A few days ago I had some business in the West Bank settlement of Bet-El, a 20-minute drive across the flat, rocky plateau north of Jerusalem. Bet-El, which means “the house of God” in Hebrew, is a settlement of religious Jews founded in the late 1970s near the Palestinian village of Beitin, which is apparently the site of the biblical Bethel, where Jacob, according to tradition, dreamed in his sleep of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven.

It was my third visit to Bet-El. The first was not long after the settlement was founded. I was doing a month’s reserve duty in the army and for a few days was assigned to a detachment guarding it. It was composed, as I remember, of only a few houses, with empty space all around. It did not seem to pose much of a problem to anyone. There wasn’t a Palestinian town or village in sight, and should there ever be a need to evacuate the settlement’s handful of families, it could obviously be done without difficulty.

My second visit to Bet-El was some six years ago. I went to attend a wedding there. The place had grown beyond recognition and had a population of 4,000. It was nighttime and the lights of the northeastern outskirts of Ramallah, the temporary capital of the Palestinian Authority, could be seen a mile or more away on the flat horizon. Ramallah’s buildings weren’t that close, but they and Bet-El were clearly heading toward each other.

When I saw Bet-El a few days ago, it and Ramallah had practically merged. A few hundred yards separated them at most. Bet-El has become a town of more than 6,000 people. Ramallah is now a small city with close to 70,000. The two are on a collision course in more ways than one.

There are no relations of any kind between them. “Our neighbors,” Bet-El’s inhabitants call the residents of Ramallah with palpable sarcasm. The road leading to Bet-El from Jerusalem is traveled on almost exclusively by Israeli vehicles and passes through no Palestinian villages. For a short while it runs along the east — that is, the “wrong” — side of the separation barrier between Israel proper with its “settlement blocs” and the Palestinian territories.

Then the barrier disappears and you are deep in the territory that, so recent Israeli governments have made clear, are considered tradable for a peace treaty with the Palestinian Authority.

Ramallah is in “Area A,” as the land that the Palestinians were given full control of was designated by the Oslo agreement. Bet-El is in “Area C,” where Israel retains full control. The only way to cross the distance between them is to walk across open fields.

At the moment, the security situation is quiet. It’s been a while since anyone was shot at along the road from Jerusalem, which had its casualties during the 2000-2005 intifada. Still, when you drive it, you can’t help scanning the roadside for potential gunmen or rock throwers. There are plenty of places for them to hide. They could ambush you many times over on your way, although by now there’s hardly any need to do so, because they could fire at Bet-El’s houses from a window in Ramallah, too.

It takes a kind of courage to live there. But it takes a kind of madness as well. What can possibly be Bet-El’s future? What can be the future of a state of Israel in which Bet-El and Ramallah can no longer be separated?

And yet can they be separated? There are almost as many Jewish settlers in Bet-El alone today as there were in the entire Gaza Strip when it was evacuated by Israel’s army in the difficult summer of 2005. There are 80,000 settlers on the wrong side of the barrier.

True, not all of them would resist evacuation if it came; an estimated quarter to a half might even welcome it in return for the level of compensation received by the Gaza settlers. But that would still leave some 50,000 of them, including nearly all Bet-El’s, who might have to be removed by force. Is that feasible? Might the numbers not already be too large for it? Might it already not be too late?

The irony, of course, is that it is not only in Bet-El that many people hope it is too late. It is also in Ramallah. More and more Palestinians are coming to the conclusion that their best chance of getting all of Palestine back one day is to get none of it back right now. Let Israel become increasingly entangled in the West Bank until it can no longer extract itself, they reason, and sooner or later, perhaps in another generation, perhaps in two, the sheer weight of Palestinian numbers will bring the Jewish state down. This is not only the outlook of Hamas. Many less extreme Palestinians have come around to it, too. They will continue to suffer, of course. Maybe their children will as well. But in the end the entire structure will collapse.

And who is to say that they are wrong? In Bet-El this possibility is shrugged off disdainfully. God gave the Land of Israel to the Jews; if they keep faith with him, He will see to it that they never lose it.

Faith, like courage, is an admirable thing. But it, too, is easily allied with madness. Although miracles sometimes happen, a wise rabbinical adage advises one not to rely on them. Toward the Jews, at least, God is fickle; he has proved it more than once in the past.

If I were a religious Jew living in Bet-El, I might believe in him and pray for his mercy, but I would never count on him to come through in the pinch.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.