sort of a disengagement -- a mental disengagement and a social disengagement -- with the majority of the people in the country," he said.

Many of the 220,000 Jewish settlers who built the communities that the territories conquered during the 1967 Middle East War live in remote towns seldom visited by the average Israeli.

The settlements are often homogeneously Orthodox in religious observance and staunchly conservative in political outlook.

The gulf could widen amid disillusionment over the evacuation, leaving Israel's religious Zionists even more closed off and, in some cases, more radicalized.

"When you find that your basic goal -- building the country -- isn't being shared, there's a real crisis of faith," Mr. Bick said. "The potential exists to throw up your hands and say let's retreat into our community and wait for 50 years for the messiah to come."

Although public-opinion surveys suggest that one-third of Israelis are opposed to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal plan, the majority of protesters hail from settlements in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights or are religiously observant Jews from inside Israel.

In the decades before Israel's establishment, religious Zionists bridged the gap between the secular Jewish nationalists, who advocated settlement in Palestine, and a rabbinic establishment that viewed two millennia of exile from the Holy Land as a divine punishment.