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.
Another change, related to the end of socialism, is that the rudeness for which Israelis used to be renowned has almost disappeared. The only bad manners I encountered came from an abrupt girl at passport control. Her colleague promptly apologised: ‘She doesn’t know the right words.’
Traditionally the Charedim ultra-Orthodox have been hostile to the State of Israel, seeing Zionism as a sort of blasphemy. The religious are excused military service and, because they devote their lives to study rather than paid work, taxes. But the country has the capacity to surprise. The orthodox Rabbi Moshe Weiss took me off to his L’Zion B’rina (‘To Zion with Joy’) School near Jerusalem, which has won an award from the strictly secular Ministry of Education.
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