Barak's action has incensed Israel's right wing, which supports the settlers and has vowed to oppose the 10-month freeze on settlement building announced by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, under pressure from Washington, in late November.

Netanyahu's action triggered a wave of confrontations between settlers and the army across the West Bank.

Some ultra-Orthodox soldiers, products of the seminary network and exhorted by rabbis, refused to go against the settlers. A dozen soldiers have been sentenced to jail terms and others have been reprimanded.

Raising the specter of mutiny in the armed forces, Barak, a former chief of staff, cracked down on Dec. 13. He expelled a West Bank seminary, known as a hesder yeshiva, because its principal rabbi, Eliezer Melamed, refused to condemn acts of mutiny by pro-settler soldiers.

It was the first time that a yeshiva had been disowned by the military since it made an arrangement with a group of seminaries in the 1950s under which religious draftees could combine military service with their religious studies.

There are now more than 40 of these institutions, more than half of them located near Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Melamed's seminary is part of the settlement of Har Bracha, a hotbed of hard-line settlers.

He preaches that religious soldiers are bound by the laws of God to refuse to obey any order to evacuate settlements or prevent their construction.

This ideological divide emerged forcefully in the weeks preceding Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in September 2005, when some soldiers refused to enforce the abandonment of Israeli settlements there.

Barak's unprecedented action against one of the most ideological of these seminaries raised a clamor of outrage among religious Israelis and the right wing.

But it underlined the military's growing unease about the widening rift between the ultra-Orthodox, who believe that God gave Judea and Samaria -- the biblical name for the West Bank -- to the children of Israel, and secular Israelis who support the idea of ending the 42-year-old occupation of the West Bank as part of a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

Rabbis in the military have been whipping up opposition to the government and the military high command for months.

During the 22-day Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip in December and January, rabbis distributed leaflets to soldiers describing the battle as a struggle against evil and urging them to slaughter their enemies.

Barak fears that Israel's nationalist-religious camp sympathizes with the young soldiers who are defying their commanders.

As one commentator put it, "In this sense, the Israeli government's longstanding fostering of religious settlers to expand Israel's borders at the expense of the Palestinians may be coming home to roost."

Barak's action, he observed, "appears more than anything to be a belated attempt to put the Jewish fundamentalist genie back in the bottle. But it will take a lot more to accomplish that."

Barak had infuriated the settler and yeshiva networks and some army officers fear it will spur other religious soldiers to disobey orders to stop settlement expansion, even if Netanyahu had agreed to limit the freeze rather than halt all building as Washington demanded.

Whether the army will sever links with more hard-line seminaries is not clear, but most commentators are bracing for new and possibly violent confrontations involve army mutineers.

Indeed, as tempers rose on both sides, military officials disclosed Sunday that the government may soon use special commando units, unmanned surveillance aircraft and cellphone-jamming equipment to enforce the settlement freeze.

Settler leaders angrily vowed to resist all government efforts to neutralize them. That prompted Barak, secularist leader of the Labor Party, to warn the settlers he would unleash the full might of the army if they defied the government.

"The rabbis are saying that the land of Israel is sanctified more than the orders you get to dismantle these settlements," said Yossi Alpher, once an adviser to Yitzhak Rabin and now co-editor of bitterlemons.org, an Israeli-Palestinian Web site that encourages dialogue.

"This can be seen as the first step toward a major break between the secular security ethos and the religious nationalists."

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