It was probably when, at 25 years old and not even an Israeli citizen, I found myself sitting alone at Israel’s seat at the United Nations just minutes before a vote — with no idea what the vote was about — that the odd twists my life had taken really hit home.
Born in South Africa, raised in Canada (with half my family in London) and attending law school in the United States, the one place I didn’t have a real connection with was Israel. But a few months earlier, eager both to help the Jewish State and to relieve the monotony of law school, I applied for an internship at the Israeli consulate in New York. If I landed it, I assumed, I would be doing minor administrative tasks or proof-reading English.
But it did not turn out that way. After an almost cartoonishly intrusive security check, I was invited to the consulate to meet a senior diplomat at the Israeli UN mission. Rather than interviewing me for an internship, he told me that they did not offer such things and asked if I would instead like to come on board as a full-time speechwriter for the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. At first, I would be shadowing someone; but within a few months I would take over as the sole speechwriter at the mission.
I thought he had to be joking. Although I had studied writing and was halfway through a law degree, I had no relevant experience. When I told my parents, they thought I must have misunderstood. But as I would quickly come to learn, that is just how Israeli society — and by extension, its government — sometimes works. In the Middle East, the pace is rapid, and there is not a lot of time for planning. A constant barrage of threats faces Israel, and the spirit of improvisation born in the state’s early days still thrives. If Israelis want to survive, they have to be fast on their feet.
I had to race to keep up. Before I knew it, I was drafting speeches for the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. Struggling to match the frenetic speed of Middle East politics and diplomacy, I had to learn what I needed to know as I went along. My superiors soon even started giving me responsibilities beyond speechwriting. I would work on Israel’s formal statements about Hamas terrorist attacks or about Israeli military action in Gaza. I would often even go to official UN meetings on behalf of Israel. At one of these, the Iranian delegate refused to sit beside me, giving me a taste of the juvenile behaviour that sometimes characterises international relations.
Then there were the missteps, like the time a UN diplomat made disparaging remarks about Israel in French. When my very rough translation of his statement got into the international press, I worried it was about to cause a diplomatic incident. Or, of course, the time when I found myself forced to vote on behalf of Israel. On that day, I was the only one from the Israeli delegation in the room, with no superiors around to give me instruction. Nobody in the Israeli Mission had realised that there was going to be a vote on a resolution, and I had been told just to attend the meeting and take notes. So when the Italian delegate casually mentioned the imminent vote, I thought I was about to have a nervous breakdown.
I had previously noticed how poor mobile-phone reception was at the UN, but it had never affected me until then, as I frantically struggled to get through to someone at the mission to find out what I should do. With few other options, I sheepishly went up to the American delegation to ask them how they were voting. Since the Israelis and Americans often voted together, I reasoned, this would at least give me some indication of which button to push. So, after a brief — and awkward — conversation with the Americans, I went back to Israel’s seat, put my earpiece in, and pressed one of the voting buttons before me. Only afterwards did I determine that the vote had something to do with “weapons of mass destruction”.
After 18 months of speechwriting at the UN — which included working on a speech for Israel’s foreign minister — I was ready to move on. It had been an astonishing experience, and I felt honoured to have had it, but I had never really wanted to be a diplomat in the first place. Once again, though, life took a strange twist. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, came to New York to deliver a speech, and I was asked to contribute to it. A week later I was stunned to receive a call with a strange request. Could I move to Israel to be the Prime Minister’s English-language speechwriter? And could I come immediately?
My jaw dropped, of course. But this was a hard request to turn down, and within a few weeks I was on a plane to Tel Aviv, arriving on the day, in the summer of 2005, that Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip.
Life in the Prime Minister’s Office somehow managed to make life at the UN Mission seem mundane. Suddenly I was floundering about at the heart of the action, with only my broken Hebrew to get by on. I wrote speeches for Prime Minister Sharon and fielded phone calls from the English-speaking media.
I witnessed sing-along sessions in the “Situation Room”, watched a high-ranking government spokesperson do a live radio interview with CNN Radio while driving through Jerusalem’s perilous traffic, and was sometimes asked single-handedly to play host to foreign diplomats on behalf of the Prime Minister. Early on, I was even offered leftovers from Sharon’s lunch.
I was in the Prime Minister’s Office through the founding of the Kadima Party, Prime Minister Sharon’s stroke, the rise of Hamas in Gaza, and the election of Ehud Olmert. Only a few weeks before the Second Lebanon War in 2006 did my bizarre adventure come to a close. I had been working for Israel for a total of two-and-a-half years at that point, and I left for mostly personal reasons. But I also felt that the “window of opportunity” for progress and peace was closing, following Sharon’s stroke and the rise of Hamas, and so that decision was made easier. I did not make the move because of anything specific, but had started to doubt that progress was near — as I had once thought it was.
Throughout this whole experience, I was constantly amazed by the Israeli leaders with whom I was in contact, because of their toughness, their resilience, and, at times, their silliness. I would hardly be the first to suggest that Israeli governmental thinking is mostly tactics and very little strategy, but that remains the best way to explain some of the experiences I had. Again, though, in the Middle East there is not a lot of time to look too far out at the horizon.
I am still wrestling with how to think about it all. In no other country would I have stumbled into the job in the first place, and continued to stumble right into the halls of power. Israel’s lack of formality — sometimes charming, sometimes exasperating — made it possible. Now that I have returned to my natural role as outsider and diaspora Jew, I am often asked how the experience changed my relationship with that wondrous and frustrating country. All I can say is that it made it both simpler and more complicated. I do not know what I was expecting to find at the heart of the Middle East pressure cooker, but what I found were regular people, both heroic and flawed, doing the best they can.