In an unprecedented move, Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Dec 13, cut ties with one of the dozens of religious seminaries that feed students to the military amid concerns that its ideologically driven students might refuse orders to evacuate settlements.

The military was concerned that the chief rabbi of the school, known as a “hesder” yeshiva and located in the West Bank settlement of Har Bracha, was educating students to become insubordinate soldiers.

Israel’s move highlights the military’s increasing unease about a clash of values involving soldiers who arrive in a secular army after being taught that holding on to the biblical land of Israel is a religious duty.

The break is another sign of a festering rift between the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the religious nationalists who spearheaded the settler movement.

“The rabbis are saying the land of Israel is sanctified more than the orders you get to dismantle these settlements. And by the time they get to the army they are brainwashed,” says Yossi Alpher, an advisor to former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who is now coeditor of online opinion journal Bitterlemons.org. “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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