We are in Tel Aviv, where the sun is doing its best to break through the clouds. Last night we watched a Tchaikovsky opera in a packed house at whose doors, unlike those at London’s Royal Opera House, no bags were checked. Still, I felt safe. The previous night we’d seen a concert by the Israel Philharmonic featuring our brilliant mishpochas Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, which had me on my feet, tears in my eyes, shouting “Shkoyach!”
We’d driven back that same day from the imposing desert crater of Ramon, via the outpost fortress of the Nabataean Kingdom – no, me neither, but this Kingdom controlled part of the Silk Route from 3rd century BC until it was annexed by the Romans, who renamed it Arabia Petraea. There were wine presses and storage rooms, water cisterns and a chapel… and there was I, millenia later, in scratchy denim and the wrong shoes, wondering, not for the first time, what the Romans ever did for us? But walking through a crater, formed by erosion billions of years ago, was a good reminder that in the scheme of things, the delay in selling my flat and the vertical lines around my top lip might be less important than I think.
The Beresheet Hotel overlooking the crater was a magnificent setting for our delayed honeymoon. The view from our balcony was a palette of colours beyond even Farrow & Ball; from chalk to ochre and rose to teal, layered like a Mary Berry gâteau by years of erosive wind and water. As we sipped a glass of mint tea, an ibex, with long curved horns, appeared ten feet below, knelt on his front legs and took a sip from the wine glass on the patio. Then his wife and kid tripped over to join him and they nibbled the towels, ruminating on life and art, as I watched, breathless.
The Foreign Office had warned us not to come here unless our travel was essential. Well, it is. It‘s essential for the soul. And I’m here to tell the Foreign Office that there’s a reason why their initials are F.O.
Here, archaic spectrums and futuristic Technion embrace. Whatever the divisions in Israeli society – and there are almost as many as types of hummus – there is a shared passion for this tiny, intrepid, integrated and misunderstood strip of precious land.
We felt especially glad to be in Hostage Square on Holocaust Memorial Day, to watch as the giant digital clock, which marked every second of the hostages’ captivity, was turned off. The speakers were either former hostages or the parents or siblings of those murdered. I speak no Hebrew but I’m good at interpreting body language and inflection, and the fortitude of those speakers, in defiance of their personal grief, was devastating to behold. It was a quiet, restrained event and even the singing of Hatikvah was subdued.
I had a Zoom that day for Andrew Marr on LBC, so we strolled to a friend’s flat where I spoke on the phone between pea soup and salad. The subject, I thought, was the relevance of Holocaust Memorial Day, but the questions were all about antisemitism in London. Andrew brought up Israel’s response to October 7 in Gaza, without actually calling it a response. I pointed out that Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates a real genocide, enabled by the silent majority, that occurred because hatred of Jews existed, viscerally, decades before the state of Israel. The tragedy of Gaza happened because of innate and fuelled hatred of Jews, which existed centuries before the existence of the State of Israel. The present war is an existential battle.
Later, the BBC Today programme referred to the death of six million people, neglecting to mention that those people were Jews. They apologised but nothing can convince me that it wasn’t intentional. The head of News may have departed but the mummery lingers on.
Meanwhile, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, an exhibition called The Day is Gone showcases the work of German painters between the wars, loaned to the museum for the first time by Jan E. Fischer, a private collector. The artists included Otto Dix and George Grosz, and there is a haunting study of the actress Carola Neher, which I may have to break in and steal. Neher, for whom Brecht created the role of Polly in The Threepenny Opera, was a superstar and an anti-fascist, who fled to Prague, then Moscow, where she was accused of anti-Soviet activity and perished in a gulag. It all throws light on the current situation in Israel.
At the Museum of Eretz Israel, there are 12 pavilions. We randomly chose an exhibition of photographs in the Rothschild Centre, which houses several rooms of photographs of Berlin and St Petersburg by the brothers Evgeny and Yakov Henkin, working in parallel. They show the mundane as well as the tender, against the backdrop of the build-up to war: footballers in mid-air, a girl rising from a seesaw made from a plank, a well-dressed couple, first in repose, then in Heil Hitler pose, chilling and ridiculous in retrospect.
Afterwards, in the café, I overheard an animated lady at the next table asking her companions, a man and a woman: “And where is Greta Thunberg when Iran is shooting thousands of its own citizens?’
Like a red rag to a Taurean; I turned and joined in. “I know! Thirty-six thousand slaughtered in a couple of weeks, and not a word from the bloody UN…”
We got kvetching, and I praised the exhibition as a metaphor for precisely this kind of moral grandstanding, and urged them to see it. It turned out one of the women was Ilana Matatov, the curator. I promised to write about it in the JC. Was I a journalist, she asked?
“No,” I couldn’t resist it, “I’m an actress on my honeymoon!”
The man turned and stared at me: “Are you Adam’s mother?” he said. It was the US-based colleague my son has worked alongside for 13 years, of whom I’ve heard so much, but never met. He was in Israel for two days as a sponsor of the exhibition. And that’s the magic of Israel. In some mysterious way, everybody is related. That’s why Hostage Square is symbolic in a way the world can’t grasp. You are one person away from every soldier who risks or has lost their life. That means you reader.
Don’t wait for travel to be essential. Get on the first El Al flight and take a stand for your tribe. As the Sondheim song (almost) says, “We’re still Here.”
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