A Day in the Country

From Jerusalem the train winds slowly north through the olive and cypress-pillared Soreq River valley, dust-dry in late summer. The track follows a late nineteenth-century Ottoman route, one of countless marks left by earlier empires on this land.

Facing me sit two soldiers in olive green. With buds in ears, he nods to music in his head; she dozes behind high-fashion sunglasses. Across the aisle, three soldiers play cards, sleeves rolled neatly to the elbow. All have assault rifles propped beside them or nestled in laps.

We pass a hillside village, children in dark blue uniforms walking to school; a sand quarry, orchards, towns, a forest of construction cranes, crimson bougainvillea spilling over a wall, one gaunt cow grazing in a field of rubble.

DOROTHY NAOR

The train terminates at Tel Aviv, Israel's metropolis. In the Central Station hall, more soldiers sprawl among their packs. Outside, the city quavers under a blanket of humid heat. Through ranks of buses I see an older-model green Volkswagen Passat, a woman waving, short grey hair – this would be Dorothy Naor.

Introductions done, I launch into small talk about the weather, a Canadian habit. But Dorothy interrupts, "I want to get on the road right away. We have a long day ahead of us." She doesn't seem so much rude as driven.

She lives up the Mediterranean coast in Herzliya, named for Theodor Herzl, a revered founder of Zionism. Dorothy was born in San Francisco in 1932. At 18 she flew to the new state of Israel, then only two years old, for a Zionist leadership training course. "Like many of us who grew up during the Holocaust, I was convinced that the only place where Jews could be safe would be in a country of our own. And now suddenly here it was! Of course I was quickly enamoured with lots of Israelis I met, including the one I married." They met at university in California.

With help from a Hungarian uncle, Eric Naor had slipped out of Austria at age ten with an older brother, after the Nazi coup in 1938. They made their way to Palestine, then under British rule. Of their immediate family, Eric and his brother were the only survivors; the others died in concentration camps.

After fighting in the 1948 war of independence, and proudly taking the name of his new country, Israel Naor went to California to study water engineering. There he met Dorothy, working on a PhD in English. They married in 1952, and four years later they emigrated, or made aliyah – Hebrew for "ascending" – to the promised land.

"I thought it would be the perfect place to raise our kids," says Dorothy, "a place of our own where Jewish customs, holidays and culture would be the norm." Working for an Israeli engineering company, Israel Naor specialized in international waterworks, dams and canals. Dorothy raised the kids, completed her PhD at Tel Aviv University, and taught English in several countries where they went for Israel's work.

East of Tel Aviv the air clears visibly, as if the windshield had been washed. Under a cloudless sky, the land here looks hard and white, scraped bare.

THE GREEN LINE

"Now pay attention here," Dorothy says with pointed emphasis – I can hear the teacher. "We've just crossed the so-called Green Line. That means we have left Israel and are now in the Palestinian territories. But do you see any sign to that effect, 'Welcome to the West Bank?' Of course not, the Israeli government would never allow it. This is psychological expansion. We're meant to regard all of this land as part of Israel."

The "Green Line" refers to the truce line between Israel and its older neighbours – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – after the 1948 war. It left the new state with almost 80 per cent of the land that had constituted the British colony of Palestine.

As Israel expands, the Green Line has become little more than a historical footnote, a myth. Dorothy tells me that Israel is the only country in the world that refuses to define its borders.

We're flying east on newly built Road 5, wide and smooth. It links Tel Aviv to massive Israeli settlements deep in the northern West Bank. "This used to be Palestinian farmland," my guide explains, "but hardly any of the colonists are farmers. They all work in the city – morning and afternoon you'll see long lines of commuters on this road. Not only are we stealing the land, we're also urbanizing it, the way we've done with so much of Israel."

Why does she say "colonists" instead of the usual "settlers"? "I prefer to call them what they are", Dorothy replies crisply. "The distortion of words is another form of occupation, one that should offend anyone who cares about language. 'Settlement' sounds much nicer, especially to Americans who did exactly the same thing. But when you occupy other people's land and build towns on it, that's a colony."

I watch her as she drives, face set, a little fierce, but with enough laugh lines to imply the delight she takes in her eight grandchildren. She wears sturdy sandals, jeans and a white shirt, long-sleeved for modesty because we'll be visiting Palestinians during Ramadan, the holiest time of the year. To respect our hosts who will be fasting dawn to dusk, we won't eat or drink.

Dorothy makes this journey often, either to educate foreigners like me or to transport Palestinians from the West Bank, often children with serious illness, to hospital in Israel. I suspect this formidable grandmother would not be easy for young Israeli soldiers to turn back at the checkpoints.

How did she first encounter Palestinians? "For many years I never met any. We weren't supposed to, you know, except maybe the occasional gardener. Of course there were things that bothered me, but with the kids, the PTA [Parent-Teacher Association], teaching and everything, who had time to ask questions?"

What things bothered her? "Oh, lots of things, things you have to work harder each time to ignore. Probably the first big shock I couldn't ignore was when Goldstein murdered all those people in the mosque." On 25 February 1994, American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron, in army uniform and carrying an assault rifle. Unimpeded by Israeli soldiers on duty there, he opened fire on the worshippers, killing 29–52 (Israeli and Palestinian sources differ on the count), and wounding more than 100, before survivors beat him to death.

Dorothy says, "What disturbed me almost as much as the massacre was the fact that, instead of removing the colonists from Kiryat Arba, Rabin locked up the Palestinians." On orders from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, the army imposed a two-week curfew, 24 hours a day, on the 120,000 Palestinian...