The young guy wearing the orange t-shirt that read "I, too, am connecting - to Katif and Samaria" who knocked on my door one evening stirred my usual irritation with dinnertime salesmen insistently selling things I don't want. Usually it's cable TV; this time it was the purported religious obligation to oppose disengagement. But he did serve to answer the question a friend had posed a few days before over kiddush schnapps, as we mused about how the Orthodox pro-settlement camp would respond religiously when it realized that no miracle would prevent the pullout from Gaza and the northern West Bank. "The Jewish response to troubles is to examine your actions," my yeshivah-educated friend had said. "Will they ask where they've gone wrong?"

They, or at least some of them, have asked, and have come up with an answer: Much of religious Zionism has cut itself off - disengaged - from the rest of Israel. That's why anti-pullout protests look like gatherings of the Bnei Akiva youth movement and its graduates. Now it's time to reconnect. The door-to-door campaign is a bid to do that. Settlers and their supporters will politely sit down for coffee in thousands of living rooms and try to convey - as pro-settlement journalist Nadav Shragai recently wrote - "connection to Judaism, tradition, commandments and the Land of Israel."

The answer is half-right. A generation ago, the young activists of Gush Emunim led a revolution in religious Zionism, presented themselves as the true voice of that community, and indeed cut themselves off from the rest of Israel. But knocking on doors to peddle the sanctity of the Whole Land as a fundamental truth of Judaism is not going to close the gap. In hindsight, instead of turning the peddler away, perhaps I should have interrupted dinner to invite him in, brewed some evening decaf, and shown him a couple of Gush Emunim documents, older than he is, that explain the very long disengagement.

Gush Emunim arose after the shock of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Responding to national despondency, its leaders described themselves, by turns, as either a religious "revival movement" or as a political vanguard. A real revival movement, beginning with soul-searching, would have been in order. It could have asked, for instance, whether the hubris of faith in "my strength and the might of my hand" had left Israel unprepared for attack, whether a Jewish state should have done more to "seek peace and pursue it."

An early Gush Emunim platform maps a different path. It calls for immediate annexation of the land Israel conquered in 1967, and for "a resolute security doctrine, not deterred by 'moral' or political considerations" - a striking formulation for a religious group. And, it declares, the path to virtually every national goal is "settlement throughout the Land." If nothing else, this showed a colossal lack of political imagination. Gush Emunim not only spurned peacemaking, it ignored every social problem within Israel, from education to the alienation between Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Israeli Arabs. The self-anointed vanguard marched out of Israeli society to settle in occupied territory.

By the summer of 1975, Gush Emunim had established Ofrah, its first settlement, north of Ramallah. Though the movement imagined itself as the heir to kibbutz pioneers, Ofrah's settlers didn't want a communal economy and needed to design a new structure. The solution, as described in an internal movement document from the autumn of that year, was the "community settlement." That meant a small, residential "closed society" managed by an association responsible for "preserving the character of the settlement." New residents would have to be accepted as members, so all would share an "ideological-social background." They would enjoy "single-family homes, quiet streets, fresh air," a dream beyond the reach of most Israelis. The community would grow no larger than a few hundred families, attracting educated professionals to an "island" of a "selected population," intentionally "homogeneous."

Read most forgivingly, this was a utopian approach to revolution: Settlers would create ideal communities, defined by religion rather than socialism, to show Israel a new way to live. Read more coldly, it was a design for exclusive exurbs, where residents could live apart from Israel's social problems and anyone who disagreed with them. The model caught on, and was soon applied throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

Ironically, Gush Emunim took this path just when the kibbutzim were demonstrating the pitfalls of the utopian approach. Kibbutzniks had sought to build socialism in their own communities. By the 1970s they were widely resented for looking down on other Israelis, for their disproportionate political power, and for a comfortable lifestyle that depended on state support. That resentment was one reason Labor lost power to the Likud, which proceeded to provide extravagant subsidies to the new "vanguard." Of the kibbutzim it can at least be said that they had reached the status of landed gentry accidentally. It was in the blueprint of Gush Emunim settlements.

Formally, Gush Emunim was replaced by other organizations. Thirty years later, its heirs are knocking on doors, seeking mainstream support. It's too late. A movement, religious or political, that wants to change a society must first be part of it. It needs to connect to Israel, not to Katif. The settlers disengaged long ago.

The Jerusalem Report, September 5, 2005 issue