Quotes of the Day

A math question: if it took 3,000 Israeli troops and police to evict two families of Jewish settlers from the West Bank city of Hebron, how many would it take to clear out the 275,000 Jewish settlers living inside the Palestinian territories?

Two possible answers: a) it would require nearly every single policeman and soldier on duty in Israel today; b) zero, because it simply won't happen. Despite pressure by the Bush Administration and the rest of the international community for Israel to withdraw many of its Jewish citizens from 220 hilltop settlements and outposts in the disputed West Bank, such a move could be so divisive in Israel that no Prime Minister, especially one as embattled as Ehud Olmert, would risk it. Olmert won the March 2006 election in part by vowing to remove large numbers of settlements. But public opinion shifted against him after last summer's bungled war in Lebanon, and now he is too unpopular to try uprooting thousands of angry Jewish settlers, even though Israel's withdrawal is regarded as vital to any lasting accord with the Palestinians.

Will Olmert, or any future Prime Minister, be able to pull it off? A preview of this mammoth challenge was on display in Hebron, where 800 Jewish settlers live surrounded by 180,000 Palestinians in what Ha'aretz newspaper columnist Benny Ziffer has called "a kind of nature park of extremism." The Jewish settlers are protected at great cost to the nation by Israeli security forces. But after months of dithering and judicial pressure, Israel's government decided on Aug. 7 to remove two Jewish families squatting in Palestinian-owned buildings. At 6:20 a.m., riot police bashed in doors as teenage settlers on the roof hurled down stones, oil and eggs at the police, while Wagner played over loudspeakers. (As every Israeli knows, Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer, and the music was a brutish way — for the benefit of TV news crews — for the settlers to draw a parallel between Israel's security forces and the Nazis.)

The eviction itself went relatively smoothly, but the hard feelings it generated resound deep inside Israeli army barracks. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were initially assigned only to secondary tasks, such as manning roadblocks to stop religious Zionist sympathizers from joining their Hebron brethren. Still, when orders were given to the Duchifat Battalion to assist evicting the two settler families, 38 out of 400 soldiers initially refused to obey after many called their rabbis on cell phones. Eventually, all but eight relented. These "refuseniks," as they were dubbed in the Israeli press, were slapped in the army prison for 14 to 28 days and some were banished from their élite combat unit.

The incident has left lingering doubts over whom soldiers will obey: their commanding officers, or hard-line rabbis who believe it's the destiny of Jews to occupy the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, even if they are now in disputed Palestinian territory? One senior IDF commander complains to TIME: "It seems like every soldier is consulting his own rabbi." The more extremist rabbis, he says, "want to change the system," bringing Israel's vibrant secular society more in line with their orthodox views.

Several refusenik soldiers rang Rabbi Re'em Hacohen, a former teacher of theirs at a yeshiva, or religious seminary, in the West Bank. "They were all loyal and responsible citizens, wracked by the decision whether to obey their superiors," says the rabbi, who urged them to act "with a clear conscience." The rabbi, himself a former soldier, lays blame on the army brass, not the refuseniks: "The army should be used to fight our enemies, not against our own society."

Interviews with officers, enlisted men and rabbis show that opposition to evicting Jewish settlers from Palestinian territories is widespread inside the army. One senior officer told TIME: "As a soldier, I'd prefer it if the government doesn't assign me the task of evacuating Jewish settlers, but if that's the mission, I promise we'll carry it out."

What worries politicians is that the religious Zionists, many born and raised in the West Bank settlements, are assuming a greater role as officers and soldiers inside élite combat units. Lieut. Colonel Dotan Razili, a commander at the Officers' Training Academy in the Negev Desert, estimates that 30% of his cadets are religious Zionists, even though they make up only 9% of the Israeli population, according to census figures.

By all accounts, the religious Zionists are brave, well disciplined and tough fighters. As kids, they also grew up seeing the menace of terror first hand; settlers were often targets of Palestinian snipers and bombers. But these settlers' sons bring their ideology with them into the army, and may prove resistant to any future withdrawal of settlers. They believe that Israel should not cede a single stone of Biblical land to the Palestinians.

Without the army, the Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory could not exist. The IDF guards the roads leading to the settlements. The senior army commanders consult on a weekly basis with the settlers' council on possible security risks coming from Palestinian militants. In Hebron, where over 500 troops protect the city's settler families, the boundaries between soldier and settler are even more blurred than elsewhere. Six settler families actually live inside a Hebron army outpost, and their illegal presence is tolerated. Officers routinely arrange for a settler to lecture troops on the significance of Hebron to Jewish history, advocating a large influx of more settlers.

Often, senior officers excuse soldiers if they object to evicting settlers, assigning them instead to, say, sentry duty. One Lieut. Colonel recalls that during the Gaza eviction he had a mid-ranking officer whose family was among those being moved out. "I let him go back and help his family," he says. Many religious Zionist soldiers were never disciplined when they called in sick during the February 2006 operation to remove nine families from a bleak hilltop known as Amona.

The profile of the Israeli army is changing. Increasingly, today's soldier wears a yarmulke, the skullcap of the religious conservative. In the past, a majority of Israel's fighting officers came from agricultural communes, known as kibbutzim, and from villages. Over the past 15 years or so, kibbutz members have traded socialism for the materialistic individualism so prevalent in Israeli society. Nowadays, dynamic Israeli youngsters want to cash in on the country's high-tech boom and not spend their lives in uniform. The pool of potential recruits is also shrinking for other reasons: 11% of the nation's men are ultra-orthodox and excused from military service, 4% of draft-age Israelis have moved abroad, 5% are rejected for physical reasons and an estimated 5% dodge military service, according to Stuart Cohen, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University. In addition, about 18% of Israeli men drop out before finishing their three-year duty.

This manpower shortage led Defense Minister Ehud Barak to complain recently that the IDF was no longer "the army of the people but of half the people." That leaves new Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, along with religious Zionists, to fill the ranks. Meanwhile, to ensure that the IDF remains a melting pot, some generals say that special units, comprised of religious Zionists who spend two-thirds of their time in religious studies, should be more integrated into the regular army.

Support for Olmert's plans to remove settlers has ebbed. So far, his government has failed to find homes and jobs for many of the 8,500 embittered settlers evicted from Gaza in 2005. Nor has the handover of Gaza to Palestinians brought any calm: Palestinian militants continue to shower southern Israel with erratic homemade rockets fired from Gaza. Olmert must first win back popular support for his disengagement plans before he can bring the military on board.

Given the Israelis' displeasure with Olmert's policy of disengagement from the Palestinian territories, it was not surprising that a poll taken by Ha'aretz after the Hebron skirmish found that 32% of Israelis think the refuseniks were justified in disobeying orders. For Olmert the answer is thus not just a simple equation of troops versus settlers. He must also factor in the rising numbers within the army ranks who are in no mood to evict fellow Jews from Arab territories and the sizable portion of the public that supports that sentiment. Any way you look at it, it adds up to a daunting political dilemma.

• TIM MCGIRK/HEBRON
• An eviction of Jewish settlers in Hebron sparks a crisis of conscience among religious Israeli soldiers, intensifying doubts about the future of the West Bank