Don’t ever travel business-class to Israel, for a start. Yes, you’ll feel like the Big I Am. But you just won’t get the sheer oomph! of what Israel is. The crop-topped teenage girls blowing bubblegum next to prayer-shawled Haredim. The soft-hearted gangsters holding the toilet doors open for the cold-eyed grandmas. The Russian blondes and the Mizrahi brunettes. All of them — gorgeously — Israel.

And the way they cheer when the plane touches down in the Promised Land. Not the usual drunken huzzah — which I love anyway — but the sheer molten joy of a people living who might well have never been born had all gone to monstrous plan just a while back. No, in business class you get only bliss. And bliss is a poor thing, compared to Israel.

The first time I went there, seven years ago, I came back determined to move to Tel Aviv — a city that, on a good day, makes Miami look like Milton Keynes. There was one reason I didn’t — my husband, whom I am extraordinarily fond of.

But since my dream was thwarted, it’s fair to say that there have been three of us in this marriage — me, Dan and Israel. I wanted to go back again to get some winter sun, touch base with a country I love above all others (even my own) and see if the thrill was still there.

Being a tiny state, just the size of Wales, it’s easy to see a lot of it — though, for me, never enough — in the space of a week. We were in funky Tel Aviv, fun Eilat and scary, beautiful Jerusalem. We first rocked up to the Dan Tel Aviv; the Dan is the biggest and best hotel group in Israel, and over the next week I would suffer several poignantly cinematic moments when, having succeeded in drinking my husband off my mind momentarily, I would look up and see a huge neon sign spelling out his name.

I’m no walker, but the Tel Aviv seafront on a Saturday morning made two hungover hours fly like minutes, and before long my friend Nadia and I were in the old port of Jaffa, which modern Tel Aviv grew alongside and has now absorbed with its edginess and energy. On the way there I discovered the best museum building, Etzel House, and the best seafood restaurant, Manta Ray, which is typical of the way that history and hedonism elbow each other out of the way in Tel Aviv.

And everywhere you come across the cats of Tel Aviv: tiny, perfect, well-fed strays basking on bar stools, on beaches, even on motorbikes. They were the crowning touch that led me to look up at the beautiful Sea One apartment building, still under construction, and tell Nadia: “That’s where I’m going to live.” But, of course, she’d heard it before, seven years ago. She pointed at the “Dan” sign flickering in the distance. “No. That’s where you live . . .”

As luck would have it, next stop was the Dan Eilat. But Israel’s southernmost seaside town certainly eased the pain of separation somewhat as we sat in our FitFlops and Miraclesuit swimming costumes smirking over headlines about the Big Freeze back in Britain. With a flourish typical of this cheeky city, this was the final piece of land retaken for the Jews in the War of Independence of 1948-49, and, having forgotten to bring an Israeli flag with them, the Negev Brigade soldiers improvised with pen and bedsheet and raised the glorious “Ink Flag”. There is a come-as-you-are, can-do backbeat to Eilat to this very day.

With more diving, dolphin-fondling and underwater observatories than you can shake a strand of seaweed at, Eilat is a great place for the aquatically inclined. But the lazy bitch brigade, which I was there to proudly represent, may wish to limit their water-based activities to the nibbly benediction of a pedicure. For a modest fee you may put your feet into a pool where doctor fish (a tiny carp) will toothlessly chew them into a baby-soft state. Makes the phrase “Bite me!” take on a whole new meaning.

I never got the coffee-shop thing back in Blighty — drug dens for nervous nellies — but during my Israeli jaunt I saw the light. Apparently there are eight times more cafés per person than there are in Manhattan and, considering the clemency of the climate and the beauty of the citizens, I’m not in the least surprised. There may be better ways to start the day than taking a leisurely Café Café Israeli Breakfast — scrambled eggs, with peppers, olives, feta, tuna and aubergine in a tiny palette on the side — on the Eilat promenade before running into the clear blue sea, but because my husband wasn’t with me, I couldn’t really go there. Instead I shared, from a decent distance, the connubial fun of the pair of young Orthodox men who stood, fully clothed, in the sea, entreating their modestly dressed, laughing wives to join them. This they did, to uproarious splashing and shrieking.

In Jerusalem, our final destination, you get a real sense of Israel’s fragility — and its strength. I had meant to attend a conference on anti-Semitism on my last day, but as I got dressed that morning it struck me as the height of idiocy to sit in a conference hall to hear spelt out in great detail the hideous things I’ve known since I was 12 years old, while the most beautiful place on Earth shimmered outside.

So Nadia and I jumped on the famous red 99 tour bus and saw everything that makes the Talmud quote so true: “Ten measures of beauty descended on the world — nine were taken by Jerusalem, one by the rest of the world.” (Even the YMCA building, opposite the King David hotel where we were staying, is a building of world-class beauty.) And we also witnessed the occasional ugliness of the rest of the world, which makes Israel’s existence so vital, in the shape of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.

Back in the Mamilla mall, all around us teenagers celebrated at a kosher pizzeria to the wheezing beauty of Leonard Cohen singing Hallelujah. I was so glad that I’d swerved the conference just to be a face in a throng of Jews who, at last, don’t need to be aware of anti-Semitism every hour of their lives — because of this tiny, fantastic country.

“Do you have a gun?” the young and lovely security guards ask you plainly and politely at the airports and, like the fact that every Israeli baby — Jew, Christian and Muslim — goes home from hospital with a tiny gas mask, it makes you aware each time exactly what these people deal with, with such grace under pressure, day after day. Don’t hate them because they’re beautiful; go there and see it for yourself.

I was sad to leave Israel, but more than happy to see Him Indoors. There are still three of us in this marriage, but I reckon it couldn’t hurt for me to get them together and see how they get on. Maybe next year in Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv, or Eilat . . .

[via: Times Online]