The thousands of young people who demonstrated last week on the ruins of the settlement of Homesh took Daniela Weiss back several decades. Weiss, once a prominent settler leader and one of the founders of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, who for the past 35 years has participated in almost all their struggles, was encouraged by what she saw there.

"The spirit emanating today from the direction of the organizations that are calling for a return to Homesh is the revolutionary spirit that we had in Gush Emunim," says Weiss, the chair of Kedumim's local council. "And it is entirely different from that which characterizes the Yesha Council [representing the settlements in Judea and Samaria]. The Yesha Council represented the illusion that we may all have wanted to believe in, that the revolution was over and that we could devote all our energy and resources to building a comfortable bourgeois life."

But reality, claims Weiss, has proven otherwise. She says the mistake of the Yesha Council was that "it wanted both to be connected to the establishment and to fight against it; both to receive from the government the budgets that are coming to us and to fight against those who gave us those budgets." Today they understand that this led, in the final analysis, to the failure of the struggle against the disengagement. This failure is now giving rise to new movements and organizations that are turning back the clock of the settlers, to the days of Gush Emunim.

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Broad circles within the settlements share Weiss' discomfort, which has resulted in a rise in a wide variety of organizations that want to serve as a political, ideological and leadership alternative to the Yesha Council. Their names - Meginei Eretz (Defenders of the Land), Komemiyut (Uprightness), Mateh Tzafon (Northern Committee), Halev Hayehudi (The Jewish Heart) and Ne'emanei Eretz Israel (Land of Israel Faithful) - are almost unknown west of the Green Line. But they are mentioned often in the new political discourse developing in the settlements, as well as in the media of the radical right. These are also the groups that organized the two "Return to Homesh" campaigns (on Hanukkah and last week).

All the new organizations agree that with the failure of the struggle against the disengagement, the Yesha Council has lost the right to lead additional settler battles. And in fact, the Yesha Council was totally absent from the two demonstrations in Homesh.

This constitutes a changing of the guard in the organizations, which involves a generational turnover (although Ne'emanei Eretz Israel is led by two Gush Emunim veterans: Weiss and Rabbi Moshe Levinger) and also, and perhaps primarily, an ideological one. This was clearly evident in the publications of the new organizations and in the statements made by their leaders.

They claim that the Yesha Council demonstrated "exaggerated reverence" toward the army during the disengagement, accuse the council of causing the entire struggle to fail because it was opposed to calling on soldiers to refuse orders, believe that "the time has come to end the attempt to please the secular community" and some even adopt the principle called "da'at Torah," which means subordinating political decisions to the rabbis' halakhic decisions.

Bezalel Smutritz, one of the leaders of Komemiyut, who thinks the country should be run according to the halakha, divides the settlers into three camps: the veteran camp, those who share the traditional views of the Yesha Council, whom he calls "establishment types" ( an expression that he utters with open disdain); new camps that were formed in the wake of the disengagement: those who are becoming ultra-Orthodox, or as Smutritz puts it, "Those who have to some extent severed their connection with the State of Israel and now describe themselves as non-Zionists;" and his camp, "which stands between the establishment types and the non-Zionists.

"We, as opposed to them, are not hitchhikers in the State of Israel," he says, explaining the differences. The Yesha Council, in his metaphor, is behaving like "hitchhikers in the State of Israel car." It sees the driver taking a wrong and dangerous route and points this out to him politely, but refrains from trying to force him to change direction. He says that the newly ultra-Orthodox are also behaving like hitchhikers: "When they saw the driver going the wrong way they jumped out of the car. We are not hitchhikers," he sums up, "and therefore we will fight with the driver so he'll change direction."

Komemiyut, whose leaders played a major role in organizing the demonstration in Homesh, is an organization that concentrates its activity among the students of the religious Zionist yeshivas and ulpanas (girls' high schools). Smutritz is the principal of the yeshiva in Kedumim and among his prominent followers are rabbis Zalman Melamed, Elyakim Levanon and Dov Lior. All are members of the militant splinter group of what was once the Committee of Yesha Rabbis, and they all supported the call to refuse orders during the disengagement.

Smutritz says that his organization's principal motivation is "the desire to once again enable our public to assert itself." Komemiyut wants to combine the struggle over the future of the settlements with additional battles that in the opinion of its leaders are related to it: During the past year they established "rabbinical courts for financial matters, which will serve as a Jewish alternative to the existing judicial system," all over the country, he says. And they also operate "a department for hazara b'tshuva [a return to religious observance] that operates among the elites of North Tel Aviv rather than among the unfortunates in the development towns." Smutritz wants to make it clear that the organization "is not talking about kiruv levavot or hitnahalut b'levavot [bringing people closer to Judaism], but about hazara b'tshuva. We are convinced that we have a great truth," he says, explaining the difference.

That is also the goal of Halev Hayehudi, a small, more extremist organization, which belongs to what Smutritz described as the non-Zionist camp among the settlers, and which also participated in the Homesh campaigns. It is led by Gadi Ben Zimra, one of the leaders of the struggle for refusing orders during the disengagement, who is identified with the views of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, a member of Chabad who headed the yeshiva that operated at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus.

Ben Zimra, who refused to be interviewed for this article, on the grounds that "Halev Hayehudi does not speak to the media," explained part of his philosophy at a convention held by his organization in Jerusalem about two weeks ago: "The religious community must create a different identity for the State of Israel, a genuine Jewish identity. When that happens and we ask soldiers whether they belong to the State of Israel that betrays its citizens and wants to uproot Jews from their homes, or to the Jewish people that favors a return to Zion and a return of the Jewish people to its home - the soldiers' answer will be: to the Jewish people, not to the State of Israel."

As opposed to Komemiyut and Halev Hayehudi, Meginei Eretz, whose members headed the Homesh Committee, concentrates on practical issues. This organization, whose ideologue is attorney Elyakim Haetzni, is openly working to establish an alternative to the Yesha Council. At the founding session of the organization last October in the settlement of Beit El, Haetzni explained that their first goal is to "map the people in Yesha who consider expulsion a crime and are willing to fight for their lives against it"; as well as to establish action committees that will unite all those who believe that "in this war it is permitted to block roads, to resist, to tell soldiers not to obey and to practice civil disobedience."

"Our ambition is to establish a body that will represent all the settlers and will behave politically the way the Yesha Council should have behaved," explained Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Yitzhak Shadmi, a leading activist in the organization. In the summer of 2005 he was removed from the command of the regional defense forces of the Benjamin Brigade, after getting 35 officers in the brigade to sign a letter calling on the chief of staff not to include the brigade in assignments related to the disengagement.

Mateh Tzafon is the only one of the organizations active in the Homesh Committee that is not composed of settlers. The organization began to operate during the days of the demonstrations against the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, when the militant right was dispersed all over the country and on both sides of the Green Line. The other committees fell apart, only Mateh Tzafon, which coordinated the protest activities in the area from Hadera to the Lebanese border, continues to exist. Today the organization is engaged in enlisting support for the struggles of the settlers among right-wingers who do not live in the settlements. Miriam Bar-Yosef, a leading activist in Mateh Tzafon who lives in the religious Moshav Sde Ilan, says that several dozen members of the committee, both religious and secular, participated in the demonstration in Homesh last week, but the influence of the organization within the Homesh Committee is considered very marginal.

Ne'emanei Eretz Israel, headed by Weiss and Levinger, also has little influence on the new leadership. Both are popular with the new organizations and the younger generation, and their radical ideological views are admired, but neither of them has demonstrated outstanding organizational abilities. The small organization they represent actually exists only on paper. It has no active institutions and no organizational or ideological activity. It is only a vestige of the various splits that took place in the extreme right in the early 1990s, and provides an organizational framework for the separate activity of Weiss and Levinger.

The question that still remains open is whether extremist groups such as Komemiyut and Meginei Eretz will be able to attract a majority of the settlers, who now number about a quarter of a million people with varied worldviews - as the Yesha Council did in the past. The leaders of the organizations are of course convinced of their ability to do so. The heads of the Yesha Council, who for a long time have been maintaining total media silence, respond in private conversations with a great deal of skepticism.

"For the time being the activity of the new organizations is being conducted alongside that of the Yesha Council," was the cautious comment by MK Uri Ariel, who in the past served as Yesha's director general and is now wooing the activists of the new organizations on behalf of his party, the National Union. "The Yesha Council is planted very deep both within the Israeli establishment and among the settler community," he added, "and only time will tell whether we are now truly witnessing the growth of an alternative leadership."