COLUMN ONE : Settlers’ Life on the Edge Gets Edgier : The Cohens say they struggled to claim a piece of the West Bank desert for themselves and for Israel. Now, they fear that impending Palestinian autonomy threatens their future.

Shkediya Cohen’s life runs on a familiar suburban rhythm. She has a husband who works long hours; four children who bound in and out of the house on missions of their own; a beat-up, bumper-stickered car, and a big black dog who recently ate the family rabbit.

But Cohen’s living-room window opens onto the Judean Desert, to a West Bank moonscape of tawny mountains that she cherishes as part of the biblical Land of Israel and loves as home.

Her mundane tasks are imbued with that meaning. She is where she is, she said, for a sacred reason: “By living here, I have the feeling I’m an active part of the Land of Israel. My father always taught us that the Land of Israel is for the people of Israel together with the Torah of Israel. Those are the three things that have been joined over the ages.

“We live here because Jews should live here,” she said.

Of 125,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many moved onto occupied territory for the cheap apartments and easy loans offered by a government intent on holding the land. But for those like the Cohens--and they appear to be the majority in outlying settlements--the move was an expression of ideology first and only secondarily the search for choice real estate.

Now, they may be facing the ultimate test of their beliefs.

The Cohens have had more than a dozen years to set down roots in Kfar Adumim, a hilltop village of about 150 families between Jerusalem and Jericho. They built their house while living in a trailer for four years, planted their shrubs, added a third story.

When they began, they were seen as part of the solution, performing a national service by securing a strategically key spot.

Now, as settlers, they are more often portrayed in Israel as part of the problem, as obstacles to peace. Israel’s peace agreement and subsequent talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization point toward the creation of a Palestinian state; among Israelis, the settlers have become the loudest, most violent opposition to the Israeli-PLO pact.

“It’s very convenient for the government to have settlements” to bargain with the PLO, Cohen said. “But who pays the price and what for? So that in five years we have to get up and leave? Before, there was a feeling that we were building the Land of Israel.”

Kfar Adumim these days is a bewildering mixture of small-town quiet and brewing disaster, its very foundations suddenly in danger of giving way.

On the surface, still, it seems almost a utopia--inside the walls of its defensive isolation. To get to Cohen’s house, visitors must pass a military roadblock on the highway, one armed watchman at the settlement’s entrance and another near the school. But once there, they can leave their keys in the car, and when they try her front door, it will be unlocked.

The community is so safe and caring that Cohen’s youngest son, 5-year-old Eera, has walked the few blocks to day care by himself for two years. If neighbors see him stalling, they prod him along. Eera is also free to buy goodies in the settlement’s single store, an eclectic jumble of everything from frozen schnitzel to rental videos--but only with a note from his mother.

Cohen, 38, an occupational therapist with an Ivory Soap complexion, tiny nose and girlish grin, enjoys concentric circles of friends in the settlement, from her closest confidantes to acquaintances who will always help out if she is in trouble. When her father died three years ago and friends paid mourning visits, “the group of people was enormous,” she said. He was buried according to his wish, in Kfar Adumim, in a cemetery that now holds five graves.

The settlement, a somewhat unusual mix of observant and non-observant Jews, is known for its atmosphere of tolerance. People are allowed to drive on the Sabbath but not near the synagogue. Cohen covers her head in accordance with Orthodox rules on modesty but maintains the unconventional right to wear pants; no one calls her on the seeming contradiction.

Her children thrive here. Hamutal, her 12-year-old daughter, already jokes about inheriting the house. Evyatar, 14, her oldest son, said that he wants to live “either here or a place like it--a small settlement. It’s very quiet, and the secular and religious people mix well, and everybody knows everybody--that’s nice.”

“I love Kfar Adumim. I love the scenery, I love the place, I love the climate, the cold and the hot of Kfar Adumim,” said Shkediya, whose name means almond tree in Hebrew. “I want to live here for the rest of my life.”

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That may not be possible. She does not know the fate of her settlement, is not even sure whether it will be included in the Jericho-Gaza Strip autonomy agreement that is supposed to begin taking effect Dec. 13.

“There are people who say we’ll be inside (the Jericho autonomy zone) and people who say we’ll be outside. The PLO seems to want up to Mishor Adumim”--a nearby industrial area, she said, “and others say it’s up to the Jericho junction, which is about five yards from here.”

Shkediya has had to think through what it would take to get her to move.

“If our internal security is threatened, I don’t know if I can stay here,” she said. If the government forces her to leave, “I’ll have great pain in my heart. I really feel as if I’ve arrived at my place here.”

It is too early to tell what form the Palestinian autonomy will take and what arrangements will be made for settlers. But, already, the prospect of traveling roads patrolled by Palestinian police is deeply threatening to her. “If one wants to take me to prison for speeding, I’m afraid. I don’t know what I’d do,” she said.

Her anxiety--well short of panic but strong and abiding--afflicts many in Kfar Adumim. The settlement’s council is discussing how to bolster the resident pool fast by absorbing more people as quickly as possible in trailers and rented rooms. It is looking into joining a bloc of settlements near Jerusalem, and working on improving its own defenses--adding better emergency communications and possibly building a fence around the hilltop.

Improved security has taken precedence over new parks and gardens. This is the frightening side of settlement life.

“Eera, who is our prime minister?” Shkediya asked her 5-year-old in a familiar routine.

“Rabin!”

“And what is he doing now?”

“He’s sending the PLO to Kfar Adumim!”

“And then what will we do?”

Eera did not know. He took a shot at saying the family will move in with relatives, ended up fantasizing about the whole village crowding into one car and tootling off together.

During a dinner-table conversation, when Eera asked what the school crosswalk guards were there for, his brother Bnayah, 8, told him that along with helping kids cross the street, they were there “in case Arabs come here.”

The Cohens have virtually no contact with Palestinians. Kfar Adumim does not abut a Palestinian village, and a scattering of Bedouins in the surrounding desert keep mainly to themselves.

But when the Cohens travel, the family submachine gun goes along. When Hamutal and her school peers recently went hiking in Vadi Kelt, a desert valley below Kfar Adumim, nine adults, five of them armed, accompanied a group of 40 kids. There have been Palestinian attacks in the area, both on hikers and on settlers in cars.

With the settlements’ fate unclear, the political situation is so sensitive that the Israeli army spokesman’s office said Shkediya’s husband, a high-ranking officer, could not be given permission to be interviewed, even if only to discuss his home life.

The spokeswoman did not cite any security reasons; instead, she said there could be no publications that intimated that the army was supporting the presence of settlers.

Her husband’s views are no secret in the family, however. He grew deeply religious after fighting in the Yom Kippur War of 1973; his values combine with Shkediya’s to infuse the household with faith that flows seamlessly into the ideology that brought them here. The boys wear the knit yarmulkes of the modern Orthodox movement, and Eera says grace in Hebrew before meals.

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All of the children in the family but Evyatar were born here. The Cohens moved to Kfar Adumim from Jerusalem, a half-hour bus ride away. They emphasize that for them, the point was not the big house but the principle of helping create a Jewish presence on the land. They were part of the enthusiastic “core” of people who built this settlement, and they look back on their early days in a cluster of trailers on a windy winter hillside with pride and a hint of nostalgia.

As they see it, Judaism’s holidays and teachings work to connect the individual with his family, his community and the Jewish people as a whole. Their observance helps meld them as a family, in the quiet Sabbaths they spend together and the discipline it encourages, and it helps them mix with other families in synagogue and school.

It gives them a sense of belonging, the Cohens say, and where they belong is the Land of Israel. Shkediya’s husband does not even like to be called a settler; he figures that he is living in a place that is already his.

Shkediya sees many of the secular Jews of Tel Aviv and Haifa left the poorer by their rejection of religion. “I belong so much not only to the past but to the future, all in one flow,” she said. “They live only in the present, in the materialism of how to live better.”

Ties to the past mean that, for example, Shkediya may contend in discussion that the Cave of the Patriarchs in occupied Hebron should belong to Jews because Abraham paid for it in biblical times. When she argues that, she said, “People look at me like I’m from the moon. But I’m not willing to give these places up because they really were ours.”

Whether the future will entail giving up all 2,200 square miles of the West Bank remains to be seen. The prospect that Israel will give up sovereignty over the settlements is not out of the question, however. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been quoted as asking of Ariel and Emanuel, two large settlements, “Who needs (them)?” Rumors are already rife in Israel about how much the government will offer Gaza Strip settlers to move.

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But even a glance around Kfar Adumim underlines what a monumental task it would be to compensate dwellers of a community like this for what they would lose.

Fourteen years ago, it was an empty hilltop, nothing but rocks. Now, the streets and sidewalks are paved and a giant playground complex stands on one slope. Many of the houses are three-story villas that families built as their lifetime homes. Other families have been waiting years in Kfar Adumim’s trailer section as their houses slowly go up.

In the oldest section, homes already are draped in flowering vines, their yards graced by silvery olive trees and others bearing pomegranates and grapefruit. The school is built to hold more than 100 children; there is a library, a clinic, a large synagogue and an evening club.

It all looks solid and normal, as does life in the Cohens’ home. Evyatar--all the names come from the Bible--keeps doves for his magic tricks; Hamutal is post-Barbie but pre-boy and about to have her bat mitzvah; Bnayah wanders the house glued to a Tetris computer game, and Eera talks like Tattoo from “Fantasy Island” and rules the road on his pint-sized two-wheeler.

“The daily life is normal--you go to work and school and worry about money and watch TV,” Shkediya said.

And yet, it is all amazingly fragile. Shkediya said settlers recount the rumor that Palestinian workers put marks on the Jewish houses they build, claiming them for the moment when the land reverts to them. She recalled that she turned down one Palestinian contractor because, “In his eyes, I saw something that said, ‘This house will be mine.’ ”