The Human Spirit: Babies Against Disengagement

Jan 21, 2005

By BARBARA SOFER

Miriam Fleishman, 29, a freckled Sabra with a striped colored head scarf, is sitting on a curb at Jerusalem's Russian Compound while her daughter Kamah, five months old, is snoozing in a baby carriage in the winter sunshine. A dozen demonstrators and a like number of journalists rush forward as a representative in a black jacket comes out of the magistrate's court to order Fleishman and two other Hebron women inside for sentencing.

Fleishman is one of those multigenerational Sabras about whom the mantle "settler" never seems to fit. Her great-great-grandfather painted the Machpela Cave in Hebron - the burial site of Israel's matriarchs and patriarchs - where she grew up. At the cusp of what may be the most wrenching juncture of the tectonic plates that form our country, she is an unlikely defendant in a precedent-setting case.

Fleishman was arrested while protesting the midnight eviction of Livnat Ozeri, widow of murdered Nati Ozeri, and her five children from their concrete and metal home on Hill 26, an outpost near Kiryat Arba.

Fleishman, a housewife and mother of six, was outraged that the Ozeri children were yanked from their beds into the icy rain. She joined the demonstrators with her own four-month-old son Yosef strapped inside a cloth baby carrier. Apparently, to escape the biting wind, she and several other moms with tots entered an empty van. In an act of civil disobedience, they locked the doors and refused to leave until the police sawed open the vehicle.

The protest took place in March 2003, but Miriam's case has come up now as we brace for family struggles over their homes.

Chilling TV coverage of babies pulled from their mothers' arms in pre-disengagement scuffles have already provided previews of forthcoming events.

It's easier to give lip service to proclaiming that children should be left at home. Babies will be in the very homes where the struggle takes place. Who can expect their mothers, who have been leaders in the settlement movement, to stand aside because they have children in their arms?

And if they take advantage of the vulnerability of children to win public sympathy? Black children marching into the fire hoses did more than Martin Luther King's speeches to crush opposition to the civil rights movement.

FLEISHMAN AND the two other women, Elisheva Federman and Yifat Alkobi, stay outside, denying the authority of the court to judge and sentence them. Judge Yehezkel Barkali decides that the women's presence at the portal of the courthouse is good enough, and reads the sentence.

They are devoted mothers, he submits, but by bringing their babies to demonstrations they are indeed guilty of neglect. They "have taken advantage of the sensitivity of the police not to injure babies," and hence hindered them in the fulfillment of their duties. Their beliefs don't justify exposing babies to the physical and emotional damage of violence.

"With severity do we see their choice of bringing their children to a demonstration in order to use them as a human shield instead of making the good of the children a priority in their concerns."

He rejects the women's analogy that they have acted like Israeli pioneering women, pointing out the pioneers' willingness to evacuate their children from expected danger.

Punishment for child neglect is up to three years in jail, but the judge gives them suspended sentences. Nonetheless, his warning is clear: Endanger your kids again and you'll risk a term in Neveh Tirtza Prison, among murderers, drug dealers, and an increasing number of female terrorists.

The judgment raises more questions than it answers: about placing limits on the democratic rights of women (who are more often in charge of family child care); about the arbitrariness of trying three Hebron women as a test case when children are frequently present at other demonstrations; about whether the women were intentionally out to foil the police or used to taking their babies everywhere in papooses; about what constitutes endangerment (going to a demonstration, living in an outpost, living in Hebron, or Jerusalem, Afula, Tel Aviv or Haifa, for that matter); whether certain populations in this country are unfairly hounded; about the justice system's ability or desire to incarcerate thousands of women who will take part in civil disobedience together with their children when defense forces come to take them from their homes.

All these questions aside, the judge's motives are wholesome: He recoils from exposing children to violence from zealous grown-ups, while either defying the law or enforcing it. Like us, he is aware of the urgent need - before the going gets rougher - for police and activists to think out red lines of behavior to protect children.

They need to do this not because a judge orders it, but because our values demand it. No matter how fervent or righteous a cause, we must keep all our sons and daughters safe because we cannot abide gains bought by the suffering or - God forbid - the martyrdom of our children.