That’s just fine with most Palestinians. If they have a strategy in the latest round of violence, it is to wear down the settlers and the soldiers who guard them, forcing Israelis to abandon the West Bank and Gaza. Rocks are not the only weapon they’re using: settlers have been shot at and bombed. Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis in the violence, but last week alone, five Israelis died in attacks on settlers, including the bombing of a schoolbus in Gaza. After two months of fighting, some officials in Fatah, the group under Yasir Arafat’s leadership that has steered the uprising, advocate driving the settlers out by force. In one case last week, a uniformed Palestinian policeman slipped into a settlement and killed two Israelis. “The settlers are living in the shade of fear and this situation will increase in the coming period,” promises Marwan Barghouthi, the head of Fatah in the West Bank. Another Fatah official adds: “Our goal is to make their lives intolerable so they leave.” Some already have. NEWSWEEK found that at least 100 families have left settlements since late September, some temporarily, others for good. With nearly 200,000 Israelis living in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s not exactly a flight. But interviews revealed many more would leave if they could.

That is especially true for settlers who came to the territories to improve their standard of living. The majority of them landed in communities near the Israeli border, an easy commute to work in Israel. Financial incentives and tax breaks offered by successive governments allowed them to live cheaply. Artzi bought his spacious home in Hermesh three years ago for $70,000. Other settlers paid as little as $10,000 for theirs. “We are not hard-core right-wingers,” says Rinat Ezra, a Hermesh resident who drives an Audi dented by stones. “But we could never have bought a house like this inside Israel,” she says, explaining why she can’t leave even if she wants to.

But the rising attacks have the opposite effect on ideological settlers, who moved to the territories because they felt Israel had religious and historic claims to the West Bank and Gaza. They built settlements near or even in Palestinian population centers like Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus, aiming to prevent the return of any part of the territories in a peace deal.

In Psagot, a religious community near Ramallah, nearly every night Palestinians fire automatic rifles and larger machine guns at a row of stone houses that face the Arab town. Settler families have sandbagged windows and no longer leave their homes at night. The shooting got so bad one night last week that Israeli tanks stationed at the settlement fired shells into Ramallah. Still, the settlers say they will not be moved. “It’s not pleasant being shot at, but you don’t just get up and leave your home,” says Yael Oren, whose house is one of the few in her row that hasn’t been hit.

For Palestinians, Psagot represents something else altogether: an impediment to independence. The settlement’s population has doubled since Israelis and Palestinians reached their first interim peace accord in 1993. Palestinians interpreted the agreement to mean Israel would freeze settlement expansion while the two sides negotiated the terms of a final deal. Instead, settlements continued to grow. According to figures of the Israeli Peace Now group, the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza has risen by more than 50 percent since 1993, and the number of houses and apartments has grown proportionally. Leaders of Peace Now say clashes with Palestinians reinforce the argument that the settlements should be dismantled.

But the Palestinian strategy is already backfiring. Pollster Hanoch Smith says popular Israeli support for the settlers has grown significantly since the latest round of fighting began; only 17 percent of Israelis think the settlements should be removed. Once viewed as zealots, “settlers are now looked upon as the frontline fighters,” says Smith. For Artzi that’s little comfort. “I feel like a refugee now, living neither here nor there,” he says, sitting in his dilapidated two-room apartment on the kibbutz. It’s a modest alternative to his house in Hermesh, but it beats life as a moving target.