TRUE BELIEVERS : At the Forefront of the Fight Over Isarel’s Occupied Territories Is A Die-Hard Group of Jewish Settlers--From America.

AT ANOTHER TIME IN ANOTHER PLACE, BATYA KFIR MIGHT BE TAKEN FOR AN AMERIcan pioneer woman fearlessly taking civilization into a strange land and holding off the local natives. The bonnet-like covering on her head and the long dress somehow complete the image--she could be auditioning for a role in “Wagon Train.” At night, she sits outdoors with a couple of friends, surrounded by her brood of children, and wonders aloud about their future on the frontier. Her husband rests nearby after having spent the day working on the cooperative farm where they both live, and in the distance cows feed on brown grass under a wide, starry sky. All that’s missing is someone to sing a chorus of “Home on the Range.”

But this is not the Wild West of the 19th Century. This isn’t even the United States. Kfir is a 20th-Century woman, an American by birth who has emigrated to Israel and settled on land that Israel won during the 1967 Six-Day War, land that ever since has been the focus of violence in the Middle East. Her dress signifies that she is an observant Orthodox Jew, and the natives she worries about are the Syrians, who claim the Golan Heights where she lives, and the Palestinians, who desire the West Bank and Gaza Strip as their homeland. It is an M-16 rifle, not a Colt .45, that is stashed at her home.

Kfir is living out Israel’s Manifest Destiny, the notion that the disputed land, about 4,400 square miles all told, belongs to Israel. The Manifest Destiny term is not incidental, and one hears it--in English--throughout the disputed territories in large part because of an odd phenomenon: the prominence of Americans in the Israeli-settler movement.

Americans make up about 10% of the settlement population, although they compose no more than 1% of the Israeli population at large. In some settlements, Americans constitute the majority, creating Main Street, U.S.A., enclaves within the territories. The American settlers, often activists wielding unusual influence by virtue of their original citizenship, greet touring U.S. congressmen on fact-finding missions with ringing defenses of Israel’s continued possession of the land. It is the Americans who have created a “foreign relations” division of a settler group to promote their message abroad in newspapers and on television.

These Americans--like Kfir, who is a New York City native--are circling their wagons against plans by President Bush to resolve one of the world’s most intractable problems, the Arab-Israeli dispute. As a means of resolving the conflict, Bush wants Israel to give up control of at least some of the occupied territory, be it the Golan Heights, which was annexed in 1981, or the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel has occupied militarily but has not formally made part of the state of Israel.

In the discussions leading to his proposed Middle East peace conference, Bush has gone so far as to threaten to stem the enormous flow of American aid to Israel if the government of feisty Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir does not stop settling the land, at least in the West Bank and Gaza. Hanging in the balance are American loan guarantees that would make it easy and cheap for Israel to borrow $10 billion it says it needs to integrate up to a million Soviet immigrants in the next five years.

So far, Shamir has responded with variations on a single theme: This land is Israel’s. And his housing minister, Ariel Sharon, is frenetically building new houses for even more settlers, hoping in two years to double the Jewish population from the just over 120,000 who now reside in the Golan, West Bank and Gaza. Those settlers will live, sometimes side by side, with 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and another 13,000 Druze, members of a Muslim sect, on the Golan. The idea is simple. The more Israelis who live on the land, the less likely that any Israeli government, for fear of backlash, would dare try to cede any of it.

Though surveys say that about half the population of Israel proper is willing to give up at least some land--and, implicitly, some of the settlements--in return for peace, Shamir has found in the U.S. emigres an often-militant group that is drawn to the territories by a peculiarly American variety of traits. The Americans, many of whom still carry U.S. passports even though they have taken out Israeli citizenship, are individualistic and demand the freedom to settle where they please. Self-absorbed in the extreme, the Americans commonly view the Palestinians as bit players in their own private drama of destiny. Some are simply exercising abroad their option on the classic American Dream: Housing prices are low in the occupied territories, and real estate ads for the embattled West Bank trumpet a “great quality of life.”

There is an edge of gun-toting violence to some emigres. Followers of the late American firebrand Meir Kahane, who was gunned down in New York last year, are trying to make their marks as settlers on a lonesome West Bank hilltop with a kind of brash militancy.

Mostly, the emigres seem to share that timeless trait common to Americans who take their ideas abroad: a sense of their absolute rightness. Kfir laments many Israelis’ lack of concern about the settlements (“It’s hard to get someone from Tel Aviv even to think about the territories,” she says), because the land is central to her unabashed vision of the future. With biblical- and Zionist-based arguments bolstered by a triumphant interpretation of American history, she sees things clearly indeed: “Would Arabs give back land if they had won any in war?” she asks defiantly. “I don’t see anyone suggesting that the United States give Texas back to the Mexicans, not to mention the West to the Indians. These borders are not any more unnatural than any other border in the Middle East.”

THE GOLAN HEIGHTS, THE WEST BANK, THE GAZA Strip and the whole of the Sinai Peninsula came into Israeli hands during the 1967 Middle East War, the heroic six-day struggle in which Israel beat away border invasions by Arab armies.

In the afterglow, a sticky question arose: What to do with the conquered territory--the Golan Heights won from Syria, Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan. As the war ended, the Israeli government proposed withdrawing from the Golan and Sinai in return for demilitarization and diplomatic recognition from Syria and Egypt, respectively. The question of the West Bank and Gaza was left to be settled later. Arab states responded with a trio of negatives: No to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, no to discussions about Palestinian territory.

So plans were laid for settlements designed to provide defensible borders. For the West Bank, a scheme was drawn up by Yigal Allon, a deputy prime minister. He proposed that Israelis settle key areas along the new border with Jordan, as well as along mountain ridges that hugged the old 1967 frontier. For Gaza, he intended settlements for the southern half, near Egypt. Eventually, one would be built across the border, in the Sinai itself, south of the Gaza Strip at Yamit.

In effect, Israel took control of strategic passes and hilltops. Other land, where hundreds of thousands of Arabs were concentrated, could be given back--and secretly. Allon presented such a proposal to Jordan’s King Hussein as terms for peace. Hussein rejected it.

In a move that was perhaps not viewed as significant at the time, Allon included in his plan space for settlements not precisely designated for defense. Their construction was based on historic claims, some from biblical times. So although the Allon plan was limited, it actually set the philosophical basis both for defensive settlements and ideologically based settlements that grounded their claims in historic rights. “From then on, there was really no debate over whether to settle all the land, only how ,” says Meron Benvenisti, an expert on affairs in the territories.

In the end, the Allon plan never contemplated returning the Golan Heights. The 250-square-mile plateau was seen as necessary for defense against an enemy that everyone believed would be eternally hostile. “No one could imagine that Syria, which was so extreme, would one day sit at a negotiating table,” recalls Shlomo Khayat, an architect and an expert on Israeli settlement.

During the first decade of Israeli occupation of the territories, successive Labor Party governments resisted expansion based on ideology but lacked the resolve to outlaw it fully--the Defense Ministry would tolerate unauthorized colonies on land it controlled, notably in Hebron, a Palestinian town on the West Bank. Still, the Israeli population of the West Bank and Gaza grew slowly. Only 3,176 had settled in the West Bank by 1976, and a tiny handful in Gaza. But that was to change.

In 1977, the first right-wing Likud government came to power, and its leaders were overwhelmingly in favor of settlement. Under Likud, all the occupied lands, including zones heavily populated by Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza, were opened up for settlement. Colonies began springing up between and around Arab towns and villages. Communal and private lands were expropriated by the government. The Jewish and Arab populations rarely mixed. The apparent docility of the Palestinians--protests were relatively few and manageable--made it seem as though nothing would stop the settlers.

Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister, annexed the Golan Heights, making it, in effect, no less Israeli than Tel Aviv. Asked why he didn’t do the same with the West Bank and Gaza, he responded that it was not necessary to annex your homeland. (And by not annexing the West Bank and Gaza, Israel could avoid contending with hundreds of thousands of new, hostile citizens potentially armed with a vote, a number that could have become an influential force in Israeli politics.)

During the first year of the Likud government, the Israeli population in the West Bank, the main target for settlement plans, grew by almost 60%. Then, in the late 1970s, a court decision momentarily set back the Likud drive. The Israeli Supreme Court rejected the establishment of a new settlement on land that was clearly not taken for defense. Likud had been grabbing direct control of land to convert into settlements. In theory, the court decision would have brought unbridled confiscation and settlement to an end. In response, the government simply came up with a new means of seizing land, using old Turkish laws to justify the taking of uncultivated tracts. Under the State Lands program, the amount of terrain directly owned by the state quickly grew from about 10% of the West Bank and Gaza to 50%.

The ideological framework for building new communities also changed. In the Labor scheme, settlements were to be self-contained, socialist economic enclaves. Arab villagers and Israeli kibbutzniks would live side by side on the ancient terrain.

But rightist and religious politicians insisted on the absolute right of Jews to inhabit every inch of the territories--the land was holy, part of the Promised Land. They laid claim to every spot a biblical event took place. How could they give the land back? How can you give away a symbol? Settlements began to creep into view of even the most out-of-the-way Palestinian villages. By 1987, the Israeli population in the West Bank had increased to 67,000. The Gaza population, stunted by its remoteness, reached only 3,000.

Likud, free-market-oriented and nationalistic, rejected the socialist notions of Labor and its communal style of settlement. To Likud rationale, any individual who wanted to settle on the land could be considered a pioneer. Forget about drip irrigation, milking cows and community sing-alongs; a night in front of the TV eating popcorn put a suburban commuter in the same league with rugged pioneers who settled the land before independence.

To its detractors, Likud’s rationale was a debasement--a sort of fast-food Zionist mythology. But it has brought settlers to the land: The current Israeli population of the West Bank exceeds 100,000; in Gaza, it has yet to reach 5,000; about 13,000 Israelis live in the Golan Heights. In all, there are 140 settlements dotting the territories.

“With more settlers, you create an interest that is more powerful than ideology,” advises Benvenisti. “When someone moves into a house on the West Bank, he becomes militant overnight.”

THE 1967 SIX-DAY WAR THAT CREATED THE PHYSICAL conditions for Israel to expand also sparked a kind of Zionist euphoria that reached even to the shores of the United States. Batya Kfir, who went by her original name of Barbara Goldberg and was living in New York City at the time, recalls the thrill of hearing how Israel beat back the Arabs, the accounts coming over the radio like so many exciting segments of an adventure serial. She wanted, somehow, to be involved.

During a vacation two years later, Kfir, an Orthodox Jew, volunteered to spend time at a settlement in Hebron, where she met her husband, Israel Kfir. They married in 1969 and began their lives near Ashquelon in Israel proper. After Israel’s brother, who was farming at a settlement in the Golan, ran over a land mine with a tractor and was killed, the Kfirs decided to move to the Heights. They lived in revamped army barracks for four years, then moved into government-built housing, where they have spent the past 13 years.

Like many settlers, Kfir believes the solution to resolving the Israeli-Arab dispute rests with educating the Arabs. “They have to learn that we are here to stay, and to live with us,” she says.

Curiously, Americans and non-Americans in Israel say that Kfir’s journey is typical of the way streams of Americans have found their way to the occupied territories--even after the 1960s. Americans willing to abandon the relative comfort of the United States for Israel are often motivated by complex, even messianic, drives that carry them to the disputed lands. “The kind who come from America are likely to be the ideologically or religiously motivated,” Benvenisti says. “It’s a big leap from America to Israel. After that, to go, say, to the West Bank is a relatively small step.”

Jerry Katz, the first American to move to the West Bank, was also stimulated by the 1967 war, but in a way different from Kfir. His father had been killed in 1948 during Israel’s independence war. He’d been defending the Jewish settlement of Kfar Etzion, which had been established south of Jerusalem before Israel became a state, when it was overrun by Jordanian soldiers.

Katz had spent his teen years in the United States; economic problems had driven his mother and stepfather to New Jersey. His migration to Israel was a matter of identity. In the United States, he says, “I never belonged. I belong here.” He moved to Israel before the ’67 war, helped re-establish Kfar Etzion right after, but like many of the expatriates, retains his U.S. passport.

Kfar Etzion, like Keshet where Batya Kfir lives, is trying to make it as an economic community. While the residents of Keshet raise cattle, Kfar Etzion’s commodities are turkeys and flowers. But while Keshet was initially established to fill an unpopulated gap in a defensive line running down the Golan Heights, Kfar Etzion was created to restore a historical Israeli claim to a piece of the West Bank.

Katz, who makes a living as a landscaper, believes that the Arabs don’t belong on the land and are untrustworthy. “Most Arabs really only want to come to Israel to work, make some money and go back and raise their family,” Katz said while attending to his gardening chores at Kfar Etzion. “If I go talk to an Arab, I carry a gun. That doesn’t mean we can’t sit down and he listens to me and I listen to him,” he continued, echoing another common settler sentiment. “But I carry a gun.”

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR A BALLGAME AT BAKER Field--that’s what one of the settlers named the playground, in sly homage to Secretary of State James A. Baker III. A stiff breeze blew out to right field and would later carry lazy fly balls over the high fence and onto the yards of the red-roofed houses under construction. Men and boys patted their gloves, limbered up their swings with aluminum bats and got ready for their weekly Friday pickup-softball game. It could have been a scene in any American suburb on a weekend afternoon, and in some ways, despite its location on the Israeli-held West Bank, this is an American suburb.

The place is the community of Efrat, founded in 1983 and home to 300 families, most of them of American origin. Hebrew and English mix easily here, especially among the children. The only elements that distinguish this scene from one in, say, inland San Diego, are the sight of a Palestinian passing slowly on muleback--and the pistol tucked into the belt of a father teaching his son how to field a softball.

Efrat is the kind of settlement that could make or break Sharon’s plan to keep the occupied territories. It is a bedroom community meant to be a satellite of Jerusalem and appeals to upwardly mobile as well as ideologically committed settlers. In Efrat, it is politically correct to want the whole land for Israel--and to own a villa, too. Originally meant to be a mixed secular-observant community, Efrat is populated mainly with self-described modern Orthodox Jews, who wear knit skull caps and believe that Israel should dominate the West Bank.

In an effort to attract commuters, Efrat boasts good schools, clean streets, landscaped roads--in short, the promised great quality of life. Sharon is rapidly expanding such communities, not only near Jerusalem but also in West Bank areas near Tel Aviv, where spanking-new highways can carry workers to the populated and industrialized coast. It is part of a plan to create urban centers that are, by virtue of economic and transportation ties, integrally tied to Israel.

Recently, Efraim Zuroff explained his own move from Jerusalem, where he first settled 21 years ago, to Efrat, where he has lived since 1983. Zuroff directs the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Nazi-hunting and Jewish-education organization. He is in Efrat, he explains, because he wants to contribute actively to the future of Israel.

“Jews in the United States missed the act,” he says. “The creation of Israel, the wars--they saw it all from afar. So what do they do? They give money, and it’s still like watching the game from the bleachers. Coming to Israel is like making the team. Moving to the West Bank is actually playing .”

Living in a suburban settlement lets Zuroff take part in the saga and still have time for everyday routines. “If you live in Jerusalem, you have to work hard for a living, and when you get home, do you really have the energy to integrate activism into your daily life? Here, just by choosing to come, you make a statement,” he says.

And the Palestinians? “We don’t have any trouble with our near neighbors,” Zuroff says, motioning to a village over the hill. “Probably it’s because to get to their village they have to come through Efrat. We don’t have to go through their place to get to ours.”

The government is easing the burden of instant activism by offering financial incentives to Israelis and immigrants willing to move to the territories. Space is readily available. Housing is cheaper in a community like Efrat than in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv because, since November, the government has been giving away plots of land expropriated from Arabs.

That gives the new suburbs a bottom-line appeal. “I can get twice the house for half the money in Efrat,” explains David Kahn, a real estate agent in Jerusalem who has just bought a house in Efrat that will be ready in 18 months. Kahn, a lawyer from New York City, dropped his practice three years ago and migrated to Israel. Life in the ‘80s on the Manhattan’s West Side left him empty, and, after several visits to Israel on what he described as “guilt trips,” he decided to settle there permanently. “It’s of fundamental importance to live here to fulfill my religious self,” he said over coffee at a Jerusalem open-air cafe. “Jews did without a homeland for 2,000 years, and now we have the opportunity to create one.”

Kahn moved to Jerusalem. Then, one day, while he was working his trade, it occurred to him what a bargain life in the West Bank could be. “There is going to be a new road that bypasses Arab areas, and we’ll be only 12 minutes from Jerusalem. The educational system is good. You get a garden and a view,” he explains.

“I’m an ideological pragmatist. I still don’t trust the Arabs--who I don’t think accept the idea of Israel--so we have to do everything militarily to prevent the worst. But they can stay where they are, and maybe, after years and years, they can join a confederation with Jordan.

“This is our land. The Torah is the legal authority. We are ethically obligated to treat our neighbors well. At best we can coexist. But, you know, he who collects the marbles wins. We won this land at war.”

A FEW MILES FROM EFRAT ON A HIGH PROMONTORY in the south of the West Bank, there are no freshly built playing fields or modern homes. The 30 families who have settled Medzad, a converted military compound, live in the town’s few simple houses and in trailers that rattle slightly in the wind. It is the flip side of Efrat: no connection to any urban center and not much likelihood of development. Medzad would perhaps be uninviting except for someone seeking spiritual isolation and cheap rents--and those are Yehudit Herman’s reasons for coming.

Herman holds down the long skirt of her dress against the onslaught of the constant breeze as she opens the door to her small rectangular house. “I don’t shake hands with men,” she says in a paradoxically oddly amiable way, explaining that she’s observing a religious custom. She and her neighbors are hozrim betshuva , so-called repentant Jews who have returned to strict Judaism after having led secular lives. All but a handful of those in Medzad are American, and one, Don Schannon, has hung an American flag--a gift from a senator back home--over a mobile-home window.

“We’re religious,” says Herman, a mother of seven children. “We believe in the whole Land of Israel. I came to Israel because I wanted to further express my Judaism, and here is as good a place as any.”

Medzad also was the only home that the members of Herman’s modest religious community could afford. It was a solution to the group’s struggle to support itself when, seven years ago, working with government advisers, the Shamir government turned over the army outpost to them. Prayer and study are the main vocations of the settlers. Families receive small stipends from their yeshiva, from the government and from their relatives in the United States. Some work at part-time jobs; a few of the women work in day-care centers and as nurses. Generally, money is tight. “We definitely live a meager life,” Herman says.

The relative remoteness of Medzad creates particular problems and anxiety for a group that is here for reasons of need more than militancy. Children travel 45 minutes by bus along winding roads to school in Jerusalem. They’re accompanied by a jeep for protection; the bus has been hit a few times by stone-throwing Palestinians.

A certain atmosphere of fear also pervades the settlement itself. Men patrol the fenced perimeter at night to guard against Arab raids. “We’ve had some incidents,” Herman recalls. “Three Arabs opened fire on a truck delivering a refrigerator here and wounded a passenger--an Arab workman.”

She views the struggle over the land with a curious mixture of passivity and determination. “We don’t believe in provoking the Arabs, like some settlers,” she says. “We’re more interested in learning Torah. What comes comes. But our future is here.”

IT IS NEITHER PRAGMATISM NOR NECESSITY THAT has filled communities such as Kiryat Arba with American Jews. Rather, it is a need to prove a point--that Jews have the right to claim whatever land they choose in the occupied territories--visibly, without apology and at the point of a gun.

About 5,000 Israelis, a hundred of them from America, reside in this community, which abuts Hebron, one of the biggest Palestinian cities on the West Bank. And the close contact between the two communities--they are separated only by a fence--has bred mainly contempt. Numerous violent incidents have broken out between residents of the settlement and the town.

David Ramati, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who works in the gun factory at the community’s small industrial park, came to the West Bank with a distinctly belligerent bent. As a show of force, he used to lead armed patrols through Hebron, forays that he described as “forced marches.” He’s since given up the marches as too incendiary but has not abandoned the principle that informed it: This land is Israel’s.

Ramati’s motives for settling in Israel and then the West Bank are as much a rejection of America as an embrace of Israel. “I was looking for a pioneer experience, for idealists,” he recalls over coffee on the balcony of his small apartment. And in Israel, where he moved in 1975, he found them--a country that he believes respects soldiering and one that has not become obsessed with materialism, as he says the United States has. He converted to Judaism and moved first to the Golan Heights--then to Kiryat Arba.

Although he insists that violence can do nothing to stop a peace agreement if it comes, he is set against it. “The Americans wanted to spread from sea to sea. Why is it wrong for Israel to keep its destiny?” he asks. “I’m here to apply my 190 pounds of flesh to keeping the land for the Israeli people.”

Such defiance is not limited to Kiryat Arba. It crops up particularly at some of the smaller and out-of-the-way settlements, the ones without any future or purpose other than to simply be there.

One such place is Tapuah, which until last year was a struggling community of Israelis of Yemenite origins. The Yemenites abandoned their rundown village, leaving behind some concrete houses barely bigger than shacks and sidewalks overgrown with weeds.

Enter Kach, the movement founded by the late Meir Kahane, who migrated to Israel, entered politics there and won a seat in parliament. But the movement--the name means Thus in Hebrew--was designated racist in 1988 by Israel’s Supreme Court and barred from the elections. Still, with apparent government approval, members of a Kach yeshiva moved to Tapuah last year. It’s a place where one can hear non-Jews routinely referred to by the dismissive term goyim , where the outside world is viewed as a bleak panorama of hatred for Jews, where a Torah in one hand is inevitably supplemented by a pistol in the other.

The settlement boasts a candy factory, but the vocation of the Kachniks appears to be mainly agitation. When Lenny Goldberg, a Kach activist and resident of Tapuah, is late for an interview, he explains that he’s been detained at a Kach demonstration in the Arab town of Umm el-Fahem.

“Umm el-Fahem is a nest of anti-Semites,” says Goldberg, a New Yorker who came to Israel seven years ago after hearing a fiery Kahane speech and concluding that the United States was dangerous for Jews.

“It’s like Germany in 1925,” he explains. “Bad things will happen to the Jews. I came here instead of Tel Aviv. Why go to Tel Aviv when I could have had Manhattan? Jews who come here know what they are in for. They’re idealistic.

“Baker? He is a worse enemy than Saddam Hussein. He wants to force us to give back the land. Israeli leaders are afraid of the gentiles; that’s why they’re going to this (peace) conference.”

He motioned to the monotonous rows of square little flat-roofed houses. “This is our place. Police would have to think twice about coming in here.”

IN HIS NEW BOOK ON THE ACCESSION OF THE radical right in Israeli politics, Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist at Hebrew University, writes that if a rightist Israeli government such as that of Shamir should decide to give up territory for peace, “the radical right and the settler community would probably put up a massive struggle against the agreement.”

The battle, he says, would include protests, violence and “possibly some Jewish fatalities.” But, he adds, an all-out war against the authorities is unlikely.

That the question even arises points out the tense and sometimes sinister atmosphere of life in the territories. Vigilante patrols authorized by the government roam the countryside. Guns are commonplace among the settlers, and after a long period in which guns were rarely used by Palestinians in their uprisings, armed attacks on Israeli soldiers are increasing.

For some Americans, at least, the idea of fighting President Bush’s peace plan with guns seems foolish. “Who can fight the army?” Ramati asks. “People who think that they can fight the army haven’t ever been in a war.”

Sharon is gambling that the issue of violence won’t arise; the presence of a critical mass of settlers will make it practically impossible to negotiate an agreement separating the occupied lands from the Israelis. For the future, Sharon is hastily compiling information on where to put more settlements in the Golan, West Bank and Gaza Strip. He has told town architects to plan for all the amenities: water, electricity, hospitals, even jails. And he continues to offer financial inducements to settlers--a point of friction with President Bush, who is hard pressed to offer an open pocketbook that helps support a land program he views as inflammatory.

The voices--and increasing numbers--of American settlers are clearly difficult to ignore in this debate. In Tapuah, rows of new foundations for more small homes were being laid out, cinderblock walls rising, part of the 20,000 units built between April, 1990, and August in the occupied territories and the annexed Golan. Thousands more units are on the way.

And Kach members plan to do their part to fill them, residents of Tapuah say. Twenty-six Kahane followers are on their way to fill the new houses on the hardscrabble hillside. They are all coming from the United States.