Conscience of the Israeli spymaster’s daughter

Omer Goldman is a very pretty girl, slender as a model. Never still and very restless, the expected loss of her freedom fills her with anxiety. For months before she refused to be drafted into the Israel Defence Forces she went to a psychologist every week to prepare for what was to come: incarceration in a cell in a military prison. A narrow cage for a songbird.

I met her several times during September, in an apartment, with other girls who are conscientious objectors. Together they would hand out flyers against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza at the gates of a high school like the one she completed a year ago.

On her last day of freedom as a civilian, I saw her at the gates of the intake base to which she had received orders to report for induction for a two-year stint with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), like every Israeli girl. But she came to refuse the draft, to be tried and to be imprisoned immediately.

Several dozen supporters showed up - ­ members of Anarchists Against the Wall, her mother and a few girlfriends - and she stayed close to them as though she were trying to delay the end, the moment when she would clash all alone with the army.

For Omer, this transition is sharper and more surprising than for most conscientious objectors: she is the daughter of the outgoing deputy head of Mossad, the man who very nearly became head of the organisation.

Omer grew up all her life in the warm bosom of a huge security establishment that has now become an enemy rather than a friend. Her father appears in the newspapers as 'N'.

He was a senior intelligence officer and then transferred to Mossad and climbed to the top until in 2007 he became the deputy to Mossad chief Meir Dagan, now considered the most powerful