Demonstrators, Ministry of Defence, Tel Aviv

I almost felt sorry for the security man. Only at the end that is, as I boarded the plane and walked down the aisle and he came towards me and could not look me in the eye.

They’d taken all my things at the check-in and did not give them all back. The security supervisor, a tall balding man with blue eyes, thought I might be a terrorist. A woman asked some questions and then he came and took my passport, disappearing with it round the back of the super-duper El Al X-ray machine.

‘Wait here,’ the woman says.

‘Where’s my passport? Why has he taken it?’

‘Just wait here.’ She ushers me to one side, out of the way of the families and children standing in the security queue.

He’s back. Tall, balding and thin. He stoops, even over me.

‘But you live in England or in Israel? Where do you live?’ he asks, flicking through my passport.

‘London.’

‘When were you last in Israel? How often do you come?’

‘Like many other people’ – I stress the words many and other – ‘I make regular trips.’

He disappears again. The woman returns. ‘Because we’re delaying you,’ she says, ‘we’re going to check you in.’ Delaying? There’s a big queue behind me and I’m three hours early. Plenty of time.

‘I’m going to have to take these.’ She picks up my hand luggage and laptop.

‘Why?’

‘Security.’

‘When can I have them back?’

‘At the gate.’

‘You can search them, but I want to be there when you do.’

‘Your choice – we take it, or you don’t fly.’

OK, so they’ve got it all now. Passport, computer, notebooks, camera – all of it except my cash and phone. (And probably, says Eyal later, a copy of the computer hard drive too.) Oh, they’ve given my passport back, but it’s marked with a loud red tag.

At the gate, half an hour before we leave, everyone’s showing their passport and ticket again. I’m ushered to one side and asked to sit in a screened-off enclosure where I wait, alone.

A woman carries out further ‘security’ procedures, swabbing me for explosives, swabbing my shopping too. ‘May I?’ she says.

‘Yes, if you really think I’ve managed to construct a bomb in the duty free inside that whisky bottle – go ahead.’

How, exactly, is this necessary? Since I’ve already been X-rayed and stripped of all my belongings, how exactly could I have anything on me that would pose a risk to this flight? I ask this to the security man, when he arrives again, to talk to me after I object to the fact that they’re not going to be returning my ‘suspicious’ laptop charger; that my computer and notebooks – all of my personal possessions, in fact, are still nowhere to be seen.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I don’t have to be nice to you. I don’t have to talk to you. If that’s your attitude you can just sit there. I’m not going to talk to you. I don’t have to tell you anything.’

Nilly afterwards says that the Shabak puts a black dot by anyone’s name who’s left wing – known. ‘Who’s radical left, like you,’ she says. ‘They do it just to make you feel like shit, not because they really have to. You’re so suspicious, after all.’

When I get to the plane – finally, because it takes them another hour to find my ‘lost’ computer and bring it to the gate – and everyone’s sitting there and I’m feeling like some kind of freak, I can understand what a lifetime of bullying could do to your bitter soul.

Yet, as he passes me by for the last time and can not look me in the eye, I almost feel sorry for the security man, and I feel ashamed. What’s it come to? That’s what I want to say. What are we doing? Seventy years after our grandparents fled, yours and mine, we’ve turned each other into enemies. Suspicion and fear. How did we get to this place?

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Man on a Tel Aviv street (Mor Levy) 

I’m in the car, and we’re travelling along, Zahi, Karim and me, up to Yafa cafe. We’ve just been to a solidarity meeting with Arabs and Jews where they read poetry in Arabic and Hebrew, and people from the Jaffa community came. It started with a minute’s silence for those who died in Gaza. Mohammad, who was leading, had to stop two or three times because he couldn’t talk, because he cried.

Jews and Arabs stood in a line on the stage and held each other’s hands. System Ali rapped their poetry without music, to mourn. 

And now we’re going for something to eat in Yafa cafe.

What no car, Zahi? What happened to your car? Zahi always used to come by and pick me up in a little white car. I don’t remember the make. He’d come by when he didn’t need to, even, just to be nice. Like, if I could walk there, if it wasn’t even far, he’d come by just to take care of me. But anyway, now we’re in Karim’s car, working out why Zahi doesn’t have his.

‘Did you write it off?’ I ask, turning to Zahi in the back.

‘No – it was stolen.’ Karim answers for him. Zahi’s slow off the mark, he must be tired.

‘Stolen–’

‘Yeah, stolen. By some Jews.’

What do you mean some Jews? I don’t say this. Because I remember the other day, the first day I met Karim, in fact, when we were sitting down to a dinner at Yafa cafe. A dinner with music and oud, and everyone gets up to dance, like Michel the owner and a beautiful girl. And Zahi’s asking me if I recognise that kind of dance, if I know what it means, and I say, Zahi, you know some things we have everywhere, and he’s, oh you have Arabs in London? And I say, no Zahi – some things are universal. Like what? OK, do I have to spell it out? Some things are universal, like sex.

Karim’s to my right at the table, and opposite there’s this Jewish woman with very short hair. It’s grey and short, and she’s always smiling with crinkly bits around her eyes. I think she’s the only Jewish woman there, apart from me. This woman asks if we’ll light the Hanukah candles. Michel looks around, and there’s a menorah, but candles are nowhere to be found.

‘Never mind.’ Karim leans into me. ‘Let’s burn some Jews.’

I’m like, what? I don’t know what to say. I need some time. Let’s burn some Jews.He has a merry twinkle, the kind of goatee you’d find in Shoreditch, and American hip-hop clothes. 

The conversation has moved on slightly. The Jewish woman’s spooning up kubbe and smiling again. And I still don’t know what to say. OK, now I do. ‘I think you meant that as a joke,’ I tell Karim, ‘but I found it offensive.’

‘Why? Are you Jewish?’ he says.

‘I am, but even if I wasn’t, you know, I’d still say it’s wrong.’

‘But I think it’s funny!’ the Jewish woman says. ‘Don’t you see? The power imbalance. Between our two groups. It’s funny because of that!’

OK. So you feel better if you get the shit ripped out of you. Somehow, that way, you pay.

Back in the car with Karim, and he’s still on his Jewish trip. I’m kind of tired. ‘Listen,’ I tell him, ‘don’t do that. You know it feels bad.’

‘Jews – yeah, Jews are everywhere. They stole his car.’

I turn my face away. We’re still driving, up Yehuda Hayamit. ‘Enough,’ Zahi says, but he’s laughing and it’s not enough, yet, for Karim.

‘There’s a Jew in the car! I can smell a Jew.’ He’s staring hard ahead. ‘Smells like a Jew in the car.’

I slam out as soon as we arrive. Karim follows me and we’re both pacing up the hill. We go into the restaurant and sit down – there are five of us at the table. Four men, and me.

‘You’re not still mad at him, are you?’ Zahi asks.

‘Why? What happened? What did he say?’ Abed wants to know.

So I’m sitting here at this table with these guys in the restaurant where they always go, and I have to say it. ‘We were driving in Karim’s car, and he told me … he said … Smells like a Jew.’

The whole table bursts out laughing. Abed’s laughing. Zahi’s laughing, Mustafa’s laughing. Karim looks around, then bursts out laughing too. I’m just sitting there and I really wish to be swallowed up by the ground. Instead, I push back my chair, and I go to the bathroom and all of it, Gaza, Jericho, East Jerusalem, the death and the killing, all of this hate, swells out of me, and I cry.

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Canadian teenager with gun, Tel Aviv, taking part in a Birthright Israel tour

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Adjami, Jaffa – candlelit vigil for Gaza

At Jamilah’s house Al Jazeera is on the TV. Al Jazeera shows what bombs do. Limbs come off. Eyes melt shut. Dead children have white faces from the dust. Jamilah’s mother puts her head in her hands and cries.

Jamilah reports that a colleague at work (they’re all Jewish except her) demanded to know today, are you for or against Hamas? 

‘Why should I tell you that?’ she says to her colleague. But he won’t let up, so she tells him, ‘look, it’s not like you see on TV – you know only half the story. We see the whole picture.’

‘We have to do it,’ the guy says. ‘We don’t kill children on purpose.’

‘Did I ever ask to talk politics with you?’ she says.

‘You’re a traitor,’ he replies.

The manager calls Jamilah in and Jamilah’s shouting, she can’t stop shouting: ‘Look what he’s doing to me!’

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Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies, the placard reads

January 05, 2009

An anti-war march, Saturday, through the streets of Tel Aviv. Pro-war shouters collect like flies along the side of the route – the Magav keeps them surrounded, but sometimes they’re a nose-distance away, fist-thrashing and enraged. We move from Rabin Square along Ibn Gvirol to the Cinemateque, Arab and Jewish Israelis, side-by-side. Stop the killing. We want a different future for our peoples – a future of peace, we chant.

Sometimes an Arab teenager has to be restrained by friends as the mob on the sidelines provokes, with a Death to the Arabs! or Your mother is a whore! Hadash party stewards stand between the groups, trying to keep them apart.

By the Cinemateque square, crowds of pro-war demonstrators are baying to be let in. But the Magav won’t allow them near us. They’re not even letting the residents through – ‘I have to go, I live there,’ argues a woman in a black winter coat.

Two teenage girls who’ve been sitting on the Cinemateque steps suddenly burst into a chant: It’s our country! It’s our country! Somehow, they managed to slip through. Within seconds, a group of Arab boys confronts them, only feet away. Police hustle the girls, modesty protected by skirts over trousers, out of the square.

It’s dark. It’s getting late. People are standing around, and a crowd wrapped in Israeli flags has gathered at the top of the street. It feels ugly but the police hold them at bay.

‘What’s going to happen now?’ I ask Uri. ‘Oh probably a few beatings and then everyone will go home,’ he says.

We walk through the side streets, away from the march. Men are running towards it, shouting, leaping and waving Israeli flags. Uri zips up his jacket, covering the Hadash logo on his vest. A bald-headed guy in a white T-shirt comes at us, punching the air. ‘We have only one country!’ he shouts.

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December 31, 2008

On the bus it’s not like usual, no one talks. They’re all just staring straight ahead. 

In a seat by the aisle, a black woman with a headscarf wound to her scalp. Fine features, a long, religious skirt. Opposite, a blue-blonde Russian girl looking out of the window with empty eyes. Her rose wool dress, the one she chose this morning, outlines her thighs. Music plays–the driver’s?–but nobody says a thing.

"Shelach? is that yours?

A crushed chocolate milk carton rolls past my foot. I look up. Is that yours? an old man, maybe 60, wants to know. His brown, furrowed face buries exhausted granite eyes.

Everyone’s waiting. Nobody says a thing.

He has a kippa, the man–it’s black. He’s almost crouching in his seat. Who, he wants to know, has dumped their carton on the floor? His shelach? hovers, then drops like rock into a pool.

My eyes meet his, I just look back. Nobody says a thing.

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Yasam, police special patrol unit, and demonstrators. Capitalist government will not bring security: Trotskyite group Ma’avak Sotzialisti – ‘Socialist Struggle.’ Lift the siege on Gaza, reads the placard, centre. Right, in Hebrew: The Israeli government is guilty of war crimes. Arabic, foreground: Stop the bloodshed. Gaza won’t bow down. Enough of the massacre on Gaza (placard, right): members of Marxist party Da’am. The sign in the background says: Solidarity with the families of Sderot, Ashkelon and Gaza.

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