Israel Notebook

Friday night in Jaffa, and it’s a party. Jaffa, to the south of Tel Aviv, is where the cool kids hang, apparently — think Dalston or the meatpacking district, and add radical chic. An Israeli-Russian dude in big ironic spectacles tells me that, not far from here, they filmed scenes for the second season of Homeland. ‘So you can see how edgy it is,’ he says. He’s being sarcastic.

We’re in a nice big two-floor apartment. The crowd is a mix of British foreign correspondents grumbling about their salaries, good-looking Israelis, and anguished Yanks competing to be more pro-Palestinian than each other. (‘Off the record — OK? — but Israel is effectively a terrorist state that is systematically oppressing an entire people.’) The election is next week, but it is not really the done thing to talk about it. To ask about the success of the Israeli right is to be met with a dumb stare.