The most explosive locale may not be Gaza -- it might be the West Bank, writes Graham Usher from Sa-Nur settlement Miriam Adler, 28, is the spokesperson of Sa-Nur, one of the four Jewish settlements slated for evacuation in the northern West Bank. She came to Israel in 1989 from Moscow, "after 10 years of struggle" in the former Soviet Union. She spent most of her life in Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron, before arriving in Sa- Nur in 2003 with her husband and six children. "We are Zionists, pioneers, idealists -- everything," she says. But she is not particularly typical of "traditional" national religious Zionism. She wears a short-sleeve orange shirt, black pants and thick black mascara around her pale blue eyes. Nor is she an old-style territorial nationalist, like Likud's Betar youth activists who founded Sa-Nur as a "civilian" settlement in 1978. In deference to faith, she has an orange skullcap over her hair. She is rather a modern, or post-modern, alloy of the two. Some Israelis would call her a "repentant" Jew due to the primacy she accords the "land of Israel" over the institutions of its state. Veteran Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery, defines her and her kind "a sect which bears little resemblance to traditional Judaism. Rather they are a mutation of Judaism made in Israel". But whatever you call her, she and her fellow "Zionists, pioneers, idealists" have emerged as most radical vanguard against Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. We are sitting in Sa-Nur's administrative headquarters, once an old Arab fort, now converted into an art gallery. Miriam's office has the buzz of a war-room. Detailed maps of the West Bank hang from the walls. Armed with a baton she points out the strategic location of Sa-Nur, lying athwart the main road between Nablus and Jenin. "We are Israel's flak-jacket," she says. "Without Sa-Nur northern Samaria will become a contiguous territory for terror. This is why we must remain here -- in the enemy's midst. But unfortunately," she sneers, "the present Israeli government believes its foreign image is more important than Jewish blood." She believes it to be only a temporary aberration. Sa-Nur is already primed for 4 September. This is when the Israeli army is scheduled to evacuate its 150 residents from their homes, that "surreal, catastrophic situation" when Jew will expel Jew from their Biblical birthright. Miriam takes us on a tour of the settlement. An old Ottoman mosque has become a yeshiva, housing food, refrigerators, generators and other supplies. A new synagogue is being built, dedicated to the memory of Rafael Eitan, Israel's army chief of staff during the Lebanon war. And around Sa-Nur's perimeter is a dozen or so black canvas tents, hosting 150 "defenders", mostly Jews from the settlements around Nablus. "We are ready to absorb 10,000 -- from all places, a group so big it will be impossible for the army to uproot them," says Miriam. "The army will evict 1,000. So what? Nine thousand will stay. We will block the roads, scatter into the [Palestinian] villages. Our aim is to drive the army crazy, to make its operation inoperable, to be a problem without a solution. We are prepared for a long siege, to wait until the army gives up. That is the Zionist way." There is not a single army officer who believes such threats are bluff. On the contrary many believe Sa-Nur could be the most incendiary of all the settlements to be evacuated, the one place where "something very bad is liable to develop", says Yonathan Bassi, head of Israel's "Disengagement Administration". Unlike Gush Qatif and the other settlements in Gaza, Sa-Nur cannot be hermetically sealed. It lies atop a hill surrounded only by Palestinian villages, a natural fortress. Yet it lies within trekking distance from Elon Moreh, one of a clutch of Israel's more messianic settlements near Nablus. We meet Yakiva Nevo under a black awning in Sa-Nur, breast- feeding her eight-month old baby. "I hope they will cancel the horrible thing [the disengagement] so we can return to Elon Moreh. But if they don't, we will stay and build our new home here," she says. Does she think Sa-Nur is the most suitable place to bring up an eight-month old child? "It depends on what the parents transmit to the child," she says. "And what we transmit is that we are here in the land of Israel not out of fun or for a holiday but for an ideal -- and for an ideal you must be prepared to be uncomfortable." Miriam agrees. For her the fundamental rift thrown up by the disengagement is not between Israel and the Palestine ("which in any case is a place, not a people") or even between Israel the state and Israel the land. It is between "those people who are connected to the ideals of Zionism and Judaism, to settling the land, to national pride. And those who have no ideological ties, who think only of today." We end our trip to Sa-Nur in the art gallery. Miriam exudes an almost maternal pride as she shows us the artefacts, all made by Israeli artists from the former Soviet Union. It is easy to understand why. They chart her itinerary from émigré to a born-again Jew. There are bronze sculptures of Jewish peasants, tilling the land of the Russian pale. The walls are lined with photographs of Israeli soldiers, Torah in one hand, Uzi machine gun in the other. And in the centre is a vast Jewish Menorah, hoisting not candles, but melted down machine guns. It is the emblem of messianic Zionism, a fusion of "safra" and "sayfa", where the hand of God is steeled by military might. "Had Israel lived by that code -- by religious values and force -- we wouldn't have been where we are today," she sighs.
