The Pillars of Hercules

Something that bothered me greatly were the numerous people traveling armed with rifles, usually large and very lethal-looking ones, and pistols. Most of those people were soldiers and one of the characteristics of Israeli soldiers on trains and buses was their fatigue. They always looked sleepy, overworked, and no sooner were they on a seat than they were asleep, and I often found that their weapons bobbled in their arms were pointed directly at me.

This happened on my very first ride, as a soldier in the seat opposite made himself comfortable to sleep, put his feet up and propped his Uzi automatic rifle, so that it was horizontal in his lap, and it slipped as he dozed, and was soon pointing into my face.

I said, “Excuse me,” because I was afraid to tap his arm and risk startling him and the weapon discharging.

He did not wake, but after a while I raised my voice, and asked him to take his rifle out of my face.

Grumbling, without apology, he shifted in his seat and moved his rifle so that it was pointing at the woman across the aisle, who was so engrossed in reading a medical textbook, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, that she did not notice the man’s weapon.

“Now it’s pointing at her,” I said.

He slapped and pushed the rifle, and though it was still not upright as it should have been, he grunted and went back to sleep.

Walking up and down the crowded coach, I counted the weapons: two in the next row, a frenzied man in a white shirt with a nickel-plated revolver, a soldier two rows back with a pistol and a rifle, ditto the soldier next to him, a woman in uniform lying across two seats with her big khaki buttocks in the air and a pistol on her belt, seven more armed passengers farther down. My feeling is that all weapons are magnetic—they exert a distinct and polarizing power, and nearly all attract violence. The gun carrier’s creed is: Never display a weapon unless you plan to use it; never use it unless you shoot to kill.

For the first time on my trip I suspected I was traveling in a danger zone. I had never seen so many weapons. And yet, as I said, I did not feel that I was personally threatened. That was one of the many paradoxes of Israel: it was a war zone and yet it was one of the most monotonous places imaginable.

We passed Carmel Beach, some condos going up, and a sign, “The Riviera of Israel.” It was rubble and rocks and, farther on, dunes. The coast had the look of a shoreline that had been leveled so that it could be defended. There were no obstructions, it was all visible, nowhere for a landing party to hide. In military jargon such a landing was called “an insertion”—a rapid on-shore penetration by stealth under the cover of darkness, men leaping out of small boats and hitting the beach. Many had been attempted, but few had succeeded. The very idea, though, that such military actions were contemplated here made this section of coast south of Haifa unlike its Riviera namesake.

At Binyamina and beyond was the reality of the country—that it was really very empty and underpopulated, that the garrison mentality is strong (people living in places they can defend) and that it was agricultural, intensively cultivated in many places, banana groves set out with precision and order, grape and vegetable fields beneath the green and rocky hills of Har Horshan.

The orchards and citrus groves I had expected to see in Israel were there on the coast near Netanya, with rows of eucalyptus, the gum trees that were used everywhere as giant quick-growing fences and windbreaks. Plenty of fruit trees, and canals, and craters and scrubby ditches; but where were the people? This coast was one of its most populous regions and yet it was thinly settled.

The settlement of Hertzliyya was celebrating fifty years of prosperity, and agriculture flourished there, too. But with such subsidies, so it should have. It seemed to me much more extraordinary that Mediterranean countries that did not receive three billion dollars a year in foreign aid were growing fruit and running schools and defending themselves.

Approaching Tel Aviv, I saw for the first (and last) time on the shore of the Mediterranean a drive-in theater. It was beside the tracks, and also beside the sea. It was advertising a double feature in Hebrew on the marquee.

That was appropriate enough, for no city in the entire Mediterranean looks more like an American concoction than Tel Aviv. It was wrong to compare it (as many people did) to Miami and its tangle of suburbs. Tel Aviv was both more sterile and less interesting, and it was strangely introverted; its streets were lifeless, its different cultures, and its tensions, masked.