Nisuy kelim was the Hebrew phrase used by the settler movement for its nationwide demonstrations on Israel’s highways last week. Although the phrase can be translated as “a trial run,” this misses the grim hint of violence behind it. Nisuy kelim, literally “testing weapons,” is a military term that denotes firing and adjusting one’s guns before going into battle with them.

By their own standards, the settlers’ “trial run” was a big success. Despite precautions taken in advance and a massive police presence, they managed to tie up traffic all over the country by sitting or lying on the roads until dragged away. Irate motorists sat fuming at the wheel while missing appointments and coming home late for dinner. Many stepped out of their cars to scream at the demonstrators – nearly all of them young Orthodox boys and girls – who sang religious songs to drown out the motorists’ protests.

Afterward, when the last demonstrators were cleared away in police wagons, the settlers were jubilant. “We did it!” they cried. This was but a small foretaste of what was to come. If Ariel Sharon went ahead with his Gaza disengagement plan, they would reduce the country to chaos. Hadn’t they just proved that they were capable of it?

In fact, however, the settlers’ “weapons testing” was not a huge success at all. It was a colossal failure, not because it failed to accomplish its aims, but because of them.

For over a year, starting with the intraparty Likud referendum on disengagement in May 2004, the settlers sought to win hearts. And, indeed, the referendum, in which they canvassed from house to house and helped turn out a heavily anti-disengagement vote, seemed a sign that they were winning them. Encouraged, they turned from the Likud to the country at large. A massive PR campaign was launched to convince Israelis that disengagement would be a disaster and that – as billboards all over the country declared – “Jews don’t evict Jews.”

But the country at large was not the Likud. Israelis refused to be convinced. Every opinion poll taken of them over the past year has shown that close to two-thirds remain supportive of the prime minister’s plan. All the settlers’ arguments failed to dent this majority, for the simple reason that, although they sought to play vigorously on Israeli emotions, they were unable to appeal to Israeli minds.

Not a single argument was intellectually persuasive; not a single reasonable alternative to disengagement was proposed. A secular public that did not accept the contention that Israel should hold on to the Gaza settlements because they were part of a God-given Land of Israel saw no logic in 8,000 Jewish settlers continuing to live in a strategically and historically unimportant area among over a million land-starved Palestinians. Meanwhile, a government and Knesset that felt no significant public pressure to retreat from disengagement went on preparing and legislating for it.

As a result, the settlers have changed tactics. The efforts at friendly persuasion have stopped. Threats have replaced cajoling. The message to the country is no longer, “Don’t withdraw from Gaza because it is wrong,” but rather, “Don’t withdraw from Gaza because we will make your lives miserable if you do.”

There is no chance that this will work. On the contrary. Although Israeli supporters of disengagement have no desire for their lives to be made miserable, making them so will simply cause whatever sympathy they may have for the settlers to evaporate completely. Rather than feel sorry for the settlers’ plight at facing eviction, they are now beginning to feel that eviction is what the settlers deserve. “If you don’t care about me sitting in my car at an intersection for hours,” the reaction is, “why should I care about you being forced to leave your home?”

Last week’s “trial run” was the settlers’ admission that they have lost. No longer hoping to derail disengagement, they now only hope to make it as unpleasant as possible.

And yet there is a logic to this. It becomes apparent as soon as one realizes that the real struggle is no longer over Gaza but over the West Bank.

True, Mr. Sharon has repeatedly stated that, once the disengagement from Gaza has taken place, he has no further plans to withdraw Israeli forces and settlements elsewhere. It is clear, however, that this is not the direction in which the Gaza disengagement is pointing. The next step in Mr. Sharon’s strategy for radically improving Israel’s situation in the absence of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians by drawing unilateral borders that make demographic, military, and political sense will be to start pulling back to the West Bank security fence now being built, which will necessitate abandoning the settlements beyond it.

The settlers understand this, just as they understand that withdrawing to the fence will mean evacuating not 8,000 settlers but 10 times that number – and from areas of Judea and Samaria that, unlike Gaza, lie at the biblical heartland of the historic Land of Israel. The loss of this heartland would be not merely a blow to their world, as is that of the Gaza settlements; it would spell the total collapse of it.

Hence their determination to tie the country into knots as the date for disengagement this summer approaches. “We may not be able to stop it,” they are now saying, “but if this is what happens when you evacuate 8,000 settlers, we want you to realize what will happen if you ever try evacuating 75,000. You had better forget about that right now.”

The Gaza settlements will be evacuated this summer. Everyone in Israel knows that. The real question is whether the trauma of it will be so great that no larger-scale repeat of it on the West Bank will be deemed possible. The settlers’ strategy is to see to it that this is the case.

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