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There’s a cheerless soldier keeping vigil at the entrance to the Haifa train station. He has broad, muscular shoulders and gray-green eyes and a jaw that looks like it was hacked from a quarry in Kohav Ha Shahar. I give him a bright, bushy “
Shalom!” and he fingers the revolver on his belt. He wants me to unpack my bags. I grudgingly rifle through the wrinkled t-shirts and balled-up socks while he snuffs over my shoulder, the sort of banal baggage check that, I suspect, will become routine in the weeks ahead. As I’m repacking my things he waves a security wand over the sagging bottom of a white-haired retiree, proving that in the high-stakes world of global terrorism, there’s a very fine line between security and inanity.
Ten minutes later I’m shuttling down the coast toward Tel Aviv, and an hour later I’m checked into a grotty hostel just a block from the beach. There’s a shiftless air about the place, a sense that the world’s outcasts, rejects and travel writers have congregated for some mass demonstration of withering inertia. There’s an old guy muttering in the hall and two young backpackers propping up the bar at
half-past twelve. One of them has knotty hair and a penchant for using the word “party” as a verb, and it’s not long before I’m making tracks for the beach, a copy of
The New Yorker tucked under my arm while the powerwalkers stride by and the old men play dominoes in the shade.
I quickly settle into the rhythm of Tel Aviv - a town that, once you get past the Hebrew traffic signs and kosher Chinese food, could’ve been plucked from the coasts of Southern California. Pretty, twenty-something moms push wide-berth strollers down the street; guys in sleeveless tees flex their muscles on the beach; young girls in skimpy tank-tops bare their taut little tummies. There’s a vigorous optimism around town, coupled with an air of conspicuous consumption that makes the whole city feel like some sort of yuppie fantasia. I’ve come to associate this feeling with the place that I call home - the American in me stretching toward the homeland in the same way that a plant bends toward the sunlight. Sitting at a sidewalk café, surfing the free WiFi and watching the tanned and toned twenty-somethings parade by, I can’t shake the impression
that the only difference between Tel Aviv and New York is better beaches and fewer Jews.
It’s also proving to be the perfect base camp before the next leg of my trip, which should be kicking off in Nairobi in two weeks’ time. Shopping in Tel Aviv is as pathologically refined as in its American counterparts, with all the creature comforts of home - name-brand toothpaste, designer jeans and such frisky, over-the-counter classics as
Cum in My Bum - within arm’s reach. Gearing up for my African adventure is no sweat in a country where high-end hiking gear gets hawked on every street corner and pharmacists unload malaria pills like they were breath mints.
It’s hardly surprising. Young Israelis might be the most well-traveled pack of twenty-somethings on the planet, with most logging thousands of miles in round-the-world airfare after their compulsory army stints. It takes little prodding for them to spill their long, rhapsodic tales of trekking in South America, or getting blitzed off of high-grade weed under a canopy of palm trees in Goa. The irony, of course, is that these same Israelis aren’t nearly so familiar with their own neighbors, with whom diplomatic
relations are about as warm as the underside of Ariel Sharon’s pillow. Most are eager to hear about my time in Lebanon and Syria, making weary sighs as I describe the pleasures of Damascus - a city that, just a few hundred miles to the northeast, might as well be Pyongyang. When one young waiter hears my rapturous talk about Lebanon, he recalls his father’s own reports of the country’s scenic beauty. Of course, with a bit of prodding, he admits his dad was visiting as part of an invading army in the ‘80s, and for most Israelis, the only view they’re likely to get of Lebanon is from the cockpit of a fighter jet or the turret of a tank.
After all these months in the Arab world, it’s been revealing to see the Middle East through Israeli eyes. You don’t have to work too hard to get a sense of this country’s afflictions, and the heightened paranoia that comes with the conviction that the barbarians are at the gates. I’ve gotten used to opening my bags at bus stations and shopping malls, or having a security wand waved over my backside in front of a nightclub.
The right-wing
Jerusalem Post reports on the troubles in the south - where Hamas rockets are raining down on the hapless town of Sderot - with something approaching carnal ecstasy. “Don’t you see?” the paper’s tone implies. “They’ll push us into the sea the first chance they get!” For their part, most of the locals in Tel Aviv are happy to go splashing in unprovoked, coming out to dry their long, lithe limbs on the sand.
And who can blame them if they want to treat the warm, lapping waters of the Mediterranean like the river Lethe? It’s easy to see, on the beaches and in the bars, the same reckless pursuit of pleasure that I saw in Beirut - a release from the pressure cooker of life in the Middle East. Sitting on the beach, surrounded by tanned girls roasting and turning in the sand like chickens on a spit, I’m swept up by my own sweet oblivion. Then a guy in a stars-and-stripes Speedo breaks the reverie, his hands on his hips and - for lack of a better description - his flag at full-mast. It’s all I can do not to sweep up the young
children and shuttle them to safety, or to take my cue from the poor, afflicted souls of Sderot, hustling them into the nearest shelter, safe from the terrible onslaught of this engorged, incoming missile.
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