In a speech delivered last December, Avi Dichter, the chief of the Shabak, warned that an Israeli withdrawal from Biblically important lands could heighten the desire of some Jewish extremists to destroy the Dome of the Rock. (The Muslim mosque and shrine that cover the site now are in the way of the imagined Third Temple.) “Jewish terrorism is liable to create a substantial threat, and to turn the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians into a confrontation between thirteen million Jews and one billion Muslims across the world,” Dichter said.

There is precedent for this fear. In the nineteen-eighties, the Shabak uncovered what came to be known as the Jewish Underground. The agency arrested twenty-seven men who had planted bombs in the cars of Arab mayors on the West Bank (two mayors were seriously injured), and had been planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock. A veteran of the terrorist underground, Haggai Segal—he planted the bomb that blew off the legs of the mayor of Ramallah, in 1980—told me that although he does not believe Jewish terrorists will once again plot to destroy the Dome, terrorism will result if Sharon pursues his plan to dismantle settlements. “It’s going to be very bad, certainly,” he said. “Obviously, we’re going to have violence.”

Kfar Tappuach, a settlement near Yitzhar which is populated by followers of Meir Kahane, is home to an organization called the Jewish Legion. Its stated goals include training dogs to guard settlements in case of an Israeli Army pullout. One of its activists, Lenny Goldberg, who is originally from Queens, told me, “We’ve got to do this for ourselves. It’s the new thing. The Israeli government doesn’t want to help us, fine, so we’re going to do our own self-defense. We’re ready. We’re ready to build a true Jewish state up here in the mountains. You remember when the Kingdom of Judaea split from the Kingdom of Israel?” he asked, referring to an event that occurred three thousand years ago. “It’s like that. We’re ready to go our own way. We’re like Judaea, man.”

I asked if it was realistic to expect that several thousand settlers could hold off millions of Arabs, as well as the Israeli Army. “Realism? Forget realism,” he said. “We’re the nation that dwells alone. We can take care of our own Jewish state.” Besides, he said, the dogs were very well trained.

The director of the dog-training program is a Kahanist with dirty-blond hair who calls himself Yekutiel Ben-Ya’acov. When he lived in New York, he ran the local branch of Kach, the Kahanist political party, and was known as Mike Guzofsky. Guzofsky arranged for me to be driven from Jerusalem to Kfar Tappuach in order to see a dog-training session. A young British Jew who gave his name as Eliyahu picked me up at a mall at the edge of Jerusalem. On the side of the car was written, in Hebrew, “The Jewish Legion.” The car was not armored, and I asked him if it was wise to drive a car labelled “Jewish Legion” through Arab villages. “It’s been O.K. so far,” he said. As we left, he recited a special prayer for travellers.

Then he drove fast. Traffic was backed up as we approached Tappuach Junction. Soldiers were stopping vehicles with green Palestinian license plates, while cars with yellow Israeli license plates were allowed to drive through. The Arab passengers waited unhappily by the side of the road. “Look at this,” Eliyahu said. “It’s humiliating. We should kick them out of here for their own good. What they have to go through, it’s too much.”

Kfar Tappuach is a squalid place of rusted cars, yards filled with tires and rotting mattresses, and children wearing secondhand clothing. It is populated by an esoteric assortment of marginal Jews—Jewish Defense League veterans from Brooklyn, Russian pensioners, poor Yemenite farmers, Lubavitcher Hasidim, and a group of recent Peruvian converts to Judaism. The Peruvian men are in charge of perimeter security.

Guzofsky walked me through the kennel, at the northern end of the settlement. A sign in English identified the facility as the “Reuben Mattus Memorial Jewish Legion Kennel.” Reuben Mattus was the founder of the Häagen-Dazs ice-cream company and reportedly a supporter of Meir Kahane. A trainer named Gershon, a Russian immigrant who came to Israel from Odessa in 1990, was leading a class of dog handlers and their charges. A young Jewish Legion volunteer who gave his name as Rachmiel wore protective padding and played the role of an Arab infiltrator. A sallow man in dusty sandals named Ezra was having difficulty keeping his German shepherd, named Tarzan, in check; Tarzan had sunk his teeth into Rachmiel’s arm and wouldn’t let go. Ezra began to smack the dog. “Give him a fucking treat, Ezra!” Gershon, the trainer, yelled. Ezra, who is American, did not understand the Hebrew word for “treat.”

“Fuck, Ezra, a treat! A treat!” Ezra eventually understood, and waved a biscuit in front of Tarzan, who then released Rachmiel.

“We don’t want the dogs to kill the Arabs, just immobilize them,” Guzofsky said. He said that the dogs could smell the difference between an Arab infiltrator and a Jewish resident. “The adrenaline of the Arabs, they can detect it. The Arabs are very scared of dogs. Muslims think they’re unclean.”

The Jewish Legion hopes to begin training other species to help guard settlements. Geese, Guzofsky said, will serve as early-warning indicators. He also claims to have received rabbinical permission to train pigs as guard animals; the group recently purchased its first one. The pigs are useful for two reasons, he said: they have an acute sense of smell, and Muslims consider them a pariah animal. When I noted that Jews do, too, he replied, “We’re not going to eat them. We’re going to train them.”

The session came to an end, and five of us jumped in a pickup truck to drive to Tel Aviv. I sat in the back, next to Ezra, who carried an M-16 with two clips, though he is not in the Army. The conversation turned to the far right’s struggle against Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw settlements from Gaza.

“He should die,” Ezra said. “They should slaughter the fat pig.”

Guzofsky, in the front seat, said, quickly, “It’s not going to be one of us who kills him. It’ll be someone you never heard of. I’m telling you, he’s in trouble. He’s in danger. But it won’t be us.”

When Dror Etkes looks at the West Bank, he sees not the footprints of ancient Jewish kings and prophets but land grabs and bypass roads, as well as an infrastructure of suppression built by the Army to protect the settlers. I spent several days driving around the West Bank with Etkes, who heads the Settlement Watch program of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli group that rose to prominence in 1982 when it led protests against Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon. He was counting mobile homes and water towers, trying to track the constantly expanding settlement outposts.

On our way to Beit El and Ofra one day, we stopped at an outpost called Migron, the largest of the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Migron, which is near the site where King Saul is thought to have battled the Philistines, is home to forty-three families, who live in mobile homes, awaiting the construction of permanent houses. We drove through the front gate. One of the settlers recognized Etkes immediately, and greeted him warmly. “Dror, how’s it going?”

I asked the settler about his friendliness toward an avowed enemy of his movement. “Dror? He’s a great guy,” the settler said. “What am I going to do? Call him a criminal?”

“He wants to shut you down,” I said. The settler laughed. “Next year, we’ll have permanent buildings. We’ll invite him to see.”

Etkes said that the settler’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. “The settlers have the power, and we react,” he said. “The thing I hate about the settlers is their arrogance. They call themselves a kingdom of priests, but it’s really a welfare state. Who paves the road to Migron? Who supplies soldiers to protect Migron? Who puts in the water and electricity?”

The story is always the same, Etkes said. “First, the settlers in the area need an antenna for cell-phone reception. Then they need a guy to guard the antenna. And then he gets lonely, so he needs a friend. And the friend needs a mikvah”—a ritual bath— “and the mikvah needs a plumber, and the plumber has five kids, so they need a school.”

The Sharon government has been playing a double game, Etkes said: the “illegal” settlement outposts, which Sharon has told President Bush he will dismantle, are actually built with the help of the government, and guarded by its Army. In the past year, according to Etkes, dozens more outposts have gone up than come down.

“These settlements are the harshest challenge to Israeli democracy,” Etkes said. “Not just in the cultural sense but in the disrespect for the law.” The illegal settlements make his point. “Imagine if I put a shipping container in the middle of Rabin Square, in Tel Aviv, and said, ‘This is where I now live.’ Impossible. But if I did it on the West Bank, on an Arab’s farmland, it would be fine.” We drove on to Beit El, and then northeast. Ofra came into view. It was more orderly than other outposts: neat rows of red-roofed chalets strung along a ridge. “It’s odd,” Etkes said. “A group of Jews volunteering to live inside an electrified fence in houses built in a Teutonic style.”

Etkes told me of an incident that happened fifteen years ago, during the first Palestinian intifada, when he was a twenty-year-old paratrooper. As he was walking to the dining hall of an Army base in the West Bank, he came across a group of Palestinian prisoners, sitting in the open sun. They were blindfolded, their hands were tied, and they were shoeless. Etkes, who had just returned from an operation in Jenin, saw a small group of “jobnikim,” the Army slang for rear-unit soldiers, on their knees in front of the prisoners. They were burning the soles of the prisoners’ feet with lighters.

“I ran up to them—I couldn’t believe it—I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Etkes recalled. “They didn’t try to hide it. It was the middle of the day. They were torturing them for fun. I kicked their hands away. It was an instinctive reaction. They stopped.”

Later that day, three of the soldiers approached Etkes. “They got me in a corner. They said, ‘You shouldn’t ever do that. Forget that you shouted at us—but in front of an Arab?’ ”

The soldiers were Sephardim, the descendants of Jews from Arab countries. Etkes has a fair complexion; his grandfather was a Jew from Germany. “I triggered some kind of reaction in them—‘Never do that in front of an Arab.’ They hated me because I was an Ashkenazi. They were going to show how tough they could be on Arabs, to make sure the Ashkenazi élite doesn’t think that they are Arabs themselves. This is the tragedy of the occupation.”

Etkes grew up in a religiously observant home in Jerusalem. He was a member of the religious youth movement, and he dreamed, like many Jewish boys, of fighting and dying—the dying, he said, was the meaningful part—for his people. But his time in the Army upset his assumptions.

“Zionism is my life,” he told me. “I’m alive because of Zionism. If my grandfather hadn’t come here from Germany in 1936—” He paused. “It’s not Zionism that I’m talking about. It’s the racist, colonialist elements in Zionism.” Etkes’s revulsion at the chauvinism of the settlers helped drive him from religion; today, he wears no kipa, and says that he does not believe in God.

Etkes, like many leftists in Israel, was ambivalent about Sharon’s Gaza plan. He sees it as a partial step, designed to avoid, rather than confront, the hardest issues facing Israel. On the other hand, he said, any pullout is a positive step. “The historical dynamic is against Sharon. This is why the settlers are panicking a little. Sharon has accepted a rationale for removing settlements. He won’t remove other settlements in the West Bank, but the settlers think that one of his successors might.”

Etkes advocates the removal of settlements from the whole of Gaza and the West Bank, including settlements that straddle the Green Line. This position has never been popular in Israel, even during the Oslo peace process. It is less popular now. Only a minority of Israelis believe that the creation of a Palestinian state from the West Bank and Gaza would bring about an end to the conflict.

I had thought that Etkes was one of the believers, but he asked, “Will a one-hundred-per-cent pullout lead to a peaceful Israel and a peaceful Palestine? Now, I’d have to say no. It wouldn’t be the end of the conflict. It might begin a long-term historical process of reconciliation, but this doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a war. There’s no way I could say that.”