The settlements are designed to feel like safe, suburban oases, but they are not. The presence of settlers, so close to Palestinian towns, makes them a target of particularly fierce enmity. Stones once shattered car windshields so often that many settlers replaced the glass in their vehicles with rock-resistant plastic. Before the wall was built, stray bullets, fired from below, sometimes burst into homes. In the settlement of Efrat, a few hills over from Tekoa, one suicide bomber detonated his bomb inside the medical center. Another was shot to death as he was about to blow himself up in the settlement's supermarket. He was killed not by a soldier but by a settler.

"Our children have been to more funerals than most people have been to in their whole lives," says Sara Bedein, a mother of six who lives in Efrat. "All my kids have friends, neighbors, classmates who have been killed." Bedein wears a bright scarf on her head—Orthodox Jewish women, like traditional Muslims, do not display their hair in public. She says that, after one school-bus bombing tore off the legs of three young students and killed two teachers, her daughter and schoolmates began sitting cross-legged on the bus, believing it would reduce the chance of losing limbs in an attack. And yet, if you ask Bedein why her family doesn't move out of the occupied territory, she answers immediately and unequivocally: "We love it here." She loves the views, the mountain air, the settlers' tight sense of community.

Many settlers keep sidearms strapped to their waists, sheriffs in their own Wild West. Some even carry weapons to synagogue, and while praying, while raising their arms, beseeching God, it's clear that any protection they seek is not solely divine: There is the unmistakable glint of a handgun snapped into a holster.

When Seth Mandell takes a short walk in the wilderness, he carries his nine-millimeter Glock in a fanny pack. Mandell lives in Tekoa, a couple of streets away from Rabbi Froman. His hike has become a ritual of grief. He works his way down a steep, slippery trail, speckled with scarlet wildflowers, bursts of color in the dun desertscape. A few doves circle above. Doves in the sky; olive branches beneath.

Mandell is heading toward a small grotto, a tranquil spot where, he says, monks have come to meditate since the fifth century. No surprise that a 13-year-old boy was inspired to explore. The boy was Koby Mandell, Seth's son. He cut school one day, in May 2001, with his 14-year-old friend Yosef Ishran, also from Tekoa. They hung out in this low-ceilinged cave. Perhaps they sat in the cool shade and looked out the entrance: a spectacular view of a rocky canyon, the walls dropping sere and still into a dry riverbed below.

When night fell and the boys had not returned home, searches were initiated. Soldiers arrived. The next morning, Koby and Yosef were found in the cave. They had been bludgeoned to death with stones. The walls of the cave were smeared with their blood. Next to the bodies lay their lunch bags, with uneaten sandwiches and bottles of water. The killers were never caught. The pain Seth Mandell feels when he walks down here seems to emanate from him like heat waves off a sidewalk. But Mandell says that he and his family—his wife and their three other children—have no plans to leave. He says what Rabbi Froman says. He says what many settlers say. His connection to this land is spiritually, emotionally, and culturally profound. "Leaving," he says, "would be leaving a part of myself behind."