With Independence Day coming up, I thought I’d dig out this article I wrote for Jewish News, shortly after my first trip to Israel in 2006. I wonder whether I got across that I enjoyed my trip…

Meeting My Heroes

When I told friends I was going to visit Israel for the first time, most of them were very worried for me. Not so much because they thought I was going to be blown up, but because they feared that I would be let down.

A card-carrying Gentile philosemite, I have for many years been in awe of the Jewish people and fascinated by Jewish history and culture – particularly by the state of Israel. In the weeks before my trip I worked myself up into a frenzy of anticipation – I’ve always been skilled at this – and the general consensus was that the country I have cheered on and dreamt of for so long could never live up to my great expectations.

And it only went and exceeded them! I met my heroes and they were too busy fascinating me, enchanting me, welcoming me and sending me into paroxysms of joy to even begin to let me down. The people of Israel were everything I had hoped for. Just as the state itself has the most beautiful of contradictions (strong and well-armed yet an underdog in the region) so do the people (blunt and pushy yet bursting with hospitality and humanity).

The longer I was there, the more the tears of joy secretly flowed. They came as I floated on the Dead Sea at 6am alongside an elderly Holocaust survivor who taught me a Hebrew song; they came as I listened to the residents of the Ein Geddi Kibbutz in who I saw a pride more pure and intense than anything I’d witnessed before; they came at Masada at dawn; they came as I sat in the seat where David Ben-Gurion first declared the state of Israel.

So I did some of the out-and-out tourist stuff, for sure. But the biggest joys came more spontaneously: pulling into a petrol station full of Bedouin Arabs and one of them letting me ride his camel; asking my new friend Susi what those metal things over there were and her replying that they were tanks from the 1948 war of Independence; finding a mosque, a Christian church and a sadomasochistic restaurant standing within feet of each other in Jaffa; listening to people’s stories, each of which was the tale of Israel in microcosm.

Within hours of my return to England, I’d taken a call from a journalist acquaintance who described his horror that ‘anyone could be pro-Israel’. The following evening in a pub, I got more abuse for my opinions. That’s what a week among the beautiful people of Israel did to me: it lowered my guard and made me forget that people in this country do not appreciate having their anti-Israel prejudices questioned.

By visiting Israel, I was putting my own views on the country to the ultimate test and everything I saw there confirmed them. ‘Come back and see us soon,’ said almost everyone I met. You bet I will.

And I did, the following year! Hoping for a third visit in October.