The Spectator’s Notes | 5 March 2011

In Jerusalem last week to interview the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, I noticed several changes since my last visit 15 years ago. The first is that Israel is now quite rich. It even has its own gas and shale oil, prompting Netanyahu to tell me that he is being forced to revise his view that Moses, for all his heroic virtues, had been a ‘bad navigator’ in finding the only place in the Middle East with no natural resources. Israel used to be socialist — democratic, of course, but almost Soviet in its collectivist austerity. Today, the annual growth rate is nearly 8 per cent, even the West Bank looks smarter, and the wine, which used to be undrinkable and served in thimbles, is delicious. But the precariousness never goes away for long. We were dining on an elegant yacht in the harbour of Tel Aviv when someone’s Blackberry pinged with the news that the first Palestinian rocket attack for two years had just landed in Beersheba.