"Do you know any Arabs?" the El Al immigration officer at Heathrow asked me.

I had been warned about the security checks. They will question you for ages, friends had said. But this was my first trip to Israel and I had done my homework. I was ready with my answer.

"Does my friend Sandy count?" I said. "She's an Iraqi Jew - she's an Arab."

The officer looked stunned that I had the chutzpah, laughed sarcastically and took my passport away for further inspection. Later - quite a long time later - he returned and I was allowed to proceed.

The plane was full of Orthodox Jewish passengers. To my surprise, no one refused to sit next to me, and no one kissed the tarmac on landing at Ben Gurion airport.

Having psyched myself up for a second round of full-on interrogation by Israeli border control, I felt cheated when the passport officer waved me through without so much as a "do you plan on visiting the West Bank?".

I followed strict instructions on how to get a taxi safely - much as you would if visiting a country for the first time in any other part of the world. I got in a cab and it took me to my hotel. I was surprised, again, to find my driver was neither Jewish or Palestinian, but from east Africa.

I was even more confused when the hotel staff were not the slightest bit rude to me.

I had barely been there an hour and I was already questioning whether I was in the right place. But then my notions of what Israel would be like were always likely to have been full of contradictions.

Growing up as the child of a north-west London Jewish mother and a left-wing Irish father with Catholic roots, I had heard everything - from "Israel is the safest place for Jews to live"; to "It's an apartheid state, just like South Africa".

Dad once even threatened to cut me out of his will if I ever dared to make aliyah.

Unsurprisingly, there was a distinct lack of family holidays in Israel during my childhood, which only made me more curious about the place.

Curiosity turned to fascination when Jewish friends asked me "when are you coming home" and my innocent answer - "you mean to Crouch End" - left them bemused.

That fascination deepened as I noticed the obsession some people seemed to have with Israel's "crimes" but no one else's.

So when the opportunity to spend 10 days in Israel presented itself, I grabbed it. At last I would find out what the country was really like, and, because this was a work trip for the JC, I would probably not be excommunicated by one side of my family.

I woke up in Tel Aviv on the hottest day of November and took the two-minute stroll from the hotel to the beach.

It struck me as more Shoreditch-on-Sea than South Africa. A 30-something professional in skinny jeans whizzed by on a skateboard. A hipster in tight leggings and rainbow-coloured dreadlocks blasted rap music from his headphones.

And, as if planted by Mossad to prove the critics wrong, an Arab man and a Jewish woman sat down together next to me at the café where I stopped to have iced tea. Not once did I feel like someone might attack me.

Most of my time was spent with a group of Holocaust survivors on whose tour of landmarks such as the Knesset, the Supreme Court, Western Wall and Yad Vashem I was reporting on.

I'd heard the Wall described by friends as a "majestic, spiritual" place. But in fact one that looks quite a bit smaller in real life than it does on television. I have to admit being there provided no euphoric "this is it, I am home" moment; nothing like how I feel when I get a parking space close to the shops at Brent Cross.

However, I did write my wish for world peace on a bit of scrap paper and pop it in a Kotel crack, because my granny always said it was good to keep all your options open.

Walking around Jerusalem's Old City was exciting, like walking through centuries of history, but at no point did I feel a connection.

But it was a conversation with an elderly woman that allowed me to understand the bond that millions have with the Holy Land.

Gisele Winton had been forced to hide her identity as a Jew during the Second World War when she was a refugee fleeing the Nazis.

But in Israel, she felt proud and safe enough to wear a gold Magen David around her neck.

"To hide who I was felt terrible," she told me. "I felt at any minute I was going to die. It was ever so frightening. It is something which just stays with you.

"But here, when you see so many Jewish people around you, it is such a beautiful feeling. I feel safe and welcome."

And it was spending a day with Magen David Adom, Israel's medical emergency service, that made me see what makes the country and its people tick.

It blew me away to discover such a vital provision depended on 12,000 Jewish, Arab, Christian and Druze volunteer medics and paramedics working together to save lives.

It is not a model that I could see working anywhere else in the world.

As a child I often asked my mother: "Why have we never been to Israel? Why don't we go?"

With hindsight, I should have been more confused when she replied, "It's too dangerous", while packing us into the car for our annual holiday to 1990s Northern Ireland.

But perhaps one conflict-ridden country was enough for my family to get its head round.

Still, 20 years later, I have begun to realise what we were missing and I am convinced there is much more to discover.