c. 1999 Religion News Service

TEL SHILO, West Bank _ Picking her way among the rocks at this archaeological site where Jews believe the ancient Tabernacle once stood, Yehudit Tayar vividly recalls the heady days of the early 1970s when young religious Jews like herself came and camped on these lonely hills to excavate the ruins of the past and build modern-day towns.”People came with permits to excavate. They dug, and then they stayed to settle,”she says, a smile playing across her face at the memory of the covert tactics used by the young settler movement”Gush Emunim,”or”Bloc of the Faithful”to claim territory.

Then in her twenties, a child of Holocaust survivors and of religious Jews who had lived a precarious existence in the Arab Galilee before the state of Israel was born, Tayar entered the settlement movement with a passion.

Jewish settlements in ancient West Bank sites like Shilo, the heart of the ancient Jewish homeland were meant to strengthen modern Israel, allow it to expand to its original biblical dimensions, and, ultimately, help usher in a messianic era of Jewish redemption.

But today, 25 years later, while Jewish settlements are still being built on more and more hilltops, the vision that guided the religious settlement enterprise is slowly fading among the rank and file, fading against the harsh reality of an impending peace.

Israel’s new center-left government aims to sign a political deal with the Palestinians within a year that would carve out final boundaries in these rocky hills. Within the coming few months, some 40 percent of the West Bank will likely fall under Palestinian control if the interim arrangements of the recent Israeli-Palestinian accord are fully implemented.

If that happens, a Jewish religious movement that shaped itself for nearly 30 years around the mission of staking out disputed West Bank lands for Jewish settlement will have lost its main ideological motor. Settlements that were established as linchpins in a map of”Greater Israel”may instead become vulnerable enclaves in a Palestinian state.

For Tayar, recent events merely reflect the battle fatigue evident among mainstream Israelis who have lived through three major Arab-Israeli wars and countless smaller skirmishes.”Spiritually,”she remarked bitterly,”half of the population is punch drunk from the fight. They’re willing to make concessions with the hopes that the Arabs will just leave them in peace. It’s always been left to a very determined group of people to carry on the torch of our heritage.” Yet some key religious thinkers and philosophers within the settler movement are beginning to call for a deeper rethinking of the message guiding them since the founders of”Gush Emunim”forged the settlement movement in the aftermath of Israel’s heady conquest of the West Bank in 1967.”It’s like a ship that has sort of been sailing along with this trade wind for 30 years has been left in a terrible calm,”said Rabbi Dov Berkovits, a Jewish philosopher and educator who lives in Shilo.”We know we should be here, and why. But we can’t really say where we are going now spiritually,”said Berkovits, interviewed in the tiny living room of his house overlooking the mountains.”Many of the people who are more open to what is happening in mainstream Israeli society have gnawing questions about the classic ideology of the Gush Emunim. Is this process of redemption that we all believed we were a part of going to happen in our lifetimes, and if not, how long will it take?” (OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS)

It was in 1993, when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo peace accord with the Palestinians, that some maverick figures among the settler community first began asking such questions.

But their voices were quickly forgotten as leading religious figures in the settlements adopted a policy of confrontation with the government, a policy that ended in Rabin’s assassination by a young Jewish extremist.

Today, with memories of Rabin’s assassination still fresh, settlement rabbis and political leaders who called for mass resistance in 1993 are behaving with far greater caution. Many key figures see cooperation with the government rather than fiery confrontation as the movement’s only genuine option.

(OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS)

Yet if the settlement movement is co-pted by the establishment, it may also lose its appeal among young Israelis, leaders worry.”What will draw the youth of today to religious idealism and commitment?”asked Rabbi Jonathan Blass, chief rabbi of a small settlement in the northern West Bank known as Neve Tzuf.”The acceptance by the settlement movement of the new restraints dictated by the new consensus _ no new settlements, all settlement activity coordinated in advance with the (Prime Minister Ehud) Barak government _ dulls the inspirational, anti-establishment luster of the movement and for the moment, muffles the call to youth to join and feel the thrill of altering history’s course.” In fact, some tentative answers may be emerging from the settler youth themselves.

More young yeshiva students appear to be delving into the spiritual and mystical dimensions of classical Judaism, said Berkovits.

Others are looking for a deeper connection with the land and the agricultural cycles that play an integral role in Jewish tradition and ritual.

Last month, for example, as Jews celebrated the fall harvest festival of Sukkot, a group of local youths harvested the first grapes from a vineyard painstakingly cultivated by the settlement for the past three years.”Our parents came mainly to create settlements. Today there is a greater interest in the deepening the connection to the land, not only on the material plane but also the spiritual,”said Yoel Spatz, 21, a yeshiva student who had toiled along with some two dozen other students in the vineyard.

Music and prayerful passions also have begun to play a bigger role in the religious rituals of a settler society where spiritual emotions and feelings were often repressed, Berkovits said.

For many of these religious youths the new religious frontier may no longer even be a West Bank hilltop but a deprived neighborhood in ultra-secular Tel Aviv or the Red Sea resort town of Eilat.

After years of isolation, some of the young are actively seeking a dialogue with the secular Israeli mainstream and new yeshivas are opening to accommodate that aim.”The hottest thing now is for settler kids to do is to go to a yeshiva in a place like Tel Aviv or Eilat,”said Berkovits.”They volunteer in the community, and hold Sabbath services and celebrations with secular Israelis. On Friday evenings, as the Sabbath begins, they go out dancing in the streets.” While today’s religious settler youth still are probably every bit as politicallyright-wing as their parents, the new concern with dialogue may ultimately impact their positions on the Palestinians as well.”I think youth still pretty much agree that the Palestinian state is dangerous for Israel and our role is to make sure it doesn’t happen, or it happens in as restrictive way as possible,”Berkovits said.”But at the same time, they’ve also internalized certain values of Israeli secularism that have to do with equality, openness, communication and dialogue. They are more aware of the Arabs as human beings than their parents were. How this is going to work out in terms of their commitment to right-wing political views will be interesting.” DEA END FLETCHER