Shortly before I left England, I’d been approached by another old face from the old country.
“Hi there. I heard you were coming over. Do you fancy a trip up north? We can meet up and I’ll show what life’s really like up here”.
It was a three hour drive up from Efrat and that was lovely, spending some quality time with Antony in the car, just chewing the fat, just being mates. I found out some stuff about why he was here, tales of getting bullied, beaten up for being a Jew (the familiar “Fuck off back to where you come from” stuff), tales of family in the Holocaust… The sort of stuff that makes the words “a Jewish state” sound very reassuring and very appealing.
We were supposed to meet in “my village” Kfar Veradim in the Galilee, but Kfar Veradim is far from a village. Another new town, bigger than Efrat, Kfar Veradim was established in 1982 and is green and well-laid out with big wide streets and statues. It looks curious, an affluent oasis in the hills of the north. There’s a vibrant industrial estate where SanDisk has its HQ and hi-tech companies share space with car companies. The car park’s full and bright young things walk around looking cool and hip. The potted plants gleam and the glass and chrome shines.
Natan had said he’d introduce me to Lt. Col. Sarit Zehavi, CEO and founder of the Alma Research and Education Center and, listen I’m up for anything interesting but this is where it got a bit weird.
We had coffee and chatted about the old days and what we were doing now, about Spurs – like all proper Spurs fans, we had nothing but disappointment and negativity in the new season – and just chatted like mates. Then he said “Come, let’s go and meet Sarit”.
So we drove to the industrial estate where there was an office block – all atrium and light, lots of those potted plants and cool looking people – and went up to the Alma offices.
Sarit was – and I hope she doesn’t mind me saying this – fit in every sense. She was very attractive, but clearly sharp as a tack and bright as a button. She was also very clearly not to be messed with. Let’s put it this way. No one was going to be making glib sexist comments to Sarit.
“So Natan tells me you have a blog. Tell me, what’s the reach and who is your audience?”
What’s the reach and who is my audience? “Well, I sometimes put it on Facebook, got 15 likes once. My wife thinks it’s very good…”
I think it took Sarit about…. hmmm, a couple of seconds to work out the lay of the land, but – bless her – she’d allotted me the time so I was going to get the treatment.
Actually, she was a sweetheart and we got on great. Up north is right by the border with Lebanon and up here the story isn’t Palestine, it’s Hezbollah and Iran. There’s also
“Jed, tell me. What’s going on in England? Is everything I’m reading true?”
Everyone here loves that story.
The situation in the north is very tricky and very real. Not that you’d know it from the press in the UK which seems to think that Israel is the root of all evil in the Middle East, but Iran is a serious threat and has very dangerous expansionist ideas – dangerous not just to Israel but to the whole region and therefore the world. That Corbyn has appeared on and taken money from Press TV, Iran’s state TV propaganda channel… Oh, don’t start me. You see what you’ve done now?
We spent most of the day with Sarit and she was a sweetie. Despite pretty quickly figuring me for what I am – a nice bloke whose wife sometimes likes his blog – she was a sweetie. We went up to a lookout point where she gave me a pair of proper army binoculars and she showed me the border, where Hezbollah have their weapons, where the rocket launchers are and she explained what they could do.
It’s beautiful up there, the hills, the clean air. But I’m not sure I could live up there with all the bomb shelters and the rockets aimed at me and my family. As we drove back to Kfar Veradim and to lunch, the thought occurred – and not for the first time – you’ve got to really want to live here to live here. The people up here have a certainty and a there’s very little in the way of introspection. They were properly lovely to me – well, OK, I’m an influential social media influencer with a hard core, devoted readership and I was going to speak to her later – so maybe it’s not surprising they were nice to me, but they’re properly proud of their place, of what they’ve achieved.
We went to lunch at a local Druze cafe, and as we sat there eating a substantial meze, I mulled. It takes a special kind of person to build communities like Kfar Veradim and to live there – really, a bijou flat in the centre of Brighton is much easier – and so full power to them.