Ilan is a mapmaker. He has travelled the country extensively. He pulls out a map and points to a dot. "Modi'in Ilit," he says. This is the world's perspective: dots on a map. It doesn't show the apartment blocks, the schools, the malls, the playgrounds. Ilan sips his black coffee. We're sitting in one of his native Tel Aviv's many chic cafés. Water spurts out of the nearby fountain, gleeful children in the playpen exploit an illusory freedom from parents chatting away noisily at other tables, every so often moving their seats to stay out of the shade. This city is restless. It would eat the serene Nili whole. Tel Aviv is also the bastion of Israel's secular Left, but even here one finds pockets of support for the settlement enterprise.

"Both Jews and Arabs have a lot of history and religious and emotional attachment to this land," Ilan declares. "Ultimately, Tel Aviv is peripheral. Yehudah and Shomron are the biblical heartlands." It is a rare admission from a resident of this city, which fancies itself the centre of the Israeli universe. 

Highway 60, Derech Avot ("the route of the fathers") runs along the spine of the West Bank and traces the path trodden by the biblical patriarchs. Tradition teaches that Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah, are all buried in Hebron, Rachel in Bethlehem, and Joseph in Shechem (Nablus). Other sites like Shilo, Dotan (Jenin) and Beit El keep the biblical past alive, and Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, is the pearl in the crown. The Hebrew word for settler, mitnachel, comes from the word, nachalah, heritage, or inheritance. The settlers are realising the inheritance of the nation by settling in the biblical heartland.

This country is exceptionally grateful for its inheritance. This café is located on Ibn Gvirol Street, named after the medieval Jewish poet. All these roads are named after biblical kings, Talmudic rabbis, medieval philosophers, Zionist thinkers, Jewish philanthropists, Israeli pioneers, and the fauna and flora of the land. "The Arabs had the land for a long time, and they did nothing with it," Ilan observes. "Now they see what can be done with it, and they want it."

He concedes that he would support withdrawing from the territories for the sake of true peace, but he struggles to imagine such a scenario. This scepticism seems well-founded: previous withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza did not bring peace to those borders. It also seems logical: if the Palestinian Arabs are incapable of tolerating Jewish communities in their state, is that really "peace"?