British-backed activist who keeps track of Israel's West Bank activities

IF Palestinians one day achieve a viable state, they will owe some thanks to a determined young Israeli activist and her British backers for its territory not being entirely eclipsed by Israeli settlements.

Hagit Ofran, a down-to-earth former university student of Jewish history, uses a four-wheel drive vehicle, pocket-sized camera and a deep sense of mission in order to monitor the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank area captured during the 1967 Six Day War.

Her findings translate into pressure on the Israeli government from abroad and within to stop further encroachment on Palestinian land.

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Ms Ofran's official title is director of the settlement watch team of the Peace Now organisation. In practice, she is a spy operating in hostile territory, snooping, sniffing and piecing together snippets of intelligence to show how much illicit building is going on.

The British government is contributing 93,000 to the project this year.

Last Thursday, Ms Ofran spotted four new trailer homes on a hillside of the Alon settlement east of Jerusalem, structures that are in effect helping to fragment the heartland of a future Palestine.

"It's not that one caravan will change the chances of Middle East peace," says Ms Ofran, "But another and another will determine if we can have a two-state solution to the conflict or not."

Ms Ofran claims Israel's right-wing government now faces a crucial decision over whether or not to extend a ten month partial freeze on settlement building that expires in September.

"If it is not extended than the freeze may have delayed a few hundred sites for months, but it will not have caused a real change. If work is restarted it might mean that the chances of peace are doomed, at least with this government."

Ms Ofran pores over aerial photos Peace Now commissions before she heads to the sites. A fluent Arabic speaker, sometimes she is tipped off by Palestinians about new settler building.

In March, Ms Ofran learned from the Jerusalem municipality's website that officials had given approval for settler building at the Shepherds Hotel site in the mostly Arab east part of the city. She did not keep the information to herself.

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Embarassingly for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, news of the new settlement activity broke just before he was scheduled to meet United States President Barack Obama at the White House, contributing to the frostiness of that encounter between the two.

Ms Ofran is up against a stealthy system that shies away from scrutiny because much of its activity, although government sponsored, is illegal.

For example, there is no separate budget for building at settlements.

At any given moment, Ofran can be discovered and evicted from a settlement. Her predecessor Dror Etkes narrowly escaped injury when his vehicle was stoned in the hard core Yitzhar settlement.

But after three years in the job, she seems to have mastered the territory.

She knows when to give a lift to hitchiking settler youths and, above all, when to have eye contact with settler guards.

"If they recognise me here we are in trouble," she says, steering a rocky road near the settlement of Maale Michmash.

Ofran is the granddaughter of the late philosopher Yeshayahu Leibovich, one of the first prominent voices against remaining in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israel's stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day war. He famously warned once that staying in those territories could transform Israelis into "Judaeo-Nazis."

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"I used to hear him a lot and my character was influenced by his thinking." Ms Ofran says.

She believes Israel must withdraw from the West Bank and stop occupying its more than two million Palestinians if it is to remain a state with a predominantly Jewish population and character.

She explains: "I see myself first of all as Jewish and only then as an Israeli and it is very important to me how the Jewish state is acting."

"If we want to hold all the land we must give the Palestinians full rights. So holding all the land means we will lose our independence as a Jewish people."