The Pillars of Hercules

“Every year we come, just about this time,” Mrs. Cohen said. “We’ve seen so many changes.”

“Has Tel Aviv grown very much?”

“I can remember when none of this was here,” Mr. Cohen said. “Are you from London?”

“I used to live in south London,” I said. “Clapham—Wandsworth way.”

“Are there many Jews there?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

And as I was muttering to myself, “How should I know how many Jews there are in Clapham?” it occurred to me that perhaps I had been privy to a secret exchange. When Jews met in safe places each asked where the other was from and said, Are there many there?

“I think there’s a synagogue in Putney,” I said.

“Hammersmith,” old Mr. Cohen said.

Changing the subject, I mentioned that it was my first time in Israel and that I liked the food.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Cohen said. She mentioned several restaurants for me to try. “They’re not very nice but at least they’re kosher.”

The streets were empty at nine o’clock, and Tel Aviv, which advertises itself as “The City That Never Takes a Break,” is not much after dark. It was just a wall of unforgiving concrete; not pretty, not even very interesting, but like the rest of Israel in being clean and orderly and full of public buses. No graffiti, no apparent disorder, and so naive people who were unaware of what was going on were reassured by this appalling ordinariness.

The beach at Tel Aviv continued south to Jaffa where, within a few feet, it turned into an Arab town. But it was not a popular destination. Most people stayed right here at the center of town, and it made me think that this was perhaps more an Eastern European dream of the seaside than an American one, illustrating the Shakespearean solecism, the stage direction in The Winter’s Tale: “the coast of Bohemia.”

I woke early, and called Emile Habiby. He was still out of the country, so I checked out of my hotel and got a ten-shekel bus ticket to Jerusalem. In this week of revenge killings I expected the bus to be filled with soldiers, and it was; but they were asleep, hugging their rifles, and when they woke up they looked cranky. The rest of the bus passengers were the assorted citizens of Israel—Moroccans in track suits, Hasidim in black hats, followers of the Lubavitcher sect whose messiah, recently deceased, was the Rebbe Schneerson. (An exact duplicate of the messiah’s Brooklyn brownstone, down to the iron rails and the aged brickwork, had been built in Jerusalem, so that he would feel at home in the event that he should visit Israel.) There was a woman with a violin and another with a viola, students with textbooks, people with groceries, and pilgrims—but a pilgrim is just another sort of tourist.

Down the highway, into the semidesert and Route One through the rocky hills. But it was all more familiar than it should have been. The guardrails were American-style, and so were the signs and barriers and arrows and signal lights, and all this hardware gave a distinct sense of being in the United States.

The four-lane road passed ravines and steep slopes, some wooded summits. Old-fashioned armored cars and rusty trucks had been left by the roadside as memorials to the men who had died in what the Israelis call the War of Liberation. The vehicles, so old, so clumsy, roused pity. It was rough country, and even with the stands of slender cypresses it looked bereft, as the buildings did by the side of the road, plain, unornamented, with that same garrison look, the flat military facade which was Israeli architecture. Most buildings in Israel seemed as though they had been designed to withstand an attack.

Jerusalem is a city in the hills. The outskirts were steep and suburban, and the higher the bus climbed the denser the buildings. The bus station was like any old bus station, crowded, chaotic, with an added element of anxiety, for violence was an outdoor activity in Israel. Because Jerusalem’s terrain is irregular the streets are twisty and steep. This makes it hard for someone on foot to get a good clear sight of the city—or rather the two cities. The Old City is the Jerusalem of postcards. But West Jerusalem is the city of politics and commerce; it is still being built and settled as the Israeli capital, as though a deliberate challenge to anyone who harbors the idea of internationalizing it.

Asking the way to the Old City, I met an Ethiopian Jew, Negu. The colloquial term for such people was Falasha (“stranger” in Amharic), but it was rejected by them, as obviously contemptuous. He said he would show me the way. He had little else to do. He was not working.

“You could join the army, couldn’t you?”

“I am too old for the army.”

But he was hardly thirty, and as Israel was a country where, of necessity, soldiers were all ages and sizes, I could not understand why this was so.

“Would you be a soldier if they let you?”