THE Jewish War," a recently completed novel from which the following excerpt is adapted, is set in the near future, after the Israeli government has announced its decision to withdraw from Hebron and other West Bank cities.

In response, Hebron's Jewish settlers have established the Kingdom of Judea and Samaria, seceding from Israel and anointing as their king Yehudi HaGoel, formerly Jerry Goldberg of the Bronx.

As this excerpt begins, nearly a thousand settlers are gathered in their cluster of buildings in central Hebron that they call the Forefathers' Compound.

Below the compound, in anticipation of a siege by the Israeli Army, they have secretly burrowed tunnels leading to underground living spaces adjoining the nearby burial site of the first Jews, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives. The site is called in the Bible, and known to Jews, as the Cave of Machpelah. Above the cave is the building known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

AT HIS headquarters in the army base on a hilltop overlooking Hebron, General Uri Lapidot walked over to the window, took out his high-powered binoculars and trained them on the city of Hebron stretching out below, focusing on the Forefathers' Compound at its very heart.

The putative Kingdom of Judea and Samaria! People were milling about the central courtyard, looking disarmingly normal and reasonable from this distance, moving in and out of the complex of buildings; at the moment, no significant or unusual activity seemed to be taking place.

Yehudi HaGoel was no doubt somewhere within his royal chambers, cracking a hard-boiled egg, brewing mayhem, snatching a woman out of her bath and claiming her.

The complex itself was densely surrounded by troops, Lapidot noted with satisfaction, and helicopters circled overhead. Access to the Machpelah, exactly as he had prescribed, was cut off by trucks, Jeeps and even tanks.

It was only a matter of time before the order would have to be given to move in efficiently and decisively to extrude this band of zealots; the question was when and how to do this in such a way that the threatened calamity could at least be minimized if not averted entirely.

Lapidot pictured himself the immortalized hero of an immaculate, surgical, Entebbe-like commando operation -- swoop in, pluck them out, spirit them away -- that would stun the world and go down in the history books as the paradigm of high military art.

While Lapidot believed in principle that Jews should be free to dwell openly in any portion of the biblical homeland, he nevertheless supported the government's decision to call a halt to further intrusions into the territories, to dismantle all existing 22 settlements that possessed no intrinsic defense or strategic value, and to evacuate the settlers from such cities as Hebron and Nablus, where the Jewish presence was unnecessarily inflammatory.

The State of Israel could not survive alone in a hostile world, bereft of the support and good will of its mighty American patron, and peace, after all, was not a prize to be spurned, even the cold, niggardly, ungenerous peace that was being held out like a miserable stick for a well-trained, well-beaten old dog to fetch.

Lapidot stood for a long time at the open window, breathing heavily, peering through his binoculars. The lousy fanatics! He was straining hard not to hate them.

It was an element of his Zionist creed not to detest his fellow Jews no matter how obdurate, ungrateful, manipulative, disdainful, and uncivilized he found them to be, especially the ones who were consumed by religion, so bloody pious and righteous.

Who made them the sole guardians of the Bible and Jewish history?

These were Lapidot's estate, too. He, too, was a Jew, in no measure less than they. Hitler would not have discriminated. The tragic and exhilarating legacy of Jewish survival was at the core of his being and his life's mission as well.

And today, down there in Hebron, the city of his forefathers, too, this aberration was holding down the fort, this breed of religious Jews who, unlike the black-hatted ultra-Orthodox, did not disdain the army -- far from it, they enlisted willingly, trained diligently, fought enthusiastically, they knew all the tricks -- a lethal mixture, as Lapidot saw it, of messianic religious zeal and rabid nationalism.

And where did all of this lead? To this sickly mutation, this rotting fossil, this so-called Kingdom of Judea and Samaria, deposited right in the heart of this hotbed of Arab fever and extremism.

Although Lapidot declared that Israel was in no rush whatsoever, that the army would just wait this thing out, on background he told reporters that if he knew anything at all about these fanatics he was dealing with, any day now their white crocheted yarmulkes would come poking out of their little burrows and holes like white flags of surrender because these guys were practical and shrewd and cunning as all hell when it came down to the bottom line, they knew just how far they could push, these weren't your all-purpose, suicidal Masada or Jonestown types, and when they realized once and for all that Israel means business this time and isn't kidding around, isn't fondling and worrying its traditional soft spot for religious maniacs and Zionist zealots, then they would understand and accept that this time they had lost, and they would come scrambling like little moles out of their stinking holes and this whole miserable business would be concluded once and for all.

Underground, Yehudi HaGoel continued to refuse all overtures for negotiation from the State of Israel, haunting and torturing his enemy with his creepy silence.

He remained sequestered in his crypt, conferring in deep whispers with his most trusted followers on what courses of action remained open to them and then disappearing from view entirely.

The siege was in its eighth week, consuming the end of summer, cooling into autumn nights.

By now the settlers had retreated from the Forefathers' Compound down into their labyrinth of caves, crypts and tunnels that reached even the Cave of Machpelah. Rosh Hashanah, the high holy day renewing creation, had been enacted.

Now they were in the Ten Days of Penitence, heading toward the holiest of the holies, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur attacks were the mark of the Arab, Yehudi had declared, an Arab specialty, like a knife in the back or a stone hurled from behind a barricade of women and children, a badge of cowardice and disgrace, but even if the attack did come on Yom Kippur, Yehudi had reminded his people, our sages teach that on Yom Kippur, when the gates of heaven are flung wide open, only the most righteous of souls, only the most deserving of spirits are privileged to die.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, every man, woman, and child in the Kingdom of Judea and Samaria gathered solemnly in the immense underground stone gallery they called the Annex for the Kol Nidre prayers.

They filed into the great hall silently, in white-stockinged feet or in white cloth shoes, entering in tight family clusters and then separating wordlessly, almost sorrowfully, as if the parting were destined to be a long one, the men and boys to one side of the room, the women and girls behind a curtain on the other side, and they sank down on the cold floor of packed earth, sitting there like mourners, facing the massive gray rocks that divided them from the ancient mothers and fathers resting in dignity in the Cave of Machpelah.

The men wore the pure white shroud-like kittels of their wedding day, the robes drawn in at the waist with a white cloth belt, and, over their shoulders and heads, great white prayer shawls giving off the intimate, slightly sour musk of their living day-to-dayness.

Above, in the Forefathers' Compound, and in the Machpelah, the contingent of Israeli soldiers on duty had been lightened; nothing would happen on Yom Kippur, General Lapidot was convinced.

He sat at the window of his headquarters on the hilltop overlooking Hebron smoking a Cuban cigar, a rare 16th-century edition of "The Works of Flavius Josephus" printed in London spread open across his knees, a glass of Benedictine on the low table beside him.

Yehudi HaGoel was seated in his usual place with his face to the Ark, his back to his people, blanketed entirely in his white prayer shawl, rocking intensely.

Only when the day was almost all over, when they had nearly abandoned all hope of hearing his soothing voice on this day of all days, this day when it would have restored their souls, toward the very end of the final service, only then did he rise to reveal what he had seen through fasting and prayer.

Yes, God was with them, Yehudi assured his people, and He would soon show His face in a miracle, not a flashy miracle that defies nature like the parting of waters or the stopping of time in Gibeon or the Valley of Aijalon, not even a miracle like the victory in the Six-Day War or the rescue at Entebbe that those wanting in faith twist to explain in rational terms, but a miracle of the most refined, paradoxical subtlety in which, although we seem to fall, even so the enemy is nevertheless defeated and the principle that we embody triumphs.

After all, Yehudi cried, what do we, what does the Kingdom of Judea and Samaria signify, except the embodiment of a principle?

That principle is our unnegotiable right to possess and dwell in the heart and soul of the ancient biblical homeland promised to us alone by the God of our fathers.

And that principle can prevail even if we, the people of the Kingdom of Judea and Samaria, do not survive, indeed, even if, to assure the perpetuation of that principle, it is absolutely necessary that we die.

For the sake of this principle, then, to enable this victory, let us now take matters into our own hands and choose death with honor.

Let us not shame ourselves at this hour by falling alive into the hands of our enemy. Choose death, I say. It is the most compassionate thing we can do for ourselves.

And it is the most bitter blow that we can inflict upon the State of Israel, a shock from which it can never recover, when it enters our underground halls in its customary pride and arrogance to be struck with amazement by our death and overcome by our courage, to discover dreadful silence, to find us at peace, our bodies still bedecked in the pure penitential garments of this Yom Kippur which shall have become our shrouds, our souls ZTC departed to their true home, released from the calamities and disappointments of this earth, our unfettered souls as free as God Himself.

And when word spreads throughout the world of the great act of courage and defiance that we shall commit tonight when we leave this chamber and enter the next life as we break the fast, when the entire world hears what we have done here and marvels at the purity of our resolve, at our contempt for death to carry it out without fear, then the State of Israel will be chastened and humbled once and for all.

Never again will it dare to risk acceding to the surrender of even a millimeter of this holy land that is the province of God alone to give and to take.

In the struggle between the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Judea and Samaria, the Kingdom will perish but it will be the State that will be defeated.

That will be the miracle and the wonder.

Tova Reich is author of the novels "Master of the Return" and "Mara."