Monday 01.23.06 - Official
Double Agent Screenshots
Eytan Sat went from kibbutz to kibbutz, asking for volunteers. Young people did not enlist in droves. The effort was a failure, Sat felt, but he signed up one here, two there.
One was Carmel Bar, a shepherd at kibbutz Mahanayim, just released from his reserve paratroop unit. Romanian born, Bar had spent part of his childhood in a Cyprus detention camp where the British kept Jews who tried to enter Palestine illegally. When Bar was five, his family reached Israel. He eventually came to Mahanayim with a group from a leftist youth movement. It was a schoolbook Labor Zionist biography; if there were an Israeli Norman Rockwell, he would have painted Bar. After Sat's recruiting stop, someone dropped by Bar's room and asked if he was interested. He agreed, though, "for my sins, I can't say why. I was a bachelor... with hot blood."
One day Bar got a call, telling him when to be out on the road. At the appointed time, an open jeep pulled up and took him to the former Syrian base at Aalleiqa in the Golan Heights. For practical purposes, Carmel Bar was the first Israeli settler in occupied territory.