The Pillars of Hercules

Just as I was surprised by the offhandedness and the truculence, I was pleased by many other aspects in Haifa that I had not expected. The food, for example. It was the cleanest, the freshest, the most delicious I had found since Italy—but it was less meaty than Italian food, and lighter. It was salads and fish and fresh bread, hummus and ripe fruit, just-squeezed juice and pure olive oil. It was not expensive. Everyone ate well.

The public transport was another pleasant surprise. There was a train to Tel Aviv. There were buses. From the bus terminal in Haifa you could go anywhere, every half hour, and because this was Israel there was not a town or village in Israel that was not reachable in a few hours. Jerusalem was an hour and three quarters. The Dead Sea was two hours. Nazareth was an hour. Tel Aviv about an hour. A bus to Cairo took half a day, which was nothing. President Clinton had just visited the previous week to be present at the signing of the Israel-Jordan Peace Accord. So there were buses to Amman, too.

The intellectual life of Israel was visible in terms of public lectures and bookstores—I had not seen such well-stocked bookstores since leaving Italy. Croatia’s were pathetic, Greece’s stocked school textbooks and women’s magazines, Turkey’s were no use to me, nor were Egypt’s. Israelis sold every sort of book and magazine, in all the languages that Jews spoke, which was almost all the languages of the world. There were museums with rich collections, classical music on the radio and symphony concerts. I like going to concerts, listening to live music; I went to two good ones in Israel. I could have gone to many more if I had stayed longer. Israelis complained of the high cost of living, and the high inflation, but nothing in Israel struck me as being very expensive.

And there was a suburban atmosphere which also made it seem peaceable if not downright homely and dreary. This first impression was borne out by my travels to other towns and cities, for so much of Israel had the texture and pace of a retirement community, and—alone among Mediterranean countries I saw—the whole land was noisy with the persistent whine of air conditioners.

Strangest of all, I felt a sense of safety. Perhaps it arose from the colonial look of the city, and the orderliness of the stores and streets. I never felt at risk—or rather I felt that I was among millions of people who were taking the same risk.

But of course you only feel very safe in Israel if you are ignorant. I did not know it then—I learned it by degrees—but Israel was in a terrible period, one of its worst cycles of murder and retribution. What I took to be somnolence was suspense.

Another thing I learned about Israel: never question a date, because everyone took liberties. A person might allude in one sentence to something that happened last week, and in the next breath he would be in the Bronze Age, quoting the Torah and mentioning Egyptians at the time of Moses, making it all seem like it was yesterday. It was poetic license, but it was often the basis of Israeli political or military decisions. Egyptians claimed that on the walls of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was written “Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile!” It was not merely a misquotation, but a misrepresentation of Genesis 15:18 in which God promises Abram and descendants all land, from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, which is not the Nile but the Sea of Reeds. On the other hand, “God gave it to us” is not usually the equivalent of a Purchase and Sale Agreement.

The same doubtful history and wobbly logic made it normal for Israeli immigrant citizens from Morocco and New York City and Kiev to think of themselves as Israelites, and Israeli life today as a rehash of the Torah, in which the chosen people were taunted and held captive and laid siege to by idol-worshiping pagans. They never used the word “Palestinians”—always saying “Arab” instead, because it depicted an upstart horde and served to make Israelis seem the underdogs (there were so many more Arabs in the Middle East than there were Palestinians). Egyptians avoided the word Arab too. They were part of the same theater of self-dramatization. This was the land of the Pharaohs, they said; they were pharaonic. “We built the pyramids!”

So the Israelis were not alone in taking liberties, but it made life rather confusing for a traveler when Mediterranean peoples were so busy misrepresenting themselves. Most inhabitants of its shores took the most fanciful liberties with their ancestry. In fact, though no one ever said so, the Mediterranean was almost devoid of aborigines.

Anyway, I took the train down the coast from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Israeli Railways was celebrating its centenary. A hundred years ago Israeli Railways did not exist, of course; but who had built this line? Probably the British.