A Brookline man joins the Gaza protest

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip -- In his two weeks in Israel, Andrew Gold has camped out at rightist demonstrations, has been caught twice trying to slip into the Gaza Strip, and has duped a soldier at a checkpoint with fake identification papers.

Yesterday, the 33-year-old resident of Brookline was thrown out of this settlement, as were other opponents of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and residents of Neve Dekalim, after a wrenching standoff at the community's most important synagogue.

Gold, a religious Jew who works as an Internet consultant, had been reading with dread for months about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to pull out of Gaza and the northern West Bank. Gold attended small protests in Boston and, he said, he felt cut off from the situation in Israel, which he had visited several times.

''When it became clear the government was going to go through with it, I decided I had to stand with my people and try to prevent it," Gold said in an interview outside the synagogue, shortly before troops charged in and then dragged hundreds of protesters away from the site.

Two days after he made the decision, Gold was on a plane to Israel. From the airport, he traveled directly to the southern town of Sderot, where opponents of the disengagement were staging a huge protest march.

Gold says he felt even then that the rallies, organized by the settler leadership, were feel-good affairs, with prayers and speeches, but with no action that could dislodge the government from its plan.

''All these rallies were media events. The leadership in retrospect let these people down. They could have mobilized better for a real battle against the program," said Gold, who grew up as a secular Jew but who became observant. He said protesters should have trained to lie in streets to block troops evacuating settlers.

Gold camped with the demonstrators for three nights; he slept in a tent he brought from home and mingled with Israelis from across the country who had hoped to flood the Gaza settlements and to help residents there thwart the disengagement plan.

But when he tried to hike into Gaza on the third night with a group of protesters, soldiers turned him back, allowing only residents of the settlements in and out of Gaza since last month.

After praying for God's intervention, both at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and at the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank town of Hebron, the Jews' two holiest shrines , Gold tried again to enter Gaza, this time hitchhiking his way south. Once again, he was rebuffed by soldiers.

The Jewish community in Hebron includes some of the most hardline settlers in the West Bank. During his visit, a journalist who works for a rightist radio station offered to take Gold into the strip.

After making false IDs -- which identified Gold and three others as journalists -- the five set out in a Toyota for the Gaza border.

''The driver was the only one in the car with a real press card. But at the checkpoints we turned up the music, flashed our papers, and got waved in." Gold stayed in the synagogue during yesterday's evacuation, filming the events with a video camera.

''It's a shame that the Jews of Boston decided to sit this one out," he said. ''I want to take the tapes back and show Jews what a tragedy this was."