fugitive peace

(More pictures here)

Mostly, the Africans are invisible. You catch a glimpse of dark faces like a hallucination when the kitchen door swings open in just about any of Tel Aviv’s glitzy restaurants and bars, but for all the diners know they are teleported to work, or flown in specially from Sudan each evening.

That’s because most of the diners, like me until last night, have never heard of Levanda street. I stood on Levanda for at least half an hour, and almost everyone who passed by was either African or lost.

The street begins next to Tel Aviv’s central bus station, which pumps passengers in and out 24 hours a day, and runs between workshops and low-rise housing to where the shiny office towers of the business district rear up. Those Africans who have found paying work rent rooms. Those who haven’t are in the basement of the last house on Levanda.

I went with a handful of young Israeli soldiers. Some of them had been in the south the day before, near the Ketsiot prison where Africans who sneak across the porous border with Egypt are held while the UNHCR processes them. They had bumped into a gaggle of Ivorians who, through a bureaucratic snafu, had been released into the empty desert. The Ivorians had heard of this place in Tel Aviv that an NGO had rented as a shelter for migrants. The soldiers arranged for them to be picked up, and then decided to bring them some food.

2,000-odd Africans entered Israel last year, a growing tide encouraged by the news that Israeli soldiers, unlike their counterparts in most of north Africa, don’t shoot migrants (and even help them). Some are refugees from wars and genocide, and some just want a better life.

The ones from Cote d’Ivoire have one of the more uncertain futures. Most of them - so they say, at least - fled the fighting that broke out after a rebellion against Laurent Gbagbo, the president, in 2002. On the recommendation of UNHCR, people from war zones like Darfur get automatic “temporary protection” from the Israeli government, which means the right to stay and work until the UN deems it safe to go back. Until recently, that included Ivorians. But the 11 who arrived at Levanda street this week were among the last batch who might be eligible. The civil war was officially declared over in March, and refugees will now have to prove their case for protection, though they may have left Cote d’Ivoire two or three years ago and have no idea what is going on there.

The 11 new arrivals were mostly young men who said they had been rebels in the war. They were friendly, though still a little annoyed at having been dumped in the desert. An argument broke out between a couple of them about whether talking to journalists was likely to improve their chances of asylum. Then they took us inside.

It’s a small warren of rooms, which judging by the scraps of posters used to be a nightclub. At their estimate, which looked about right, around 100 people are packed in to it. They’ve run out of sleeping space, so some are sleeping outside, in temperatures that have fallen close to freezing. Bags, clothes, mattresses and cooking pots take up almost all the dry floor space. What was once shelving improvises as bunk-beds. They could sleep in the bathrooms if they weren’t inch-deep in diluted urine. A couple of broken, shit-filled toilets are the alternative to relieving themselves outside. Well-wishers have brought some bits and pieces of kitchen equipment, utensils and food. A few, though, clearly have some money, whether sent by relatives, borrowed, earned or stolen; there are a few mobile phones and even the odd MP3 player.

Their plight illustrates how slow the refugee rumour mill is to catch up with reality. When just a few dozens or hundreds were trickling across each year, it was easy for Israel to give them a much better life than they could have elsewhere. “Would you have come if you knew what the conditions were like?” I asked one of them who had been designated as the spokesman. “Not at all,” he said.

The space is divided by nationality: Ivorians in one section, Eritreans in the next. The Eritreans are usually classified by the UNHCR as economic migrants, and have little chance of staying permanently.

Scanning a list of names of people awaiting their UN documents I came across a young Eritrean geography graduate called Aaron. He had excellent English, an easy, ironic smile, and cynical sense of humour. When I asked why he had come to Israel, he gave me such a look that I apologised for asking a stupid question. “No, it’s not stupid,” he said, and looked around us at the pile of blankets and mattresses. “I was just, you know [ironic smile] looking for a better life.” After graduating, he had few job prospects and faced getting drafted into the army. “But I like my freedom. I was born free and I intend to stay free the rest of my life.”

I told him if that George Bush heard him, he would probably get an American passport on the spot. He laughed loud and ironically, declined to be photographed, and then walked out of the shelter to the bus station. A relative from Eritrea had contacted him, asking him to meet yet another new arrival and bring him back to the shelter. Aaron was one of the ones with a phone.

I took his number. He felt like someone I could have met nursing a lazy afternoon drink in any of Tel Aviv’s cafes. I’d like to think he soon will be. I doubt it, though.

Or in the local language, court acquits Palestinian.

I know nothing about law, but I’ve always been oddly fascinated by Israel’s supreme court. It’s probably the paradox of a court known worldwide for having civil rights at the centre of its agenda—in Israel, if you think your civil rights have been violated, you go straight to the top, bypassing the lower courts—in a country known worldwide for its dubious record on those same rights.

The short answer to the paradox, of course, is that the civil rights we fondly think of as universal are totally not. It’s courts and parliaments that get to decide what the rights should mean, how much scope they should have, and what to do when individual freedoms clash—as they inevitably do—with the good and security of the collective. And though judges are more independent than legislators, they are still products of the same system; they have their ideologies, social consciences and political pressures, as well as personal agendas. How they interpret individual freedom suits the country they are in.

This came home to me yesterday at a seminar on “The Interface between Law, Intelligence and Terror” at the Shasha Centre at the Hebrew University. The main part was a closed session packed with retired generals, senior spies and supreme court justices, where the average age was at least three decades above mine. Most of the talk was, not suprisingly, about the need for laws to give the security services greater powers, plus a lot of sniping at the recent US National Intelligence Estimate and its claim that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme.

In the evening, there was a public debate in the evening between Aharon Barak, the recently retired president of the Israeli supreme court, and Richard Posner, an influential and iconoclastic American appeals court judge.

These two are oceans apart ideologically. Barak’s motto “everything is justiciable” shaped the present-day Israeli supreme court. Posner is one of the most controversial judicial conservatives in America, infamous for arguing that a free market in babies (or rather parental rights, he later clarified) would be better than government-regulated adoption. He wrote in his review of Barak’s book The Judge in a Democracy that Barak had created “a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices”. Barak, in turn, rather cattily hinted that Posner’s opposition to judicial activism was so extreme even in American terms (let alone Israeli terms) that he was simply wrong about how US judges actually work.

Both enjoy using rhetoric to win points, which made for some disagreements that were largely cosmetic. For instance, Barak said a judge’s role is to protect democracy, while Posner said a judge is meant to act as a brake on democracy. It didn’t take much to see that, in Barak’s words, they were “reading different dictionaries”: Barak’s “democracy” was the liberal values that underpin democratic societies, while Posner’s meant majority rule. In reality they both think the judge has to keep the will of the majority from overly restricting the rights of the individual, though they disagree on how.

But some of the differences are profound. Barak has a somewhat exalted view of judges’ wisdom and importance to society, while Posner describes them as “rather limited”, “not knowing very much”, and vulnerable to “the deformations of their profession”, meaning their tendency to privilege legalism. To Posner legislative limits on judges are essential, while Barak fought them tooth and nail; since he left the job the government and the supreme court have been at war over attempts to make the judges more accountable to politicians. Posner said that words like “justice”, fairness” and “human rights” were “empty much of the time” and to be avoided; Barak, looking incredulous, riposted with “you cannot judge without justice”. To Posner, and to at least a couple of other Americans at the seminar, the idea of the supreme court intervening in military decisions, as Israel’s regularly does, was simply mind-boggling.

In short, they had totally different views on what judges should do to protect civil rights. Yet what struck me was how much of the disagreement could be explained not by ideology but by differences in the way Israel and the US function as countries. It starts from basic procedural stuff. The fact that Israel’s supreme court can be a court of first instance (the reason, I was told, is that the British wanted to limit challenges to the government’s decisions during the Mandate, so they didn’t let lower courts hear such cases) means it sometimes has to intervene on specific cases while they’re still hot—whether to permit a military action that might harm innocent people, for instance—rather than waiting for a body of experience about the issue to build up and set a general precedent.

Then there’s history. For instance, Posner, argues that personal security matters to people more than civil liberties (though one might retort that in practice they usually have to choose between their own security and other people’s liberties, so it’s hardly a fair fight) and it’s therefore reasonable to restrict civil rights in times of war or crisis. In American history, he noted, this is what has happened, and after each crisis—the Civil War, World War II, etc—civil rights have grown stronger again. 9/11 brought new infringements, but as the feeling of threat recedes, these are being challenged. Now, even in the US this idea is a red rag to anyone who believes in the sanctity of constitutional rights. Barak, though, had a much more pragmatic response: Israel doesn’t have short crises punctuated by long periods of peace, but frequent, extended patches of conflict, and without judges to act as a buffer against public mood swings, civil liberties would be in terrible shape.

The Israeli court is also a buffer against a far more volatile politics than in America. Plus it fills the vacuum left by the lack of a constitution. Indeed, the starting criticism that judicial conservatives have of Barak is that he arrogated to the court the powers to overturn legislation and treat the “Basic Laws”, which are merely ordinary laws that require a larger majority to change, as if they were a real constitution. But, as Posner admits, in an “immature democracy, poorly governed” with a “mediocre and corrupt” political class, surrounded by enemies and with no constitution, someone like Barak may have been just what Israel needed.

Meanwhile, Barak’s critics at the other end of the scale are human-rights groups who point out that his court may have been very progressive on civil rights in Israel proper, but when it comes to petitions from occupied Palestinians, it has mostly sided with the government and its security services. Yesterday’s lecture was interrupted repeatedly by a handful of American students shouting “what about the civil rights of the Palestinians?” In another country one might have expected a hall mostly full of other students to be a little sympathetic. Here they immediately began shouting at the protestors to shut up, and burst into loud applause when the security guards finally hauled them out of the hall. It was a reminder that even judges who stand as the ultimate guardians of civil rights cannot avoid reflecting the views of their society.

For the crowd that filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv tonight (Saturday night) for the annual memorial ceremony, there was what a friend of mine described as “a surrealistic irony, like something out of a Greek tragedy”: on Sunday, the actual anniversary of Rabin’s death, his assassin, Yigal Amir, will watch as his newborn son is circumcised.

Rabin’s son Yuval, who this year spoke at the ceremony for the first time, remarked that one of the names for the circumcision ceremony in Hebrew is the Covenant of Isaac, or Brit Yitzhak, since Abraham’s son Isaac was the first Jewish male to get snipped on the prescribed eighth day after his birth. Arranging for a man to perform a Brit Yitzhak on the anniversary of his murdering another Yitzhak sounds like the kind of nasty joke dreamed up by a deity who has had a particularly tiresome day.

Indeed, for the Israeli religious right this will probably pass into legend as a stroke of divine justice. Luckily for the people in the square, not too many looked like they believed in divine justice. Though Rabin’s death is sometimes compared to JFK’s in terms of the national trauma, the mourning of it, at least nowadays, is a strictly partisan affair, observed mainly on the secular left and centre. By my reckoning, a good one-third of the people were wearing the blue shirts of the Labour youth movement. Most of them would have been too young to remember the day he was killed.

There were no big names from parties to the right of Rabin’s Labour party (unlike two years ago, when Tsipi Livni, then in the Likud, caused quite a buzz by giving a speech). On the contrary, there were several not-so-veiled references to the fact that though Yigal Amir is in jail, nobody has punished those in the settler movement and the Likud who incited against Rabin; his son noted that “one finger pulled the trigger, but many hands brought it there”.

I confess that tears welled up a couple of times. One was during Yuval Rabin’s eulogy for his father, which was tough and moving. The other was the minute’s silence, when 150,000 (according to the organisers) yakking, jabbering Israelis suddenly went into a hush. You could have heard a mobile phone ring all the way across the square; I just prayed it wouldn’t be mine.

But then I remembered Barbara Plett, a BBC journalist who admitted to crying at the pathos of the moment when the helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat on his last journey to a Paris hospital lifted off from the presidential compound in Ramallah. She was roasted by pro-Israel media watchdogs such as HonestReporting: “Another BBC Mideast reporter displays open attachment to one side of the conflict”. Although her report was in the BBC’s “From our own correspondent” programme, which is meant to be a personal view — rather like this blog — the BBC partly upheld a complaint against her. She was transferred to Pakistan not long afterwards. When I started this blog, though it’s separate from The Economist, my editor warned me to “remember Barbara Plett”.

So should I be admitting that my eyes got damp for Rabin? They say Karachi’s quite nice this time of year. Somehow, though, I don’t think HonestReporting will jump on my “open attachment to one side of the conflict” for this one. Palestinian media groups might, but they seem to have less interest in hunting down such infractions, or maybe just fewer resources, and certainly less clout (I can’t immediately recall a case of a journalist being drummed out of her job for being too pro-Israel).

Nor do I think it’s somehow more legitimate for a journalist to shed tears over Rabin than over Arafat. Rabin may have made a greater leap towards peace than any Israeli leader before or since, but a lot of Palestinians remember him chiefly as the man who talked peace while letting the settlements grow faster than ever (as the book Lords of the Land, which I reviewed recently, points out, making it all the more ironic that the settlers hated him so). In political terms, settlement-building is to Palestinians what terrorist attacks are to Israelis: the deal-breaker, the actions that belie the other side’s claim to want peace. Arafat, at least before the second intifada, was a bit like Rabin, trying but failing to stop the extremist forces in his society. They both got the Nobel.

But in any case, what moved me, like Barbara Plett, wasn’t the memory of the man himself, but the emotion of the moment. Surely that’s legitimate for anyone.

Just back from two very busy weeks in the US, hence my lack of recent posts. I have to limit what I can post for now about my trip to Washington, since a piece is due in The Economist about the Annapolis summit and I can’t pre-empt it.

Not that I have a big scoop or something. Both in Washington, and in my interviews in Jerusalem and Ramallah in the couple of days since returning, I’ve found nobody who knows what the substance of the summit will be, when it will take place or even whether it will happen at all. A Palestinian official I saw today confirmed what Abu Alaa, the chief negotiator, said today in a press conference: they want a timeline for a peace accord to be announced at Annapolis. Israel opposes this, and in months of talks the two sides have come no closer on it.

Does Annapolis really matter? What’s the criterion for success? What if it doesn’t succeed, or doesn’t happen at all? The answers depend on the politics of whoever you’re talking to. Broadly speaking, the further to the left/pro-Palestinian people are, the more they think the summit matters and less likely they think it is to succeed. On the right/pro-Israel branch, they think the summit could yield something but its importance has been exaggerated anyway. Those happy few who are most enthusiastic about the summit are therefore in the political centre, at the equilibrium between optimism and importance. It’s just like the equilibrium of supply and demand.

What has this got to do with the French buying Jerusalem? Oh, nothing. It’s just that I returned to find the former site of the Israeli foreign ministry surrounded by billboards (above) advertising a new luxury housing complex. Old-time Jerusalemites have long been griping about how property prices are being driven up by the influx of French buyers - some of them immigrants, some merely investing for a rainy day - but this is the first time I’ve seen houses advertised directly at the French market.

Oddly, the Hebrew and English versions promise “a new lifestyle culture” while the French version offers “a new life and culture”. I’m not sure if that is just a bad translation, or a hint that the targets are existing Hebrew- and English-speaking Israelis but new French immigrants.

The final entry in my correspondent’s diary of reporting from two weeks ago. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the week in Washington, getting some takes on the upcoming Annapolis summit. I’ll be posting some thoughts on that at the beginning of next week.

Three millennia, one neighbourhood at a time

TODAY is a Jewish holiday, the Rejoicing of the Law, and West Jerusalem is as quiet and bucolic as an English village on a Sunday afternoon. It seems a good morning for a bike ride.

I zoom down the hill towards Yemin Moshe, the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls of the Old City. Its builder, a Jewish philanthropist in the late 19th century, set the style for the new city by covering everything—the houses, the streets and the staircases that run down the hillside—in rough-faced, yellow-white Jerusalem stone. He put a windmill there too, only to discover, so legend goes, that there wasn’t enough wind.

I swing past the shuttered old railway station with murals of 1930s Palestine, past the Sultan’s Pool, a rocky valley where cattle and horses took water in the days of the Ottoman rulers, and climb the road that winds around the Old City’s southern walls. Below me snakes a dusty ravine studded with old olive trees. This is the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna—the Bible’s word for hell, possibly because the refuse burned and the corpses dumped there in ancient times released a stink not of this world.

I enter the Old City at the Zion Gate (in Hebrew), David’s Gate in Arabic, passing the alleged site of both King David’s tomb and the Last Supper. Both claims are dubious, but myth often has more power here than scholarship. I rattle over cobbles and down a hill to the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. Since my lycra cycling shorts undeniably constitute immodest dress, I remain outside the security gates, watching a group of American Jewish teenagers doing a festive circle dance.

Out of the Old City through the Dung Gate and down a hill so steep my wheels skid, I head into Silwan. This Palestinian neighbourhood has the misfortune to lie atop Jerusalem’s ancient precursor, the City of (King) David. Right-wing Israelis have stealthily bought up a few houses near the site of the archaeological dig, each of which is now a mini-settlement with barbed wire, electric gates and a threadbare Israeli flag.

On to a dusty track along the Kidron Valley, where I am distracted by a bizarre set of Greco-Egyptian monuments hewn from the rock. A passing tour guide tells me they are the tombs of David’s son Absalom and of “the Pharaoh’s Daughter”. I look them up later. Absalom’s tomb has previously been ascribed to Jehoshapat and to Hezekiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter’s tomb (if indeed it’s her in there) is somewhere else, and what he said was her tomb is actually called the Grotto of St James, and actually contains the mortal remains of a Jewish priestly family. Clearly, Israelis and Palestinians weren’t the first to argue over who owned what here.

I ride past the garden of Gethsemane, where Judas betrayed Jesus. Christian pilgrims cheer me on as I struggle, but eventually walk, up the steep hill towards the Mount of Olives cemetery. By Jewish tradition this is the world’s best place to be dead, for when the Messiah comes, those buried here will be the first to rise and follow him.

I recall a cold November night when I came here with the scion of an illustrious rabbinical family and we stumbled around tombs looking for his ancestors, stopping spellbound as the unearthly dawn call of the first muezzins echoed off the Old City walls below us.

Puffing, I ride along the ridge at the top of the Mount of Olives and stop to look over the Judean desert to the east. On these barren slopes Israel plans to build 3,500 homes to connect the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim—on a hilltop in the distance in front of me—to Jerusalem, thus taking a large bite out of the West Bank. To Palestinians it has come to symbolise Israel’s refusal to take peace seriously.

I carry on to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, which was a Jewish enclave in Jordanian territory between Israel’s birth in 1948 and its capture of the West Bank in 1967. The dividing line between the slightly ramshackle Palestinian neighbourhood and the neat, aloof university precinct is as sharp as the day the border fence came down.

Back into town, past the elegant, orientalist American Colony hotel where I and other journalists meet aid workers and diplomats to share overpriced meals and cynical stories. Past St George’s cathedral, where Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli convicted of treason for leaking his country’s nuclear secrets to the press in 1986, often hangs out—stateless, forlorn and, say those who know him, now slightly unhinged.

I cross the former border with Jordan, now a highway, and swerve past black-coated ultra-Orthodox hasidim as I cut through Mea Shearim, then up to the Russian Compound, where a notorious prison for Palestinian detainees sits in the shadow of the magnificent Holy Trinity church.

My home stretch takes me past my local watering-hole, the Restobar. Some locals still know it as Moment—the name it had when a suicide bomber entered it and killed himself and 11 others in 2002. I slalom through security gates into the quiet little street where the prime minister’s house is, and race past a tall, strapping security guard who watches me from behind impenetrable sunglasses, assessing whether I have a weapon concealed in my lycra shorts. Past the Belgian consul’s house, a superb neo-classical mansion whose Palestinian owner leased it to the Belgians in 1948 to keep it out of Israel’s hands. And home.

Every stone in Jerusalem has a history—or several, and often contradictory. Many outsiders find it an oppressive place. But where else can you cover over three thousand years by bicycle in less than an hour and a half?

The second entry in this week’s correspondent’s diary from The Economist’s website.

From economic stagnation to flamenco in one day

AFTER three years here, I still don’t understand the West Bank security regime. Israelis are forbidden from visiting the main Palestinian cities, and at some, like Nablus, checkpoints block them.

But in others, you can drive all the way in and out without being stopped, and since there are rarely any signposts, it’s easy to end up there by mistake. The first time I went to Hebron, I stopped a taxi driver to ask the way. “You’re in the middle of it,” he grinned.

We visit a stationery factory in Hebron. The usual stories. The checkpoints make moving goods between cities in the West Bank, let alone to Gaza, costly and slow. It’s hard to compete with Israeli goods, which suffer fewer hold-ups.

More surprising is that Hebron’s paper-pounders, shoe-smiths, clothes makers and others are really worried about competition from China. Even here in Palestine, they feel the same global threat as everyone else. Except that here it’s much harder to make your business leaner and meaner, since so much depends on Israel, on things beyond your control.

We drop in on a senior Hamas man, a member of parliament, portly and bearded as per usual. But unusually, he is one of the few not in an Israeli jail. I cheerfully ask why. He bristles. I realise that my question could imply he was an Israeli collaborator. Pointedly, he explains that he spent two years in prison, and (this with some pride) was even elected to parliament from there.

Then he runs down the usual list of PA repressions against Hamas. But he says his Islamist charity, which distributes clothes and meals for Ramadan to poor families, is still raking it in, thanks to the Islamic tradition of giving 2.5% of one’s earnings as zakat, or charity, while what he calls “pro-Fatah” organisations like the Red Crescent are finding it hard to raise funds.

I’ve been asking every Islamist I meet how Hamas is dealing with the attempts to close it down, and I realise that this is the answer. They may go underground politically, but they can still do what they know best: collecting zakat to pay for social projects like soup kitchens and schools. That was what made them popular in the first place. The PA is closing down lots of Islamist charities, but it can’t close them all. Hamas can play this game for years.

He sends us on to three young men who have stories of being arrested and tortured by the PA. All were active during the intifada, when Hamas and Fatah militants fought for a common cause. Now they’re enemies. We sit around a plastic table in the concrete-walled courtyard of their family’s house and they tell me of being hooded, tied up and suspended by the wrists. Again, they say, it is much worse than what the Israelis used to do.

At iftar in my fixer’s home in Ramallah that evening, the conversation turns to the 87 Palestinian prisoners who were supposed to have been released this morning as a goodwill gesture—all part of “boosting” Mahmoud Abbas. At the last minute Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, decided to withhold some of the pardons. (Why, I asked an Israeli journalist friend. “He’s got nothing else to do,” she sneered.)

At any rate, Israel is holding some 9,000 Palestinians. If anything, agree the iftar diners, Mr Abbas will look to his people like a fool for accepting such a measly token.

From Ramallah I drive down to the Dead Sea for a concert by Paco de Lucia, Spain’s most famous flamenco guitarist. The setting is a desert gorge walled by massive cliffs. The warm, heavy air of 400m below sea level fills with breathtaking music. The audience is a relaxed, joyful crowd of Israelis of all ages.

I find my concentration wandering. To be able to flit between the Israeli and Palestinian worlds is a rare privilege; most of their inhabitants cannot. But not for the first time, I’m finding the contrasts hard to digest.

The image on the left is a map that I bought in an antiques shop in Jaffa. It is dated 1940 and shows Jewish-owned land in green. Under the legend “FACTS”, it states, “The greater part of Palestine is still uncultivated. Jews now own less than six percent of the land of Palestine.” It enumerates three zones: in the largest, called Zone A, “land transfers to others than Palestine Arabs are prohibited”. The map is issued by the “Keren Kayemeth Leisrael”, the Jewish National Fund.

The image on the right is the JNF’s land holdings today. As I wrote in last week’s story, there is some disagreement over dates, amounts and prices, but between 1949 and 1953 either 1.25m or 2m dunums (1,250 or 2,000 sq km) was added to the 6% or so that Jews owned before Israel was created, by means of selling the JNF land that the state had confiscated from those same “Palestine Arabs” who had fled the war.

It took me a while after I bought the antique map to read the legends properly and realise that it was propaganda. The JNF was trying to show how little land Jews controlled, and how restricted they were from acquiring more, in an attempt to stave off criticism that they were taking over Palestine. In the preceding years tensions had flared and land prices had gone up many-fold as the Arabs in Palestine started to resist the slowly growing Jewish influx.

The figures are, of course, somewhat misleading. The 6% refers to the whole of Palestine, of which a great deal was and is desert, and does not easily support large population centres. Much of the Jewish land shown in the 1940 map is concentrated in the coastal strip, where Tel Aviv and its metropolitan sprawl, the biggest population concentration in Israel, are today. Looked at in terms of population rather than land, the picture changes: though estimates vary, by 1940 Jews were around 30%.

Likewise, today’s dispute about the JNF is based on a somewhat misleading figure. According to its charter, its land can be leased to Jews only. But it owns only 13% of Israel. So is it really such a big issue? When you look at the map on the right, where the JNF holdings are so tightly packed that they clearly outline the northern West Bank, it becomes clear that in the bit of Israel that most people want to live in, the non-arid part—in other words, from about the level of Ashkelon northwards—the JNF owns a great deal of the land, perhaps as much as half.

Kadesh Barnea is literally the last stop before Egypt. About 50 yards after the turn-off to the moshav is a decrepit military observation tower and a sign saying “Official Vehicles Only”. The border fence runs alongside the road. We didn’t think it could be the border fence, until I switched off the car engine and we heard Egyptian music issuing from a tinny radio in a hut on the other side. The Egyptians helpfully waved their torches at the Israeli soldiers patrolling somewhere down the road to warn them that someone might be trying to trespass.

It is an incongruous part of the country. As you drive down from Jerusalem, the towns give way to sprawling Bedouin villages that are fighting a losing battle for recognition and state services. Then the encampments thin out, and for a while there is nothing but army bases, prisons and war memorials, whose very remoteness seems itself a form of mourning. There are also some really weird road signs. As we approached the border, with the sun about to set, the slight background claustrophobia that accompanies wherever I go in this tiny country fell away, and I became suddenly aware of the immensity of the Sinai desert opening up ahead.

The incongruity did not end there. Avishai Pinchas, the hero of this week’s story, brought some 50 Sudanese refugees to stay in a series of huts in his back yard. Why does he have a series of huts in his back yard? Because Avishai, who seems at first to be just what you would expect of a third-generation Israeli Jew from a Yemenite family - practical, unassuming, right-of-centre - is actually a messianic Jew (meaning that he believes Jesus was the son of God but not in all the subsequent paraphernalia of Christianity, though the details of messianic Jewish belief vary considerably). His wife, Yolanda, was raised a Protestant in Holland. The huts are for other messianic Jews who come to the moshav for retreats, to meditate surrounded by the harsh beauty of the desert.

As Yolanda tells it, Avishai woke up one Saturday morning with a feeling that God had spoken to him and told him to help the Sudanese “because we too were refugees from Egypt”. (A campaign for Amnesty International against the deportations employed a similar tug on the heartstrings: images of refugees with a song in an African language to the tune of the Israeli national anthem). That same evening a friend called to tell him that some refugees staying at a hotel in Beersheva were in danger of being sent back to Egypt unless they found more steady accommodation. The next morning he hired a bus and brought the biggest families back to the ranch. At least one other messianic family in Israel is hosting Sudanese too.

The women have hair-raising stories of the treatment they got in Egypt, but as the night set in they sat outside under the kind of star-field that only the desert can display, talking and shrieking with laughter as the extended Pinchas family and friends tried to teach them Hebrew. The children seemed healthy and boisterous, and the Pinchas children seem to have adopted them all as siblings, at least when it comes to watching TV…

(Note added September 4th: in the original I mistakenly referred to Kadesh Barnea as a kibbutz. It is actually a moshav, a communal settlement. Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the tip-off.)