Part of this war is with ourselves.

Last night's news featured one interview with well-known a religious grandmother who urged the soldiers in her family and others to refuse any "illegal" orders to remove Jews from their homes in the Land of Israel. The interviewer pressed her on the conception of illegal: what if the decision to remove settlers has the endorsement of the government and the Knesset? Her response was that it could not be legal insofar as it violated Torah.

Then he interviewed a young military reservist, head of an organization that urges soldiers to refuse "illegal" orders to harm innocent Palestinians. When pressed by the interviewer to defend his conception of "illegal," the young man said that it is wrong to risk the lives of soldiers to protect religious settlers in Gaza and the West Bank. He prefers withdrawing from all settlements outside of Israel (he didn't specify just what he meant by that), but it was clear that the grandmother's home was beyond his sense of what is proper.

For a centrist opposed to both positions, It was more than annoying, but great television. It defined our moment. Earlier segments had featured the head of the general staff and the minister of defense saying that rabbis and others who urge soldiers to disobey orders threaten the country and serve the enemy. I thought of the year 70, when anti-Roman Jewish zealots fought with Jews willing to accept Roman culture and Roman rule within Jerusalem, and the Romans waited outside the city until the Jews weakened themselves enough to make the conquest easier.

We have all but smashed the Palestinian intifada. Barbarians who target children, patrons of cafes, discotechs, and restaurants, university students, bus riders, and celebrants of the Passover seder can look around at their cities and orchards and see rubble. They can count among themselves more than three times the casualties they have caused us. Many of their leaders, and even lower echolons are dead or in our prisons. Their political system is a shambles. Much of the international community is tired of their calls for help and offers only lip service. They are now hoping for salvation from a new US president; Arafat has made an overt endorsement of Kerry, which might hurt the Senator more than it helps. (Arafat also expressed support for Saddam Hussein in 1991, and produced the explusion of thousands of Palestinian workers from the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.)

No such scorecard will convince all the fanatics, or perhaps any of them, to stop the fighting.

The intifada also provided at least a temporary respite from chronic disputes between religious and secular Israelis about what we can do on Shabbat, the availability of non-kosher food, which rabbis can perform conversions, and other nuances of religious law. With neighbors wanting to kill all Jews, internal fights all but disappeared. Until the prime minister put on the table the issue of withdrawing settlements. The Land of Israel is one of the items in our tribal religion. Now religious zealots are making doctrinal proclamations about real estate.

As in other issues, the Torah is not clear. There are competing definitions of the Land of Israel.

The borders mentioned in a passage from Genesis 15, “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” is not precise enough to guide a surveyor. Where on the Euphrates: Baghdad or elsewhere? Is the river of Egypt the Nile, or perhaps only a lesser stream at El Arish? The difference between the two is a matter of 100 kilometers or more along the Mediterranean Sea, depending on the choice from among several Nile outlets. The problem becomes more complex by the 17th chapter of Genesis, when the Lord promises to Abraham “all the land of Canaan” without setting out the boundaries. The 34th chapter of Numbers provides enough clues to keep historians and cartographers busy matching modern places with the lands of ancient peoples. The eastern boundary of the Promised Land indicated here (the east shore of the Chinnereth, perhaps the Sea of Galilee), is far short of the Euphrates as promised in Genesis and somewhat less than what modern Israel has managed to acquire.

There is a vote scheduled in the Knesset next week that is likely to endorse the withdrawal of all settlements in Gaza and a small number in the West Bank. Government ministers and senior military personnel are making the rounds of the rabbis to persuade them of the dangers of religious soldiers urged to disobey orders. It is not easy to neutralize the religious enthusiasm. The outcome will be a test of our sanity. We can survive a bit of internal violence, but it will not be healthy.