At checkpoints, a gentle advocate for Palestinians

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Gaza/West Bank Pullout

(08-02) 04:00 PST Occupied West Bank -- This is the third in a Chronicle series on Israel's planned evacuation later this month of approximately 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The stories are told through the lives and voices of individuals touched by the conflict.

Today: For an Israeli grandmother, disengagement is not enough..

Squinting slightly, Hanna Barag, 69, self-appointed military watchdog, tilted her head back to peer through tinted glasses at the Israel Defense Forces captain towering over her. She smiled, and the captain smiled back.

"I think she's helping," said the captain, who declined to give his name but promised to clean up concertina wire and other debris left over from his unit's temporary occupation of a Palestinian home in the West Bank town of Saara that was on Barag's to-do list. "Israel needs more people like Hanna."

It's a far from universal opinion among Israeli soldiers, some of whom criticize her watchdog activities -- monitoring the military's behavior at checkpoints in the West Bank, taking notes, helping Palestinians in their interaction with soldiers -- as distracting and potentially dangerous.

Even less widely shared is her underlying goal: disengagement not just from the Gaza Strip and isolated pockets of the West Bank, which is set to begin in two weeks, but from all of the Palestinian territories Israel has occupied for the past 38 years.

But the captain's praise says something about her ability to reach out on a bitterly controversial issue, unlike some of her fellow activists in the Machsom Watch (Checkpoint Watch), who wear checkered Arab kaffiyeh around their necks and berate checkpoint soldiers as "evil" and "Nazis."

"Not everything the Palestinians do is right. And not everything we do is wrong," Barag said as she scanned the long lines of Palestinians waiting to pass through a military checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Nablus on a recent hot summer day. "We do enough."

Barag sees no contradiction between smiling at soldiers and criticizing their acts. Her motives are pro-Israeli, prompted, she says, by concern with what the ongoing occupation is doing to her own people.

"I don't do this for the Palestinians," she said. "I am doing this for Israeli society."

While her tactics may not be widely applauded, her sentiment echoes across a broad swath of Israelis who want to see an end to the occupation, less out of moral or legal concerns than out of a conviction that occupying land filled with millions of restive mostly Muslim Arabs endangers Israel's identity, both as a Jewish state and as a democracy.

Now, on the eve of Israel's scheduled disengagement from the Gaza Strip, such voices are more clearly heard, as evidenced by support for the disengagement, increasing criticism of the Jewish settlements and the willingness of people like Barag to become more actively involved. Barag's own evolution as an activist is rooted in the decades of war and occupation she has witnessed throughout what she calls the "drama of my life."

Barag was born in 1935 in Haifa to parents who had emigrated from Germany before Hitler's rise to power, and her ride home from the hospital was interrupted by skirmishes between Jews, Arabs and the British who ruled what was then called Palestine. Her first night was spent in a bathtub, the safest place in her parents' home.

"I was born with the conflict. And since I was born, there wasn't a quiet day in this country," she says.

The family lived in then-tiny Tel Aviv. Her father, an engineer, worked in a nearby Arab village. On Saturdays the family would ride in a horse-drawn carriage to the Arab port of Jaffa (since incorporated into Tel Aviv) or take walks together to the Mediterranean beaches there.

Barag remembers the years of curfew toward the end of the British mandate in Palestine in the 1940s. She recalls the horror as news of the Holocaust reached her family -- an aunt and an uncle died in Auschwitz -- and how the Jews of Tel Aviv prepared for a German invasion. And she remembers the day when her parents bought their first radio so they could hear the declaration of Israeli independence on May 14, 1948.

"That was the first time I saw my parents cry," she said. They marked the day by buying her a new bicycle -- she promptly fell, tearing her father's new suit as she tried to grab onto him. "Two minutes later, the first bombardment started of Tel Aviv by the Egyptians."

Israel's War of Independence lasted 13 months, and Barag ended up in Minasa Shalva, a politically oriented school where students discussed Martin Buber and Karl Marx, and even debated whether the Germans also were victims of Hitler's Third Reich. Looking back, she said, one subject rarely seemed to be mentioned: the Arabs who shared the land now called Israel.

After school, when she was 18, she joined the army -- not yet a common choice among young Israeli women -- and became a clerk in a paratrooper reserve unit. It was a time of large-scale Jewish immigration, both from Europe and Arab countries, and she spent much of her time teaching Hebrew in muddy refugee camps.

The organizational precision she learned from her German parents attracted attention, and at 19, Barag was abruptly ordered to report as a secretary to Moshe Dayan, then chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces.

"One of the most obnoxious people I ever met in my life," Barag recalls. "A very unpleasant man."

She also was a secretary for a while to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben- Gurion. "It was a lot of hard work," she said about working for the man regarded as Israel's founding father. "Just packing a suitcase for a prime minister is a story in itself."

But Barag says she did not think about politics much until she left government service and moved to London. For the first time she had regular access to television and watched images of the American war in Vietnam and of her own nation's lightning victory over surrounding Arab armies in the June 1967 war -- one of whose architects was her former boss, Moshe Dayan.

After six days, Israel, in addition to reuniting Jerusalem, had taken over the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank, which had been governed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, which had been controlled by Egypt.

Most of her countrymen saw the victory as a miracle, as deliverance, even, from a second Holocaust. Barag did not. From London, she called her father on the phone.

"I said to him, 'Everyone here is so happy, and I feel so depressed. I have seen what happened in Vietnam, and we are going to be an occupying force. If we don't leave now, it will corrupt us, and it will be the end of us.' "

"I knew that we were there to stay," Barag added, "that the power of history, religion and extremism was more powerful than people who don't see several steps ahead."

Some Israelis shared her opinion -- including Ben-Gurion, who is famously quoted as saying Israel must leave the territories as soon as possible, though some Israelis note that his statements at the time were inconsistent at best. But most of Barag's friends at the time were criticizing her sharply, even angrily.

"From that day on, I never said another word. I never said my thoughts," she said. "The next time I said something political was four years ago."

The signal event was the second Palestinian intifada, which broke out in September 2000.

It was a demoralizing shock, commonly described by Israelis as a slap in the face. It dashed the hopes that had been raised by the 1993 Oslo peace accords, signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, which had brought to an end the first intifada.

The Camp David peace talks, hosted by former President Bill Clinton and continued at Taba, Egypt, collapsed at the end of 2000, and by 2001, the level of violence had reached a terrible crescendo.

Barag was not immune from it -- her best friend, she says, was killed in a bombing. One failed suicide bomber threw his nonfunctioning explosive belt into her front yard in Jerusalem as he fled.

Stunned and angered, even Israelis who had opposed the occupation embraced their government's method of combatting the intifada -- the separation barrier, targeted killings, checkpoints -- measures they normally would have considered anathema.

But for Barag, the killings of Israelis and Palestinians were the realization of the prediction she made to her father decades earlier.

Recently divorced, her two children grown and her convention-organization business in a shambles as tourism died off during the intifada, she decided in December 2001 that 35 years of silence was enough.

Barag joined Machsom Watch, an all-female organization founded by three Jewish women in January 2001 that claims a membership of 400 women, many of them professional and middle-aged. Its stated purpose, according to its Web site, is to "monitor the behavior of soldiers and police at checkpoints," "ensure that the human and civil rights of Palestinians attempting to enter Israel are protected" and to "record and report the results of our observations to the widest possible audience."

Barag's initiation took place with a soldier at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. It didn't start out very well.

"He said to me, 'Oh, you're a Palestinian whore,' " she recalled. "This was my first time out."

At the end of her five-hour shift, she walked past the soldier who had called her a whore.

I said, 'Do you think that a woman my age has any chance at that profession? ... 'Would you say the same thing to your grandmother?' "

The next time she came to the checkpoint, Barag recalled, the soldier had flowers waiting for her.

Barag, who now often speaks on the organization's behalf, says that engaging the soldiers on a personal level is more effective than insulting them.

"I think this is a war crime," she said, referring to the occupation, as she stood among the kebab vendors and crowds of battered yellow taxis waiting to pick up Palestinians forced to leave their own cars on the far side of the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus.

"But why would I go up to the army and call them war criminals? The next time I'm at a checkpoint and a woman is having a baby, who am I going to talk to?" she asked. "Who am I going to talk to, God? Who is going to help us?"

Still, Barag and Machsom Watch have plenty of critics. Writing in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot in 2003, political commentator Yossi Olmert said the activists "disrupt the work of soldiers at checkpoints who are trying, not always successfully, to prevent the entry of terrorists."

Barag rejects the criticism and questions the usefulness of checkpoints, saying they enrage Palestinians without making Israel safer. She is skeptical of Israeli army claims of explosives found at the checkpoints, which soldiers and even many moderate Israelis cite as evidence that the system is at worst a necessary evil.

Still, she says, she has seen improvements at checkpoints -- roofs, bathrooms, and the like -- small victories, as far as she is concerned, although some of her fellow activists in Machsom Watch see them as formalizing an institution that should be eliminated.

But Barag says checkpoints might be acceptable as part of an international border between Israel and an independent state of Palestine that follows the pre-1967 war Israeli Green Line.

At the Hawara checkpoint, Barag, a grandmother, moved slowly and deliberately, her gray hair peeking from beneath her cap, her form stooped. Around her crowds of Palestinians disembarked from buses and taxis to walk through the checkpoint and get back in a vehicle on the other side. Donkey carts kicked up dust as they moved slowly through the line. A 14-year-old boy approached the bored checkpoint soldiers and said he was trying to reach his father in Nablus but carried no identification at all. The soldiers turned him away.

Amid the bustle, Barag slowly meandered, watching the action, passing easily between the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the line, a journey that could lead to violence or arrest for most Palestinians and even for some Israeli citizens if they tried it without permission.

"Because I'm small and I'm old, I have an advantage," she said, sipping water from a bottle as the sun beat down on her tiny frame. "I have gray hair, I look like a grandmother -- I can do things the young people would never get away with."

Right now, she is not optimistic that this month's disengagement will make for dramatic change -- it won't mean the end of Israeli checkpoints throughout much of the West Bank, for example. She does not think that the occupation will end in her lifetime. But she believes that her actions are helping.

"People are impatient. If they join a political movement, they want it now, immediately. They want a revolution," she said. "We are not Niagara Falls. We are a drip system. Drop by drop by drop."

E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at [email protected].