THE END OF A DREAM

The first Zionist pioneer of the Ben-Zvi family was Moshe. In 1918, he emigrated from Austria aboard a ship that took him to Lebanon. According to family lore, Moshe was robbed of his wallet almost as soon as he got off the boat, and walked penniless to the Holy Land. He eventually sank roots in Menachemiya, a farming village in Galilee, where he was given a house, land and a cow shed with--support from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the French philanthropist. Arab raiders were a danger then, so residents usually traveled in convoys for protection. The stocky, taciturn Ben-Zvi liked to ride horses--a black stallion named Knight and a white mare named Flicka--past the wheat fields of the Jordan Valley, on a saddle embroidered with colored yarn. Later, a van came once a week to the village and showed films. Moshe liked Westerns starring John Wayne and Gary Cooper.

Moshe's grandson Chen Ben-Zvi believes he's following in the old man's path. Chen was raised in another Jewish farming village in Galilee. "It was gorgeous," recalls his mother, Leah, who escaped Poland as a child at the start of World War II. "We were living the dream." But by the time Chen came of age in the 1980s, the old romance of secular Zionism was fading. Chen was bored. "I started to ask, 'What is it to be a Jew?' " he explains. "Nobody in the village knew. I started to ask, 'What am I doing here?' And nobody could answer me."

Now 40, Ben-Zvi considers himself a new pioneer. Although his grandfather had never been particularly religious, Chen joined a yeshiva--a Jewish orthodox school. Three years ago, he transplanted himself, his wife and four children to Netzarim, a front-line settlement of about 50 red-roofed cottages lodged so deep in the Gaza Strip that residents ride a bulletproof bus to get in and out. He wants to stay there, surrounded by more than a million Palestinians who are unable to freely come and go, many of them living in squalid refugee camps, because he sees Gaza as part of the land promised by God to the Jews.

But starting Aug. 17, the buses of Netzarim will be driving in only one direction: out. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will oversee the evacuation of all of Gaza's roughly 8,500 settlers, and another 600 in four West Bank communities, during the next month. For those Americans who regard Jewish settlements as an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians, the decision seems long overdue. A slim majority of Israelis--52 percent in one recent poll--share the view that Israel should unilaterally vacate at least portions of the territory conquered in the 1967 war. Yet for true believers like Ben-Zvi, the withdrawal cuts against a generations-long mission of Zionist expansion. "My grandfather is crying in his grave," he says.

Israel has pulled back from occupied territory before, most notably in 1982, when its tanks and troops left the Sinai Peninsula and dismantled the settlement of Yamit. Yet this summer's withdrawal marks a watershed: a significant number of settlements will be removed from what devout Jews consider "Greater Israel," the vaguely defined Promised Land of the Bible, including a few to be dismantled in the northern West Bank, lands that once were the heart of ancient Samaria. Even supporters of the withdrawal understand why it's traumatic. "It's the shattering of a lifelong dream," explains Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "It's the collapse of a world that they had been building in their hearts, in their minds, and in their lives."

Sharon's government is spending roughly $1 billion to help the settlers cope. About 60 percent of evacuees have applied for the compensation they're entitled to under Israeli law, up to $300,000. For settlers who moved to the West Bank and Gaza for cheap, subsidized housing and other financial incentives, such packages may be enticing. But ideological families like the Ben-Zvis, who are the majority in Gaza, didn't come for the money. They came to give their lives meaning. Managing their passions will be a key test of Sharon's plan.

It would take only a few alienated extremists to throw everything off track. The government has not identified any specific threats--against Sharon, for instance, or potent landmarks like Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. But a Jewish extremist aiming to block withdrawal from occupied territories killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. And the recent rampage by Eden Natan Zada, the Israeli Army deserter who gunned down four Israeli Arabs on a bus two weeks ago before being subdued and killed by an angry crowd, highlights how easy it is for one disgruntled renegade to lash out. "Every male from the age of 18 is an alumnus of the [Israeli Army]," says a senior Israeli security source who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "That leaves everything open."

The vast majority of Israelis don't want trouble. They live comfortable lives in a modern industrial state, and enjoy the benefits of a vibrant economy that is growing at a healthy rate of 4 percent. The country's coastal high-tech corridor is flush with venture capital. After a four-year Palestinian uprising, Western tourists have begun to return. Even under threat from the occasional suicide bomber, Tel Aviv's outdoor cafes are packed full this summer.

Yet the Jewish state remains oddly vulnerable. Demographers predict that if Israel held onto Gaza, Jews would shrink to a minority of the population west of the Jordan River within the next year, imperiling the country's identity as both a Jewish and a democratic homeland. Almost 40 years of military occupation have soured many Israelis on the dream of Greater Israel anyway; they're aware that what is a "dream" for Israelis has been a nightmare for Palestinians. Dovish Israelis are morally exhausted by the occupation, and embarrassed. "I feel that we have done the most terrible things [by building settlements]," says author A. B. Yehoshua. Does he feel any sense of loss--even a twinge--over surrendering Gaza? "On the contrary," he says. "I feel relief."

After millennia of Jewish spiritual and intellectual history, it's easy to forget that, as a state, Israel is only 57 years old. The modern Zionist movement was founded just over a century ago. The early frontiersmen were mostly young, perhaps a motley bunch, but also daring and full of idealism. They stepped ashore clutching copies of Karl Marx, and eventually founded socialist communes. They somehow imagined that Palestine was a "land without a people for a people without a land." The problem, of course, was that the land did have a people: more than 600,000 Arabs lived in Palestine in 1914. Israel was born in 1948, in the ashes of the Holocaust, but its existence was violently opposed by Arab states. Amid the messianic euphoria following the capture of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Day War, some Israelis would trade their secular ideologies for the headier stuff of Biblical revelation.

Shimon Peres, Israel's 82-year-old deputy prime minister, came to Palestine with his parents in 1934. When he was 17, Peres left home and later founded a kibbutz called Alumot in the Jordan River valley. "I was a young, irresponsible boy," Peres recalled to NEWSWEEK. "I had a lot of chutzpah." Collective farms never accounted for large portion of Israel's settlers; most preferred cities like Tel Aviv. Yet the romantic image of the bronzed and hale young men and women--sowing, gleaning, rising with the sun--captured Jewish imaginations.

Peres was in his mid-40s by 1967, the year almost everything changed. Most of the military men directing Israel's forces in the Six Day War considered themselves New Jews, unencumbered by religion. Yet as Israeli tanks and troops smashed through the Arab lines--capturing places that appear in the Bible as Hebron, Shiloh, Shechem--old spiritual longings resurfaced. After taking East Jerusalem, Israelis flooded through the Old City's gates, singing and dancing at the Western Wall.

The victory transformed Israeli society. For some, the new cartography revealed a message from God. Israelis did not immediately rush to claim the land. But over time, outposts of the hardest-core settlers sprouted on the crests of Judean and Samarian hills. The settlements are widely regarded as illegal according to international law. But right-wing ideologues struck deals with the ruling Labor Party governments that let them build synagogues and schools. Peres himself helped to establish Ofra, one of the early West Bank outposts. After the right-wing government of Menachem Begin came to power in 1977, the settlements multiplied.

For religious zionists and ultra-nationalists, Gaza was an afterthought. The narrow strip of sand dunes along the Mediterranean, choked with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, held little strategic value. The Bible story in which Samson pulls down the Philistines' temple takes place there, although few other scriptural passages do. Ariel Sharon, as Israel's Defense minister in the 1980s, lured some settlers with the promise of inexpensive housing. Avi Farhan, a 58-year-old veteran of the Six Day War, recalls Sharon's personally imploring him to consider building there. "When I saw this place," Farhan recalls, "I said, 'It will be here [that I settle]'." Farhan's living room today, stocked with a big-screen Sony television and cases of Red Bull energy drink, has huge windows that overlook the Mediterranean. He is frenetic, pacing and often losing his train of thought. At one point, Farhan pulls out a craggy beige rock about the size of a potato. "What do you see?" he asks, earnestly. It doesn't look like anything. "Here's the eyes, here's the nose," he explains. "It's Moses!"

All the while, another class of pioneers was emerging on Israel's coastal plain. These dreamers see Israel as part of a new, interconnected world, and they hope to be in the vanguard. Chemi Peres, son of Shimon, is one of these high-tech frontiersmen. "This is our Silicon Valley," says Peres, peeling back a shade from his 11th-floor office window, and exposing a Mediterranean shoreline dotted with sleek office parks and red-roofed bungalows. The shimmering city below, Herzliya, is named for Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. It's home to most of Israel's high-tech investors. Peres's firm, Pitango Venture Capital, plows roughly $100 million each year into Israeli start-ups. (Another of his companies, Alumot, is named for his father's kibbutz.) "Settlers," Peres says, "are not the only Zionists."

During a summer marked by tumult and protest, it is easy to forget these other Israelis, soaking up the sun on the beaches of Tel Aviv, guiding strollers through the cypress-lined avenues of West Jerusalem. They don't want to guard Jewish outposts in Gaza or Hebron. They seek a democratic nation that is stable and wealthy, modern and, perhaps above all, "normal."

But what does it mean to be a normal country, anyway? In one sense, normalization was the earliest demand of Zionists in the Diaspora, the population of Jews outside Israel. They simply wanted their own nation. "Normalization," A. B. Yehoshua explains, "is not the way of life, but the fact that you are responsible for your own destiny. Iran is a normal country. Britain was a normal country during the Blitz. Nazi Germany was a normal country. In the sense that they were responsible for what they were doing." In this view, the Palestinians have a right to have a normal country, too.

Another quandary: maintaining a Jewish majority requires Jews to be attracted to the place, and stay there. The Jewish population of Israel continues to climb at a rate of 1.4 percent, if you take into account thousands of immigrants each year--14,200 in 2004. Yet some 15,000 Jews also left during the same period. The young and educated are particularly prone to leave, and it is not just violence or politics that drives them away. The two most reliable indicators of emigration surges, according to demographer Sergio DellaPergola, are unemployment and inflation.

Yet even in the glass canyons of Herzliya, wealth and modernity are not the only aspirations. If they were, why not live in London or New York? There you can at least avoid the relentless claustrophobia of Middle Eastern politics, if not anymore the plague of suicide bombs. Here, nationalism still enchants. "As a writer, I live inside my language," explains Etgar Keret, a 37-year-old Tel Aviv author. "When I talk in English, it's like I'm limping. It's my identity. I don't think I can be anywhere else and be home."

Keret's short stories are filled with antiheroes. There are no brave Maccabees, no swashbuckling warriors. Instead, his sketches dramatize the mundane details of daily life. "When you wake up in the morning," he says, "before you've had your first cup of coffee, what you think about is not, Why isn't there a Palestinian state? You say, 'Why doesn't my girlfriend love me?' Or 'I hope somebody didn't steal my car.' "

Stories can be dreams, of a sort, and Keret's seem to promise that there is more to life than Merkava tanks and suicide killers, more even than nanotech or IPOs. His quirky collections--which have sold more than 200,000 copies in Israel--offer a glimpse into the Israeli subconscious. They satisfy jumbled, humble hopes--not the high-blown fantasies of the original frontiersmen.

Nations are like people. They have bodies and spirits, sinews and desires. Early Israel was rich in pep and punch; modern Israel is older, perhaps calmer and wiser. Yet for many Israelis the country also lacks something, a sense of vision and higher purpose. The trick will be finding new concepts to replace the outdated ideologies. "We have to try to build up alternative dreams," says Ehud Olmert. "Every therapist will tell you that this is what you try to do to an individual. They adjust your dreams to make them more realistic."

Normalization may be a worthy aim. But it also doesn't inspire the same passions as the life-and-death struggles of the frontier. One revealing statistic: while a majority of Israelis support the Gaza withdrawal, only a relative few--4 percent--have tied blue ribbons on their cars in support, according to a recent poll by the newspaper Ma'ariv. By contrast, 18 percent of Israelis have affixed an orange protest ribbon; you'd never guess they were outnumbered.

Writer Alona Kimchi, who immigrated with her parents from Soviet Ukraine in 1970, describes herself as "tragically secular." She supports the withdrawal, but also sometimes finds herself envying the settlers. "Listen, they're always so passionate," she says. "It's very sexy. What can you belong to, being secular? What big idea? What strong feeling can you cling on to? At this moment, when such strong forces are moving, you don't have much to say. It's very difficult to get passionate about anything." Even some dovish Israelis worry that the pullout might embolden Israel's enemies, including Muslim radicals like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and give them a free hand in Gaza to organize attacks on the Jewish state.

Fundamentalist passions, on the other hand, are persistent. And it takes only a few fanatics to ignite them. The Camp David accords in the 1970s produced Rabbi Meir Kahane and his band of extremists. The assassination of Rabin followed 1993's Oslo accords. This summer, a televised video of black-clad Jewish radicals issuing a pulsa denura (Aramaic for "lashes of fire")--a kabbalistic "death curse" directed at Sharon--transfixed Israeli audiences. ("When does it take effect?" Sharon reportedly cracked.) But corny maledictions are the least of Sharon's worries. According to a well-placed Israeli security source, officials are more concerned about assassins from the military's own ranks: highly skilled snipers and other disgruntled soldiers with specialized training.

Of course, most settlers aren't aspiring assassins. Even a majority of Gaza settlers, including the Ben-Zvi family, insist they won't fight Israeli troops. But anger and resentment linger. "Until Oslo, our kids didn't need bulletproof buses," insists Aryelit Ben-Zvi, Chen's wife. "Jews can't expect to live normal lives. We're different. Our land is not a normal land. This dream of a new Middle East--it's not happening. We keep burying our people because of this dream."

How to douse these flames? Some, like the writer Yair Sheleg, have proposed offering "ideological compensation" to accompany the financial incentives doled out to the settlers. This could be as simple as public recognition, he suggests, or as elaborate as relocation to the West Bank. But if evacuating Gaza is a feint to keep large tracts of the West Bank--where more than 200,000 settlers remain--violence could intensify again. Olmert says only that the ultimate solution is "not the 1967 lines, for sure."

"Life is a chain of changing situations," Shimon Peres says. "You cannot become Adam in Paradise. It's over. Forget it. Neither can you live in a cave or go back to the French Revolution. That age, when we had the image of cultivating the land, living among beautiful trees and dangerous snakes--over!" But not for Chen Ben-Zvi, not yet. He sits at his kitchen table in Netzarim, below a portrait of Rabbi Avraham Kook, the father of religious Zionism. He gazes out the window toward a nearby sliver of the Mediterranean. "We can see the sea from here!" he cries, looking a little starry-eyed. "We'll have a Riviera here! There will be hotels here!" He trails off. "Five stars..." When a dream is so elaborate and fantastic, waking up can be very, very hard.