The sun was sinking prettily into the sea. Adorable tots frolicked in a big inflatable cow-shaped "bouncer" on the beach near the cotton-candy machine. Young moms and dads shmoozed about current events. It might have been a picnic on Long Island or a birthday party in Santa Monica. But it wasn't. This was family camp in Shirat Hayam, Gush Katif, Gaza, on the Eve of Destruction.

The unauthorized outpost of Shirat Hayam - Song of the Sea - was established in the year 2000 as a "Zionist response," in settler parlance, to a Palestinian terrorist attack on a school bus in nearby Kfar Darom. The community consisted of a mere 16 families until earlier this summer, when standard-issue prefab sukkahs - thin wooden frames, green plastic walls - were set up to house scores of families from Judea, Samaria and elsewhere who flocked to Gush Katif, hoping to thwart the government's disengagement designs. Arutz Sheva, the settler radio station, posted on its website a recruitment brochure of sorts, featuring a photo "tour of the seaside tent-city in Shirat Hayam, a pristine beach paradise hosting new residents who have moved to the region in order to support the struggle against expulsion." Club Med meets Masada.

Amid the ubiquitous orange T-shirts I spied another that read: "The old idiot rebels against the King?" (Translation: Sharon foolishly defies the will of God, the true ruler.) A woman of about 40, her head covered, her long skirt brushing the sand, overheard me discussing religion and politics in Hebrew with a young man wearing an oversized yarmulke. He was saying that the Jewish people had endured hurban (destruction) before and if another occurred would endure that too, even, God forbid, the hurban of the State of Israel. From my accent, the woman deduced my mother tongue. "What's your name?" she asked. I told her, and asked hers. "I'm not telling you," she said, a tad coquettishly. "Not fair," I said, but I knew what was up. Signs and flyers abounded in Gush Katif, pinned to bulletin boards and pasted on supermarket windows, warning people not to talk to the press, or strangers in general. The word was that secret agents of the Shin Bet were everywhere, even posing as right-wing loyalists.

Losing one's home is a terrible thing, regardless of the circumstances. But it must be added that the dark romance of Jewish persecution is central to the mythos of the orange ideologues. For them, it is a badge of honor (and a huge symbolic boon) that the government scheduled their eviction from Gaza for the day after the fast of Tisha Be'av, which marks the destruction of the two ancient Temples, as well as the Spanish expulsion of 1492. The settlers have long purported to be avatars of pure Zionism, pioneers in service of the state. But by painting Sharon as not merely a corrupt tyrant but a neo-Nebuchadnezzar, they exhibit a retro-exilic mentality, a return to what the Israeli author Haim Hazaz, writing in the 1940s, called the "nocturnal psychology" of pre-Zionist Jews: "We love suffering... the more we are made to suffer - the stronger we become. For this is our staple food, our elixir of life." Hence the orange stars, the outrageous hand-wringing about Gaza becoming "Judenrein." Hence a pleasant woman, a fellow American Israeli who made aliyah from Manhattan, eyeing me as if I were a member of the Czarist police.

She lives now, it turned out, not far from me in Jerusalem, and came to Shirat Hayam with her husband and children to stand up for her beliefs and pray for a miracle. "We say a lot of tehillim," she told me: Psalms. What will happen, I asked, if your prayers are not answered - will there be a crisis of faith? Not at all, she said with confidence. God will have a reason. It may be because "the people are not worthy," maybe we have sinned. I was thinking the same thing, I said, what kind of sins do you have in mind? "Not enough kiruv," she said, meaning a failure to reach out and win over other Jews. (Jews like me.) And maybe, she said, "we didn't do enough for yishuv Eretz Yisrael," Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.

But did the nation also sin, I ventured, in our treatment of the Other, the gentile, the stranger whom we are commanded in the Torah not to oppress? They're terrorists, she bristled, they want to kill us. "All of them?" I asked. Well, she said, those who want to act properly can live among us as a ger toshav, a resident alien. "And would you give them the vote?" Of course not, she countered: "This is a Jewish state."

When I returned to Jerusalem I opened two books. The first, published by the Gaza settlers this past spring, is called "Al HaNissim: Tales from Gush Katif." Its title refers to a familiar prayer thanking God for his many miracles, in days of yore and our own time. Stories such as "The Miracle of Daylight Savings Time" and "The Door that Was Suddenly Stuck" recount amazing incidents of divine salvation from Palestinian terror. Sages ancient and modern are invoked, including Israel's former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who "says that not all Palestinians are Ishmaelites." The latter will ultimately repent and acknowledge that the Jews, descendants of Ishmael's half-brother Isaac, are the true owners of the Land. But other Palestinians (the percentages are not specified) are the bad seed of the "lewd" Egyptians and of the Amalekites, eternal "haters of Israel."

The other book was the Talmud, where in Tractate Megillah we find a famous midrash. In the Bible, Moses and the Israelites celebrate the crossing of the Red Sea in song: Shirat Hayam. The rabbis added that as the angels watched the Egyptians die, they too began to sing, but God silenced them: "My creations drown in the sea, and you sing my praises?" It is hard to sympathize with Jewish settlers who seem to forget this humane metaphor as they live amid Arabs who drown in poverty and lack basic freedoms. At the same time, the painful exodus from Gaza is not a time for gloating. Much hard work must be done to prove that it is worth the heavy price. Menaced as ever from without, the nation is dangerously divided within. Both camps must resist the siren song of triumphalism.

The Jerusalem Report, September 5, 2005 issue