Next Step : Jewish Settlers Vow to Fight for Land : Israel’s government worries that rightist militias may create an armed underground to thwart any peace settlement with Arabs.

High in the dusty, brown Judean Hills southeast of Jerusalem and deep in the pine forests north of the Israeli capital, a new Jewish army is training against the day that Israel withdraws from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and turns the two regions over to a Palestinian government.

“We won’t go--we will fight,” said Baruch Marzel, the leader of the ultranationalist Kach movement, which is forming the new “defense force.”

“We will fight the Arabs. We pray that we won’t have to fight other Jews. But we will not leave our homes, our communities and this holy land.”

Marzel’s hope, and that of others who have settled on the territory Israel captured from the Arabs 26 years ago in the Six-Day War, is that their very threat to fight if necessary will discourage Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from negotiating an agreement with the Palestinians on self-government for the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“We hope that our resistance against Arab domination under the guise of a peace agreement would not turn into a civil war, but resist we will,” said Marzel, 34, who lives in the largely Palestinian city of Hebron with his wife and six children and who seeks to carry on the militant Zionism of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

“We have the people, and more are joining us. We have the guns, and we are getting more. We are doing the training and improving all the time. We are raising funds and seeking international support. Most of all, we have the determination to resist to the very end, to the very end.”

Up and down the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip and on the Golan Heights, Israeli settlers are saying they are prepared to fight to hold on to territory--their homes, their farms, their communities built with blood and sweat--that they fear Rabin will yield in “land-for-peace” deals with the Arabs.

Although Marzel declined to provide detailed information on the new haganah, or defense force, because of police investigations, Israel Television filmed training sessions for the so-called “Judean Police,” as well as settlers’ patrols through Hebron and the adjacent Israeli community of Kiryat Arba.

“What happened in Yamit (an Israeli settlement on the Sinai Peninsula that was forcibly evacuated on the Sinai’s return to Egypt in 1982) will be child’s play compared to what will happen here,” an army officer, identified only as “M,” said as he trained the Kach recruits on firearms. “What we saw there will not be repeated. The struggle will be many times more bitter here.

“When the government understands this and sees the resistance,” the officer added, “it will simply stop and retreat, and no one will have to leave his land.”

But another reserve army officer training the “Judean Police” added: “I know people for whom there is no way back. If you put them up against the wall, they will use their weapons.”

Although the preparations may be little more than political shadowboxing meant to deter Rabin, members of his governing coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, worry that groups such as the “Judean Police” and the “Committee for Security of the Roads of Judea and Samaria,” both formed by Kach, are the start of an armed underground that could upset any agreements.

“All the necessary conditions for the creation of militias or paramilitary organizations are increasing,” Dedi Zucker, chairman of the Knesset’s constitution and law committee, commented. “We have a minority group with a high level of motivation. They are armed and surrounded by an enemy and live under the shadow of a very difficult political threat.”

But Ehud Sprinzak, a Hebrew University political scientist who tracks the radical right, contended that the settlers’ heightened bravado, particularly the threats of civil war, were signs of weakness rather than strength.

“We have a history of underground movements in this country, and they are not something you do in public,” Sprinzak said. “Beyond this, most of these people do not want to be seen as ‘settlers,’ but as ordinary Israelis. They don’t want to be perceived as extremists, as followers of Meir Kahane, and they don’t see themselves, at least not yet, as backed up against the wall.”

A greater danger, according to Sprinzak, will be “provocative terrorism” by extremists, Jewish and Palestinian, seeking to draw the other side into violence that would make negotiations difficult and undercut any eventual agreement.

“Say that on the eve of a peace agreement, a desperate group of settlers, well-trained reservists in the Israeli army, blew up half a dozen mosques,” Sprinzak said. “The next day, the Palestinians would be rioting in the streets, attacking every settlement in sight and Israeli forces would have to put down the disturbances.

“The scenario could also run the other way--Palestinian rejectionists attacking an Israeli school, for example--and the result would be the same. Extremists on both sides will be using provocative terrorism. For them, it does not matter who escalates, who shoots first.”

Sprinzak said he sees a serious potential for an armed Jewish underground. But he does not believe there are more than embryonic groups at present.

“If they only got 4,000 out to their last public rally in central Jerusalem, it is hard to see how they have even 400 men under arms in the hills,” he said.

Testifying before Zucker’s committee this month, Israeli security officials also minimized the forces and firepower the ultranationalists could command. But the police have since questioned Marzel and others who have called for resistance to any pullout and formally warned them against “insurrection.”

“If decisions are made (on territorial concessions), there will be groups that will not accept them, and there will be an underground or terrorists,” said Avraham Poraz, a member of the Knesset law committee. “The question is, will it be a marginal group of nuts . . . or a civil war? The distance between the two is not that great.”

In recent weeks, police have raided Kach members’ homes and seized weapons. Military counterintelligence is searching for the army reservists who have run Kach’s secret training sessions. And Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, let it be known that it was tapping the telephones of ultranationalists.

“They say we are inciting people to rebel against the government and State of Israel,” Marzel said. “But if Israel withdraws from Judea and Samaria (the biblical names for the regions south and north of Jerusalem on the West Bank), how can we be in rebellion against it?

“We will form a full Judean state . . . and declare its independence should Israel withdraw from Judea and Samaria. But we will proceed only if Israel abandons us.”

Other leaders in Israel’s settler movement urge an immediate political campaign, based on escalating street demonstrations, to deter the Rabin government from reaching agreement on Palestinian autonomy, and then massive civil disobedience in the settlements themselves to prevent fulfillment of such a pact.

“If the Rabin government wants to remove us from our homes, it will have to put us all in jail,” Yechiel Leiter of Yesha, the mainstream Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, said. “Civil disobedience on that scale, and not a Jewish underground, is our ultimate defense; it’s not perfect, but it’s achievable and it’s nonviolent.”

According to Leiter, there are now about 130,000 Israelis living in the West Bank, a similar number living on former Arab land now part of Jerusalem, 13,000 Israelis on the Golan Heights and 5,000 in Gaza--more than 275,000 in all. “It would take the whole police force, half the army and every sports stadium in the country to lock us all up,” Leiter, 33, contended. “And the nation would not stand for it. . . .”

What Leiter would like to see is the formal incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza into Israel--the Golan Heights were effectively annexed in 1981--and then talks on Palestinian autonomy under Israeli sovereignty “with full civil rights except overthrowing the government.”

“We are for peace, not against it,” Leiter added. “But these negotiations will not bring us peace, nor will Palestinian autonomy and independence. . . . We have to bring these realities home to people.”

Kach’s Marzel argues that it is his movement’s militancy that will draw together rightist forces into an alliance against Palestinian autonomy. “What we did yesterday, others will do tomorrow,” Marzel boasted. “We are trying to get a dynamic going, to make the others move; otherwise, their opposition will be nothing more than a polite debate.

“Amazing though it is, we have to get the message across to our own people, to Israelis, that Jews will not go willingly to the gas chambers again. We will not stand and wait to be attacked; if someone aims to kill us, our response is not to stand there and pray but to kill that assailant first.”

Elyakim Haetzni, a founder of the settlement movement argued, however, that the sheer number of Israeli settlers and of the 179 communities they have built on formerly Arab-held lands constitute “a weighty factor that cannot be ignored” in the negotiations.

“We are called ‘obstacles to peace,’ and I sincerely hope that the United States, Yitzhak Rabin and (Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman) Yasser Arafat all stumble on these obstacles,” Haetzni said. “This is the decisive battle for the Land of Israel, and we are placed at the strategically important places. . . .”

If Israel and the Palestinians reach agreement on autonomy and Israel begins to withdraw its forces and dismantle its military government here, Haetzni’s predictions are grim.

“This could become a second Bosnia, another Lebanon,” the 66-year-old lawyer said at his home in Kiryat Arba, where he has lived for 20 years. “We will, in fact, be headed into another war, where our casualties will be in thousands, maybe tens of thousands, and those of the Arabs will be much, much worse.”

Haetzni, Marzel and others see Israel being pushed by the United States into giving up the West Bank and the other occupied territories, and they heap scorn upon U.S. administrations for naivete in their approach to the Middle East.

“If the Americans did not meddle so much, the Arabs would have seen they have to accommodate themselves to us,” Haetzni said. “The Arab psyche is an odd mix of cold realism and never giving up a dream. They would be realistic enough to accept us here where we are while hoping that sometime in the future we would go away. . . .

“This is not peace, but it would bring a peaceful situation, a modus vivendi, that would be stable. We would have no negotiations, no agreements and no murders. With negotiations come compromises, and compromises suggest weakness, and weakness brings death.”

This danger was dramatically underscored for the settlers with the murder of a Kiryat Arba resident, a rabbinical student, in central Hebron on his way to pray Friday afternoon at the Cave of the Patriarchs, the burial place of Abraham.

According to military sources, two members of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, stabbed and axed the young man to death outside Hebron’s casbah, the scene of earlier attacks on Israelis. Settlers responded with rock-throwing attacks on Hebron shop owners and Arab passersby.

“Every settlement will have to fight to hold its ground if there is Palestinian autonomy,” predicted Moshe Naiman, 36, a Kach organizer in Mitzpe Yeriho, a hilltop settlement of nearly 150 families southwest of Jericho in the West Bank. “I am afraid, in fact, that each of us will have to fight for his life--and not just once or twice.”

Naiman said he can see no real accommodation with the Palestinians.

“My father, my grandfather and his father all told me, ‘Moshe, Jews and Arabs cannot live together, it simply cannot be,’ ” Naiman recounted, as his oldest son, 10, listened raptly. ‘The Arab and the Jew are sitting on the same piece of land,’ they told me, ‘and each is saying it is his--it is an endless struggle.’

“It is a test of strength and a test of endurance, in fact. If we were weak, the Arabs would have pushed us into the sea a long time ago. For that reason, we have to stay strong. Also, the world needs to remember--and we even have to remind ourselves sometimes--that we have no other country to go to. In every other place, there have been pogroms; even in America, they kill Jews.”

At Mitzpe Yeriho, Kach supporters are training for the defense force, the haganah, despite police raids on their homes and the temporary seizure of their weapons.

“We have been training hard, and now we are beginning to operate,” Naiman said. “We are starting to patrol, we have run some (practice) ambushes. . . . When we had some break-ins here and a fire, we tracked the Bedouin (local Arab herders) back to their camp and set their tents on fire. It was a retaliatory move--it sent a message.”

Naiman said Kach also has a message for the Israeli government.

“We want to make it clear to Rabin what a mistake he is making,” Naiman said. “If the state of Israel leaves the (occupied) territories, we will not. And we will establish our own state here and defend it against all threats, whether they are Arab or--God forbid--Israeli.”

Emily L. Hauser, a researcher in The Times’ bureau in Jerusalem, contributed to this story.