—————
England came into being, as a unified polity, in 937 CE, whereas Israel was barely a year older than I was (and eight months younger than Pakistan).
‘Well I’m basically on their side,’ he said to Julia as they were packing their bags. ‘Why? Because they’re surrounded by countries that want them dead.’
‘Then why’d they go there? Couldn’t they see? And it’s not just the surrounding countries, is it. What about the country they’re actually in? Palestine. Why there?’
‘Religion. It was religion, Julia, that led them to the Promised Land.’
She made a nauseated face. ‘Promised by who.’
Of course he had other reasons for sympathising with Israel, namely lifelong predispositions, and Rachel – his first love…Love, in Martin’s experience, greeted you head-on and face to face, and so it had been with Julia; but now, after three years of marriage, he felt something misaligned, aslant, athwart…He said,
‘In my opinion you’re too English about Israel. Arabophile and easily annoyed. You should be more American about it.’
‘Like an evangelical. Thinking we need it for a proper Judgment Day.’
‘…Oh come on, Julia. You’ll love it once you’re there. I did.’
Twelve months earlier, along with four other British writers (Marina Warner, Hermione Lee, Melvyn Bragg, and Julian Barnes), I was a guest of the Friends of Israel Educational Trust. And so we visited the Knesset, lunched overlooking the Lake of Galilee, had audiences with rabbis and diplomats, played ping-pong in a kibbutz on ‘the Golan’, floundered about in the Dead Sea, and – like novitiates in the Israel Defense Forces – circled Herodion and climbed Masada.
The only Arab I knowingly said hello to was a showpiece Bedouin in whose tent we drank tea and whose camel we all in turn clambered up on. Marina, certainly, and perhaps Hermione had semi-clandestine meetings with Palestinian activists, and the Palestinian ‘question’ was on everyone’s lips (there is no small talk in Israel); but back then I was still politically incurious, and didn’t really see the Palestinians.*2
Was there a special difficulty in seeing the Palestinians?
This question isn’t faux naïf and it isn’t rhetorical; it is non-figurative and it expects or at least hopes for an answer.
An answer to an enquiry about the condition of Israeli eyesight.
—————
I had this idea that people were like countries and countries were like people.
Do you remember the literary convention whereby countries were feminised? ‘England’s might depended on her navy’, and so on. That convention – always a quavering false gallantry – was silently abandoned during the first half of the twentieth century. Historians and politicians started calling countries it.
…If Israel were a person, what kind of person would Israel be? Well, male, anyway – male, for a start.
‘She’ was never any good; ‘it’ is a tenable compromise; really, though, it should have been ‘he’, all along. Without exception, countries are men. That’s the trouble.
Getting to the other planet
‘And is your father still a Communist?’
‘No. He stopped about thirty years ago.’
‘Why did he stop?’
‘Hungary, 1957. And general disillusionment.’
‘…Was his father a Communist?’
El Al, even then, long before the days of shoe bombs and toothpaste bombs and Y-front bombs, distinguished itself from other carriers. Instead of showing up at the airport, a trifle flustered perhaps, forty-five minutes before take-off, you had to be there three hours early. What came next was a solemnly detailed interrogation. James Fenton, in his formidable poem ‘Jerusalem’ (1988), does this with it:
Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
By the time my cross-examination was over (it was polite and not without a certain warmth, but softly intense and hypnotically eye to eye), I wondered whether anybody in my entire life had ever been quite so interested in me.*3
Approved for transfer by El Al, you feel shriven and cleansed. And also surprisingly well-qualified in rectitude and high seriousness (eligible, say, for a key role in the priming of Israel’s nuclear warheads)…Julia and I, two travellers of stainless reputation, took our seats. Her in-flight reading would be Daniel Deronda. Mine would be To Jerusalem and Back (Bellow, 1976). Some reviewers of Saul’s memoir/travelogue complained that the author hadn’t ‘seen’ any Palestinians (‘seen’ in the journalistic sense, and not in the sense I am trying to define). There were other books on Israel in my luggage. I was beginning my trek along the foothills of Mount Zion – or Mount Improbable.
The Amises had been together for six years, three of them as husband and wife. And there was a pair of Millennials back in Ladbroke Grove, W11: Nat (two and a half) and Gus (one). But now, like a tide, the marriage was beginning to turn.
Dangling men
The two-hour quiz, the five-hour flight, the late arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport, the three-hour drive, the business hotel, the extraction of a tomato and an apple from the closed kitchens, the wholly wakeful night under the panting AC, the unsolicited wake-up call telling me that, even now, the conference minibus was revving in
