Settlers, soldiers, reporters, politicians - everyone touched by Israel's Disengagement has a story. Shlomo Zimmerman is my uncle, and his story is worth telling. In a year spent working for Sela, Israel's Disengagement Authority, he's fought with his wife and kids, lost friends, driven 50,000 miles in his car, been slandered in the press, praised by the prime minister, and thwarted at almost every turn. He never even wanted a job in politics.

When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced Israel's Disengagement from Gaza and four West Bank towns early last year, Momo, as his friends call him, was working as a business consultant. Like many religious Israelis, he has always felt a close connection to the settlers. He worried about what the disengagement would do to them and their tight-knit communities.

He sought out Rabbi Yigal Kaminetzky, the spiritual leader of Gush Katif. They had friends in common, and as young men had studied in the same yeshiva, a school for higher Jewish education. Momo advised the Rabbi to begin preparing his community, the largest group of Jewish settlements in Gaza, for the evacuation. Kaminetzky refused, declaring, "It won't happen!" Kaminetzky was still saying that two days before it happened.

Within a few months, Momo decided that if he wanted to help the settlers, he'd have to work within Sela. "I knew that nobody else would take care of them as I would." He had been active in the religious youth group Bnei Akiva and spent seven years at the yeshiva of the influential Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, which gave him excellent religious and patriotic credentials. That history made him want the job and made him right for it. And it ultimately made him an object of scorn among the very people he wanted to help. "They call me a traitor [for working with Sela], because I come from the same place they come from," he explained. "That's why they hate me."

All in the Family

I first met Momo when I was eight. He was 20 then, a tall, good-looking guy who taught Jewish Education. I was more interested in the fact that he drove a Vespa. He was devout yet fun - the very image of young Israel.

Momo was immensely popular in those days. I remember walking with him in Jerusalem and having to stop literally every two minutes as he caught up with some friend or colleague or student. He's always been warm-hearted but also loud, and, some say, confident to the point of arrogance. Soon after he married my aunt Bilha, they went to Brazil, where they taught Jewish education and begat Yishai, their firstborn. When they returned to Israel in 1974, some of Momo's yeshiva pals asked him to join Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a new movement that linked land to religion and encouraged settlement in territories taken in the Six-Day War.

Until the 20th century, most observant Jews believed that their nation's long exile from its historic land would end only when God willed it. Religious Zionism, as espoused significantly by Rabbi Kook, broke with that passive attitude, arguing that Jews should hasten the coming of the Messiah by moving into every area of Israel described in the Bible. In this fundamentalist Manifest Destiny, giving up any part of "Greater Israel" is a betrayal of faith, which explains why religious settlers cling to their homes in the West Bank and were so committed to Gaza.

As Kook said in 1968, "The Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land."

Momo and Bilha were city folk, but they joined the Gush crowd to help build a new settlement in the West Bank. Idealism notwithstanding, Bilha couldn't stand the desolation, and Momo found the politics too extreme. They returned to Jerusalem, Yishai and his new sister Saya in tow, and there, over the next few years, they begat Shira, Roi, and Adi. ´´11

Today, the five siblings offer a microcosmic view of Israeli Jewish society: secular, orthodox, right, left, undecided, even unengaged. When Israeli journalists want to make hay of Momo's family, this is what they write about. Yishai, 30, and Roi, 25, each married into ultra-religious, ultra-rightist families and moved to West Bank settlements. Saya, 29, and Shira, 26, became secular and moved to Tel Aviv, where Saya married a committed leftist. Adi, 22, is studying music and is, like many young Israelis, more observant than her parents, but can't decide just how she feels about the Disengagement. She sees both sides.

By mid-July, I was in Israel myself. And as we walked on the beach one night, Momo said he'd quit Sela if it began evicting settlers by force. "I'm realpolitikal," he said. "It hurts me that we are giving up this land. Don't think it doesn't. But it's demographics. When we took Gaza in 1967, there were 300,000 Arabs living there. Now there are 1.3 million. And we are only 8,500. For us to stop worrying about 1.3 million Arabs and protecting 8,500 Jews is a very good deal for Israel. But it hurts."

We made our way down a small rocky incline, just a few feet from the ruins of a massive Roman aqueduct. The beach was crowded with people, some sitting around fires, others basking in the glow of camp lanterns. "I haven't lost any good friends," he went on. "Good friends don't let politics get in the way."

We stopped walking in a welcoming crescent of water, and wavelets lapped at our feet. I asked about his sons. "Were they mad at you?"

"Not Yishai," Momo said. "He is very rational. But Roi was mad. Then Yishai said to him, 'How can you be mad at our father for what he thinks? He never told us how to think. He let us make up our own minds about everything.' And slowly, Roi stopped being mad."

We went for a swim. The Mediterranean was warm, but the jellyfish eventually drove us out. Their stings didn't really hurt, but there were just too many of them. It was like bathing in nettles.

Demographics vs. Democracy

Demographics have become a major factor in Israeli politics, influencing attitudes toward land and borders. In 1948, secular Zionists founded Israel as a "Jewish State," a homeland for a nation that had spent nearly two millennia as outsiders in other countries. Jews had not known national sovereignty since the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The fact that the Jewish state exists on land where Arabs had long since settled posed and continues to pose a variety of problems.

Today, 1.35 million Arabs live as Israeli citizens. They vote, have representatives in Israel's Parliament, and receive social services. The same is not true for the nearly 3.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Given that Jews in Israel number only 5.26 million, the two peoples are almost at parity in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. (Arab Christians equal less than 3 percent of the entire population.) The Muslim birth rate in Israel is 3.6 percent, twice as high as the Jewish birth rate, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.

Many Israeli Jews supported the Disengagement because sacrificing a small piece of high-maintenance, predominantly Arab territory restores a sizable Jewish majority to Israel proper, thus postponing by an estimated 20 years the day when there are more Arabs than Jews in the "Jewish State."

Before announcing the Disengagement, the government hired a marketing firm to find just the right term. "Separation" was considered, but it suggested apartheid. "Withdrawal" evoked undesirable images of retreat; that's why Hamas uses the term. "Disengagement" suggested the desired distancing from terror and hostility without any other connotations. It was almost ... elegant. Like an unemotional breakup.

The Faithful Son

Roi is taller than his father and thin, with close-cropped dark hair and kind eyes set in an angular, raptor-like face. He was deeply opposed to the Disengagement. Contrary to his father's belief, he did not stop being mad.

Less than two months ago, Roi and his wife, Yael, moved with their baby to Homesh, one of four West Bank settlements marked for Disengagement. Their goals were to lend moral support and to actively pray for the plan to fail. They were convinced their faith would protect them. They had the single-minded faith of true believers.

"Let me give you an analogy," Roi explained. "Let's say, God forbid, the doctor tells you, 'Barak, on August 15 you will die. Where do you want the funeral to be?' You say, 'Hey, I'm not dead yet!' You will do everything you can to stay alive. You will start to pray, to help people, to do everything you can. You have to think positively. Thinking otherwise weakens you."

He pulled out a newspaper and found an ad for a modest housing development. "Look," he said, ´´ pointing to the photos. "Sold, also sold, in escrow, available, and here people are moving in. This is in Gush Katif, now."

That was then. Gush Katif is empty now. So is Homesh. Last week, the family moved back to their original West Bank home. "It was hard, very hard," Roi said recently. But life goes on. Now that he's finished his yeshiva studies, he'll be taking courses in physics and engineering this fall. And he's started talking with his folks again.

Soldiers of Orange

The anti-Disengagement forces ran a very modern campaign, combining branding, PR, and marketing tools. Borrowing from last year's successful Ukrainian opposition campaign, which used orange ribbons to denote solidarity, Disengagement opponents used the color on clothes, cars, flyers, fences, posters, and even pets to announce their sympathies. Orange rubber bracelets were everywhere.

Proponents bickered over colors but eventually settled on blue. One day I saw a car antenna festooned in both orange and blue. I pulled alongside and asked the driver which she supported. "Both!" she laughed. I eventually learned that flying both colors represented support for national unity. Israel's orange-blue was felt even more keenly than America's red-blue split. Shortly before the actual evacuation, many Israelis took down their blue ribbons in sympathy for their anguished countrymen. A few days later, the orange ribbons started coming down too.

The Parve

My aunt Bilha is animated and stylish, with boyishly short bronzed hair and an easy laugh. She's been married to Momo for 35 years, and she's been upset about his Sela job since day one.

"Even before he took it, the kids didn't want to sit together or eat together," Bilha said. "But at least I could say, 'Look, I am the mother, and when you come here we don't talk about politics.' When he started, I became the U.N. I didn't talk about it with either side, so I stayed under the radar. But everything changed today."

It was a breezy August afternoon, and she had just returned from her first trip to Homesh. She'd traveled through hostile territory for almost two hours in an armored bus, just to spend an hour with Otniel, her toddler grandson. But Roi, her settler son, was itching for an argument.

"I said what I always say: 'I don't want to tell you my opinion.' And my son - my little boy! - said to me, 'Can't you think for yourself? Don't you have a personality? It's too egotistical not to take a position.'

"They think it's impossible for someone to live in Israel, breathing Israeli air, and have no position." She shook her head. "They would rather have an enemy like Momo to argue with than a parve like me." In the kosher lexicon, parve foods contain neither dairy nor meat.

The Middle Sister

Momo and Bilha's middle daughter, Shira, is a social worker for troubled youth in Tel Aviv. She gets around town on a scooter, goes drinking with friends, and just broke up with a guy named Tom. Shira is tall and willowy, and the last time I saw her, she was mortified by what a stylist had done to her hair.

My cousin is perceptive, but she doesn't enjoy talking about the Disengagement. "I've been forced to take a position. Between my father and my brothers, I couldn't be uncommitted. But I have friends who could barely even tell you what the Disengagement is. I have other friends who can't get enough of it.

"I could talk about it for hours, but in short, the government has made a mess of this. It's not good for the settlers or the Palestinians, and it's not good for peace."

There has been one positive effect. She and Roi are closer than ever. "I call him a lot to ask how he is. When we were kids I hated him. But we talk all the time now."

The Book of Trump

Driving back from a building site one afternoon, I asked Momo ´´14 why, if he believes the Bible is the literal word of God and should be obeyed in every detail, is he willing to give up part of the territory it defines as the land of Israel? In essence, how does he justify deviating from the core tenet of religious Zionism?

Rabbinic arguments justify both positions on territory, he said. Then, he added, in slow, measured tones, "Israel has to have her land to protect her people from anti-Semitism. If we learned anything from the Holocaust, that's what I learned: We can't trust anyone. We never know what God really means. And I don't know what he meant by the Holocaust. If God is so good, how could it have happened?

"But I can't talk to him. He's too high-level for me. I don't know what he wants. My main issue, and I'm sure about this, is that we have to have our land and keep it strong, and happy, and rich, and smart."

"Where did you get those four words? In the Book of Trump?"

"I can give you four others. It's not a big deal. Those are good words."

The Angry Sister

Saya isn't in Peace Now, the best-known of Israel's leftist organizations, but her husband used to be, and she shares his views. They live in Berkeley, where she works as a music therapist while he's pursuing his doctorate. They plan to return to Israel.

"I'm happy we're getting out of Gaza," she told me on the phone. "Settling there was a mistake from the beginning. The settlers are right to blame the government for sending them there and then reneging, but I'm mad at the government for having made it a national mission."

She and Yishai used to be close. They were still talking until a few months ago, but now, she says, "I find myself talking to myself like I'm talking to Yishai, and I get so angry that I give up, because I know it's a lost cause. I don't even try with Roi. I'm too mad."

Community Services

As police and army expelled the last protesters at Neve Dekalim and Kfar Darom last week, settlers complained the government had not done enough to keep communities intact. Kaminetzky, who had rebuffed Momo's advice eighteen months before, told a leading newspaper: "This is a bad, tyrannical government. You want to uproot us? At least build a parallel community. Instead, we're thrown into hotels without knowing what will happen next."

The government did drop the ball in many ways, but the settlers aren't blameless. Momo had hoped to help them maintain their tight-knit communities. But settlers - those willing to discuss the future - didn't want to move from their spacious, landscaped, subsidized properties into cramped inland apartments or bungalows. Many had lived in Gaza for 20 years or more. They'd built houses, families, and businesses there. Some owned several acres of hothouses. They found government compensation offers unrealistic.

Momo's original plan, which he sold to Sharon, would have relocated communities intact to clusters of single-family homes newly built on farming collectives near Gaza. He envisioned erecting hundreds of homes to take care of over half the displaced families, at a savings to the government of $100 million. The plan was to put settlers in temp housing for one or two years while they built new full-size houses on land the government gave them.

But he couldn't convince the settlers. Because many refused to believe they'd be relocated, the most ideologically committed refused to cooperate. That dogged belief cost them: The longer they waited to move, the less compensation they received. And perhaps most significant, many lost the opportunity to relocate with their communities.

The Aftermath

About 8,500 Jews lived in Gaza, but most were already gone by the time the army and police launched their well-rehearsed evacuation, The towns swelled with supporters or "infiltrators" - overwhelmingly young, religious kids who waited for hours in blazing heat to sneak past checkpoints into "Gush." I picked up a trio of teen hitchhikers heading home after a bad day of roadblocks. When I said I'd been to the hard-line community of Ganei Tal, they squealed like Britney Spears fans.

Two guys I met claimed they'd actually ridden into Gush with off-duty policemen. In the end, the infiltrators were the last ones standing, the religious equivalent of soccer hooligans.

When the evacuation started, Momo spent the day at home watching TV, getting up only to smoke and take dozens of phone calls. He didn't want to go out. He didn't want to see anyone. On the subject of forced removals, he was sanguine. "Most of them left on their own. Now we have just a few thousand causing problems, but they will go quickly."

Around 5 p.m., Disengagement Authority head Yonatan Bassi called to ask him to come down to the Kissufim border crossing, where settlers were taking their last trips out of Gaza. Momo begged off and hung up. "For what? So they can shout at me and call me names?"

The next day, he left early to go deal with 75 families moving into the Jerusalem Hyatt. Twelve hours later, he came home exhausted. It had been chaos, mitigated only by dozens of volunteers who'd come from all over Israel to help. One shining achievement: Momo had been able to arrange laundry services, something overlooked in the original hotel plan.

He also had a new project: relocating the truly dispossessed, those who, for whatever reasons, had failed to secure houses or apartments or even hotel rooms. Momo was optimistic, because he knew he could help them.