Archaeologists are even to be prevented from digging up the bones of the

Archaeologists are even to be prevented from digging up the bones of the dead. Secular Israelis are deeply worried. It is not merely the threat that the non-kosher McDonalds in Shamai Street, Jerusalem might be closed. The deepest division in Israel is not between right and left, hawks and doves, but between the religious and secular Jews, between those who want a theocratic state and those who see Israel as a nation much like any other.A few months before he was assassinated, Mr Rabin denounced rabbinical "Ayatollahs" for calling on soldiers to disobey orders to withdraw from the West Bank. After the election Shulamit Aloni, a left-wing politician, said she feared the rise of "Khomeini-ism" in Israel. In both cases the terms were intended to be derogatory, but the growing strength of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, long disregarded abroad, has much in common with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world.The religious parties - the National Religious Party, Shas and United Torah Jewry - have played a pivotal political role in the past. In 1977 they brought down a Labour government after it had held a ceremony to mark the delivery of American military aircraft on the Sabbath.

In 1990 Shimon Peres was thwarted at the last moment in his attempt to form a government with ultra-Orthodox support because the influential nonagenarian, Rabbi Eliezer Menachem Shach, feared Labour party secularism: he suspected kibbutzniks of eating rabbit, a forbidden food under Jewish dietary rules.As secular parties like Labour and Likud decline, it is Shas and United Torah Jewry which alone give a sense of belonging. Leaders such as Rabbi Yitzhak Kadourie - who blessed the amulets - or Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, wearing dark glasses and a gold-embroidered robe, draw enthusiastic crowds of a kind quite unmatched by other party politicians. The success of Shas in the election stems partly from Rabbi Yosef's eloquent post-Sabbath sermons, broadcast by satellite to tens of thousands of his followers, mostly Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East.The hardcore of Jewish Orthodoxy are the Haredim - "those who fear God" - with their long side curls, dark suits and black hats. Every aspect of this tight-knit community's dress, diet and personal behaviour is geared to distinguish them not just from gentiles, but from other Jews.

Drivers who pass through the Mea She'Arim district in Jerusalem on the Sabbath are regularly stoned. Here people live in a world governed by intricate regulations, distinguishing them from others as minutely as the Indian caste system.Not surprisingly, the march of the ultra-Orthodox is proving highly unsettling to Jews in the diaspora, notably those in America, who belong to a more secular tradition. A letter from a coalition of 19 Jewish organisations in the US last week warned the incoming government against a surrender to the religious parties which "will not only threaten the atmosphere of moderation and mutual respect in Israel, but is also likely to create a serious rift with the Diaspora, where between 80 and 90 per cent are not Orthodox.".A few years ago, ultra-Orthodox Jews, in Israel and worldwide, might have been considered a remnant. The communities from which they came in Poland and Lithuania had been devastated by the Nazis. But more recently they benefited from two developments.Since Israel conquered the West Bank in the 1967 war, the Orthodox have drawn closer to territorial nationalism, and possession of the Land of Israel has become a priority; four out of the nine members of the National Religious Party in the Knesset come from Jewish settlements on the West Bank.The second trend benefiting the Jewish Orthodox is the same as that which has fuelled fundamentalist Christianity in the US and Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world.