Imagine this: a steel staircase planted in the middle of a field, surrounded by rolling hillocks and swaying grasses, a fire escape going nowhere. If it were in London, it would be an art instillation. But it's in the southwestern tip of Israel. I am standing on a deck at the top of the staircase with four fellow journalists and two Israelis, surveying the countryside. Looking over to where the sun is beginning to dip from the horizon, the countryside stops abruptly. Where there should be a horizon, there is instead a wall extending as far as the eye can see and behind it a blur of crumbling tower blocks and smog: the Gaza Strip. I recall recent television pictures of Israeli tanks surging towards the Hamas-controlled enclave. It must have happened around here but from the stillness you couldn't tell.
Three months ago, I was stood outside the lsraeli embassy week after week, protesting over the Gaza war. Yet now I'm in Israel. I was invited on a trip organized by BICOM (the British Israel Communications and Research Centre), a gentler version of America's AIPAC, whose mission is to improve our understanding of Israel. It feels the country has been getting a bad press lately.
The timing of this BICOM trip is no accident. When dusk falls this evening, 28th April, it will be the Israeli Remembrance Day. For 24 hours, Israelis commemorate the servicemen and women who have died for their country. A couple of years ago, it was expanded to include victims of terror. The BICOM team rolled out a map of the area, showing where the rockets and mortars being fired out of Gaza were landing—there have been 2,500 since Hamas took control—and what they were targeting, including the nearby Kibbutz Kfar Aza. This Remembrance Day they will also be remembering the 13 soldiers killed in the Gaza war and the 28 Israelis who were killed by rocket or mortar fire over the last eight years.
Our guides tells us that there have been 150 attacks since the ceasefire. I can find nothing to confirm this. (Palestinian deaths were not counted by the BICOM team. Indeed, wherever possible, they weren't mentioned at all. Gaza sits ugly and uncomfortable on the horizon and the conscience.) However, the steel staircase is not, as you might have thought, for watching Gaza. According to our guides, the army commander in the area is a keen ornithologist, and he stands atop the 20-ft high structure to watch birds.
Remembrance Day and Independence Day, which is the following day, have been in the Israeli calendar since 1949, the year after the foundation of the state. "You will see this amazing switch," our guides tells us. "First sadness, and then celebrations. People hold street parties everywhere." The creators of the state of Israel knew how to create a drama and so do its modern-day leaders. With Obama promising to overhaul things in the middle east, Israel has switched to the right again. Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to power two months ago by a quirk of the electoral system, has indicated an uncompromising stance when it comes to the Palestinians and the rest of the world.
The next stop on our trip is Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The residents are used to journalists padding around. In the first days of the Gaza war, it and the neighbouring town of Sderot, were held up to the world's press as the reasons for its invasion. The signs of the shelling are clear. The roof of its nursery school is rocket-proofed, and there is a skirt of concrete, 4ft high, around the building to stop mortars. In all, the community has lost two dozen of its people since it was founded in 1957. Most of them were in service for the Israeli army, but last summer 48-year-old Jimmy Kedoshim was killed by a mortar fired from Gaza while tending the flowers in his garden.
At 8pm, along with communities across the country, Kfar Aza held a minute's silence to remember their dead. But it is not silence as Britons know it. A Tannoy system sent out a wailing one-note cry for 60 seconds that reverberated off all the buildings. The 400 of us gathered in the square stood still. Teenagers stopped fidgeting and bowed their heads; babies were stilled. The wail ceased and a ceremony began. A flautist played Israeli tunes mournfully, a mother played the guitar while her daughter sang a 1960s song. Video montages of the dead were beamed on screens.
It may be true that behind a citizen of just about any modern country there stands a graveyard. But our own Remembrance Day is constrained and dull by comparison with this. From the lines of flags and the militarism I am reminded of a dictatorship. But, of course, that is far from the truth. Israel prides itself on its vigorous internal debate, and everyone has strong and long-winded opinions they are quick to share. (In fact I wondered whether the place might not work rather better if free speech were restricted to five minutes per speaker.)
But when it comes to the crunch things are different. One journalist I spoke to said that, although he was free to write what he wished, sometimes he refrained for the good of the country. As I was constantly reminded, Israel is a young country that has been in an almost perpetual state of war, either with its neighbours, or the Palestinians within, since its inception. This breeds a siege mentality: ask too many questions and such a fragile entity could break up. The fact that each son and daughter of the country (apart from the Arabs and the religious) does compulsory national service creates a powerful sense of national solidarity. To a typical liberal Londoner, this outpouring of grief and overt nationalism is a little uncomfortable. Even the BICOM team who took us round, all British-born and educated, were a touch uneasy. "Really, you don't see this level of nationalism through the rest of the year," they would say.
Back in Tel Aviv, the following evening, the Independence Day party was warming up. Sound systems on the streets were playing dancehall tracks, and young people were dressed up for a night out. With such a diversity of lifestyles and ethnicities, this place looks urbane and cosmopolitan. But even in hedonistic Tel Aviv you feel part of an inward-looking nation. Looking out over the Mediterranean, the Tel Avivis only see half the world. The borders to the occupied Palestinian territories are closed to Israeli citizens, as are a number of Arab states. Looking west these days isn't so easy either—they are aware that the tide of world opinion is against them. It hardly surprising that they turn inwards.
The next day I was walking down Sderot Rothschild, a central tree-lined avenue, when I heard the sound of a tuba. In the middle of a crowd I found a skiffle band, a motley band of drummers and a man looped in his brass cocoon, honking away. A group of hippies turned up dressed in the anarchic uniform of dropouts—silly hair, bright clothes, glitter on their faces—and started dancing to the music. They were part of Walkabout Love, a group founded by a former IDF soldier who, inspired by Aboriginal walkabouts, leads a group to spread the word of peace and love. They were mustering a crowd for a beach party that evening.
I asked Igal, a young man in a purple shirt, about how he felt about the Remembrance and Independence Day celebrations. "You have to understand," he said, with a warm smile. "We are under the threat of war and terror all the time. This makes us feel very strongly about our country. Yes there should be a way of remembering our soldiers who died for our country." In Israel, even the hippies know that love is not all you need.
