Five star guests need to learn some manners

Oh dear, I'm billeted at one of Israel's top five star hotels and still there's no escape from the old territorial sunbed routine.

Smart Israeli hotels bring out the worst in guests

I decide that I'm quite comfy and see no reason to move. When I tell the lady this - in a calm but inflexible tone - she starts demanding my name and tells me she will report me to the manager,who apparently reserved the chair for her (I can almost scent the buttery shmeer of an under the counter bribe).

When I tell her I'm still not moving, her face contorts with unreconstructed rage. "You're disgusting," she explodes, "you talk like a pig. A pig!"

I lose all interest and retreat behind my book. The pool boy, pool manager and a newly arrived security guard all shrug with sabra flair and offer consolation in the promise of another bed. "You just shut up," she spits as she's ushered away. To which there was only one answer. Oink.

Such behaviour would indeed be funny if it didn't leave such a bad taste in the mouth.

When did we, as Jews - harangued, hated and hassled by the armchair antisemites of the world - become so aggressive towards each other over sunbeds?

It seems to me that there's something about smart Israeli hotels which brings out the very worst in their guests. Guests such as the French woman who cuts in front of me in the queue at reception, announcing her request will only take a minute.

When I respond that I also only had a brief enquiry to make and, what's more, standing is hurting my injured knee, she tips over into a complete tizzy. I'm accused of being "over excitable" before she finishes by telling me she has in fact broken her own leg only two days before (I should have got her doctor's number - he's clearly a miracle worker).

At breakfast the following morning, as I side-step the stampede and finally make it to the bread bar, I'm innocently slicing a large brown loaf, using that awful communal napkin to cover the crust, when Paul Daniels-like, I feel it move in my hands. The English woman behind me can`t wait for me to finish my slicing and has started to pull the napkin away. I mean we're in a luxury hotel, not a refugee camp.

At another hotel, on the same recent trip to Israel, I could only watch in horror as a guest rummaged through a large bread basket with the vigour and panache of someone locating a bargain at the Next sale.

"I think there's one roll in there you didn't manage to touch," I hissed through a plastic smile as she bustled past me with a plate load of identical buns.

I'm not afraid to fight back. But it is so utterly wearing to have to enter a combat zone every time you step into communal five star life.

So what motivates such appalling behaviour?

Perhaps part of it is a sense of entitlement. In the hermetically sealed world of the five star hotel, maybe guests feel their own needs,comfort and concerns outweigh all others. What's more,being amongst fellow Jews, there isn't a fear of what "others" may think of us.

Of course bad behaviour and sun bed territorial warfare aren't limited to Israel. But I think only in Israel will you experience it at smart, high-end hotels. It would have been unthinkable at the gorgeous spa hotel I stayed at in Greece during the summer, for guests to have marshalled sharply-poking elbows to be first to the salad bar.

So what's to be done about such first world problems? Perhaps one should simply go native and join the pushing and shoving. Or, better still, try to be, as we were once told we were, a light unto the nationals and lead by example. After all, the sun is supposed to shine on the righteous.

Just be careful where you park your towel.