Diary – 25 August 2007

‘I’m not Jewish, but I love Israel, and I try to holiday there every year.’ An uncontentious remark, surely, but it produces Batemanesque horror around the scrubbed-pine dining tables of London’s chattering classes.

Arad, Israel
‘I’m not Jewish, but I love Israel, and I try to holiday there every year.’ An uncontentious remark, surely, but it produces Batemanesque horror around the scrubbed-pine dining tables of London’s chattering classes. You are more likely to boycott ‘apartheid Israel’ than visit it for pleasure — unless you are Jewish, Islamophobic or Paul Johnson. Since I returned from last year’s trip, which coincided with Israel’s justified — but mishandled, unsuccessful and deeply demoralising — war against Hizbollah, my affection for the place has cost me dear. Endless rows. The end of a long friendship with a respected British historian. A personal, televised attack by the Blessed Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

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I arrived back in Tel Aviv recently and told fashionable friends I would be spending the summer with a north London chum, now holed up in Arad. It is a run-down mini-Milton Keynes, deep in the Negev desert between Gaza and the Dead Sea. Israel’s chattering classes dismiss the place as ‘the end of the world’, after a Carry On–style movie The End of the World, Turn Left, which was set there. Bizarrely, it involves British immigrants teaching local Bedouin to play cricket (surprisingly popular among Israel’s terribly British elite) … and lots of inappropriate sex (another sport popular among Israel’s elite). Perhaps that is why people in un-elite Arad are shocked, but not surprised, at the scandalous (though often very funny) accusations of sexual harassment last year, now being levelled at several top politicians. ‘No wonder the government screwed the war,’ said a friend, ‘they were caught with their pants down.’