COLUMN ONE : Americans Answer Israel’s Call : Once the capital of Judaism, Shiloh is now home to settlers from U.S. who say they have chosen a harder but richer life. They are determined to cling to a claim they insist goes back 3,000 years.

On a rocky hilltop in the Holy Land, a slight, bearded American Jew named Joe Bazer has found a place where his family can live a religious life--and make a political statement that reverberates across the Middle East.

“This is one of our most important spots,” said Bazer, wearing a 9-millimeter pistol on his belt and gazing dreamily from his neighborhood of modern, red-roofed homes onto the ruins of ancient Shiloh.

Shiloh was the capital of Judaism for 369 years, until Philistines destroyed it three millennia ago, stole the Ark of the Covenant and drove the Jewish people 25 miles south to Jerusalem.

Now Joe, his wife, Daphne, and their three children are part of a 150-family community of fervent settlers, led by another American. They court the ire of Palestinians and even other Israelis by clinging to what they contend is a 3,000-year-old claim.

Although Americans like the Bazers constitute only about 2% of Israel’s population, they make up 10% to 15% of the 130,000 people who populate the 140 controversial Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many of those Americans live in the most committed and immovable communities of that juggernaut, which has provoked Palestinian anger and severely complicated Mideast peace talks.

Some are part of the militant far right, which experts say includes several hundred extremists such as settler Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born physician who killed more than 40 Palestinians, then was himself killed, in a mosque last month. Goldstein and others like him were inspired by Meir Kahane, the radical rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League in the United States and was assassinated in New York four years ago. An Israeli offshoot of the JDL known as Kach, of which Goldstein was a member, receives 70% of its funding from supporters in the United States.

But many other Americans in the settlements, such as the Bazers, also burn with nationalist and religious fervor. They came to Israel not only to practice their religion among the faithful but also to make a statement by moving onto what they call the “biblical lands of Israel” that lie outside the nation’s internationally recognized borders. Those territories, where 2 million Palestinians live, were captured by Israel in 1967 in the Six-Day War.

Americans in the occupied territory play an important and largely unheralded role in the Jewish settlements, and they are frequently the most outspoken leaders in their settler communities.

Although few of them advocate violence against their Palestinian neighbors, nearly all are prepared to defend their land with deadly force, if necessary. And they are vowing to strongly resist any attempt by the Israeli government to move them as part of current peace talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

These Americans don’t condone the massacre carried out by another American in Hebron. But they don’t condemn it either.

In Shiloh, some Americans say they can understand how a man like Goldstein, who had seen Jews injured and killed by Palestinian terrorists, could have been driven to the act he committed. And a few of them suggested recently that Goldstein’s victims were probably armed with axes that they intended to use on Jewish settlers. (There is no evidence to support that contention, though the Hebron region is a flash point for Palestinian as well as Jewish radicals.)

“I feel bad, sure, to some extent” about what Goldstein did, Bazer said. “But I feel more bad for things that have happened to Jews.”

Daphne Bazer, 33, added as she cradled their 2-month-old daughter: “I’m sorry, but I can’t feel sorry for them (the Palestinians). Let them move to another country. Give them money and tell them to go there.”

Ever since the state of Israel was created in 1948, American Jews have been coming, helping to swell the country’s population to 5.3 million.

During the 1960s, many American immigrants were liberal, anti-war activists who are now an important part of the left in Israel’s broad political spectrum. But in the mid-1970s, Israel attracted many modern Orthodox Jews who were seeking an opportunity to live the “Torah life” that was sometimes difficult in the United States.

Out of that last group emerged the intensely nationalistic people who created Shiloh and other settler communities in the West Bank and Gaza as a way of staking a claim on biblical landmarks and cities outside Israel’s sovereign territory.

Era Rapaport, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., was one of the first settlers in Shiloh. For more than two years, Rapaport and his Israeli-born wife, Orit, lived without telephones, paved streets or electricity.

Today, Shiloh has all that and more in a compound atop one of the Mountains of Ephraim, behind a gate guarded by community volunteers with rifles. There is a yeshiva, where 150 young men from all over the world study; a school; two carpentry shops; a silver shop; a laser printing company; an aluminum factory; medical and dental clinics, and grocery stores.

The Rapaports have seven children. Era is the town’s paid administrator, working from a cluttered office in a trailer home and taking turns doing guard duty and driving the town ambulance.

“I’m here on a mission,” said Rapaport, 48, a tall, gregarious man with a wild, gray-tinged beard. “I feel that I’m part of a chain that goes back 3,300 years. I’m following the biblical commandment to settle the land of Israel.”

And, he added with a rueful laugh, “It’s because of people like me and others in this community, who are unwilling to leave, that the Mideast peace negotiations are going to be kind of impossible.”

Indeed, the settlements are a problem for negotiators. Many analysts believe Israel will eventually be forced to buy peace for its narrow country by turning over its occupied territory, which is dotted with Jewish settlements, to the Palestinians who live there. But if Israel does that, it will need to move the settlers back to Israel or make arrangements for their security.

“If they come to evict us,” Rapaport said, “this government would fall. We wouldn’t lift a hand against them. But most of the settlers are adamantly against being moved. And many Jews would support us.”

There are many attractions in places such as Shiloh for devout Americans. One is safety inside the settlement: Their children can play freely in the streets. Few residents lock their doors. Rapaport said he lost the keys to his house years ago and hasn’t needed them since. Residents know their neighbors, and they have the comfort of knowing also that their neighbors are like-minded, observant Jews.

Batya and Yisrael Medad were among the earliest settlers here. They met 28 years ago in New York at a rally supporting Soviet Jews and moved to Israel in 1970. Yisrael works in Jerusalem for a member of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, and most days he takes a bus or hitches a ride for the 25-mile commute.

“I think only a certain type of person comes here from America,” said Batya, who spends her days teaching Hebrew to youngsters at the Shiloh school or pursuing pro-settlement causes, including a women’s group opposed to the peace negotiations.

That type of person would resemble Batya herself. She believes strongly that Jews should try to shape the world as they would like it, in contrast to other Jewish immigrants who are happy to live in peace within the current sovereign state of Israel.

“Look,” Batya said in a still-rich New York accent, “if I was a conformist, I’d be living on Long Island.”

At the Medad house the other evening, 10-year-old Aviya and his older brother were playing Monopoly on the floor and speaking Hebrew. The Medads’ oldest daughter looked up from her studies from time to time to ask a question about her English homework: “Can you say ‘Everybody has their,’ or is it ‘Everybody has his’?”

Asked if he is an American or an Israeli, Aviya said, “I consider myself an Israeli.” And his mother? “She’s an American,” he said.

Yisrael Medad, arriving home after dinner, said the family tries to live “as normal a life as possible,” and he doesn’t like suggestions by some Israelis that the settlers are “some foreign element” of Israel.

“Being Jewish means being as completely Jewish as possible,” Medad said. “And, for me, that means being here, being defined by my religious beliefs and being attached to the land. We couldn’t sit in Jerusalem or even Brooklyn and pray and think that’s being Jewish.”

The Bazers are more recent arrivals. Joe, 49, was a videotape editor at Home Box Office and Daphne was an advertising executive in New York when they decided to move to Israel three years ago. They hitchhiked around the West Bank with their young son looking for a settlement to join. Stranded on the main road in the valley below Shiloh, they decided to have a look.

Even then, the future of Jewish settlements was in doubt. But that didn’t dissuade them. Attracted by the ideological commitment of the settlers here, and by the history of ancient Shiloh, they bought a $45,000 two-bedroom home. Now, they have three children and are determined to raise them here.

“We knew what the situation was with the settlements, but we bought anyway,” Joe said. “We wanted to make a statement. We believe this land is ours because we’re Jews and the way you show that is by living here.”

He admires the Jews who have moved into even more front-line positions in Hebron, south of Jerusalem. There, a small enclave of Jewish settlers is surrounded by Palestinians. That proximity has bred radicalism on both sides. The Cave of the Patriarchs there, where the mosque slayings occurred, had been shared by both sides.

“Moving to Hebron would have been much more of a statement,” Bazer said. “But I wasn’t ready for that. Hebron settlers are the elite.”

Not all American immigrants would agree with him. In fact, Bazer says, some of his relatives in Israel blame him and other settlers for being obstacles to peace. “They think we caused the problem, and they refuse to visit us,” he said with a shrug.

The uncertain status of the settlements is one drawback to life there. But a bigger one is the security situation and, especially, worries about revenge attacks by Palestinians angered by the mosque massacre. Bazer always carries his gun, and his wife takes one with her when she drives out of town.

Another challenge for the family has been to make ends meet. Daphne makes silk paintings, which she sells in Shiloh and in Jerusalem. Joe does odd jobs; the other day he was building some steps for his neighbor. And they both are struggling to learn Hebrew, which is the only language that many Shiloh residents speak.

But they have no regrets. Their children are growing up in an environment that they believe is much safer and healthier than what they left in the United States. They also are free to practice their religion, from observing the Sabbath to keeping a kosher kitchen, in a way that would have been more difficult in New York.

“And where else can I have a view like this?” Joe Bazer asked as he took in the sweeping vista from his back yard. He picked up a shard of pottery from the hillside. “Almost anywhere you look, you find something dating back to the time of Joshua,” he said.

But it is the future, and not the past, that preoccupies them.

“I hope there’s a future here,” Daphne said, “because I can’t think of where else I could live.”