Book: Walking Isreal by Martin Fletcher

A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation, the nation being Israel. Martin Fletcher is a newsman currently living in New York and Israel and working for NBC news. He decides to walk the Mediterranean coast of Israel from north to south and this is the story.

I felt immersed in the "soul of [this] nation" and certainly learned about the Arabs and Jews and Israelis and Palestinians as Martin trudges through the beach sand and settlements and cities along the way, occasionally cooling off in the sea. He talks with people as he walks and eats in restaurants and visits friends and he asks hard questions at times. I learned that there are 7.4 million Israelis and 20% are Arab, that Israel's currency is the shekel (an old Biblical word from my youth), and that there is the concern that "reducing the Arab birthrate is essential to maintaining Israel's Jewish majority."

He visits kibbutzim and I learned how 2/3 of them are now privatized because the ideology of the kibbutz movement didn't translate into successful, economically independent communities. "Kibbutzniks always complained that there were two types of members--the suckers who did all the work and the parasites who did as little as possible."

I learned how the victims of the Holocaust were scorned and derided for years. Yegudit Winkler is a retired journalist who tells about coming to Israel , "I was one of four children from the Holocaust, out of 24 kids. They called us soap...Even in the summer my mother's friends wore long sleeves to hid their tattoos." That changed with the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961 and the survivors "found their voice, and Israel listened in horror."

Fletcher talks about the compulsory military service. He describes how various nationalities came to Israel during different decades: Russians in the early 1900s, Poles in the 1920s, Germans in the 1930s, Europeans from many countries in the 1940s and 1950s, and Ethiopians and those from the former Soviet republics in the 1980s and 1990s. Over a million Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel in the 1990s.

I laughed occasionally as when Fletcher went into a restaurant: "The waiter, whose arm was in a sling, informed me that the cook was off, and that I should look only at items that could be cooked with one hand." Or, "She is an American Jew whose despairing parents sent her to Israel at age 16 to save her from the Roman Catholic she was dating. Unhappily for them she then ran off with an Arab poet. "

He is self-deprecating, aware of his age (especially as he briefly tries to relive his youth in the bawdy nightclubs of Tel Aviv), always seeking answers and trying to understand both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He notes that the press seldom covers the amicable relations between these two peoples, only the animosity and bombs and raids and terror, and that he also has been guilty of that type of reporting.

An Israeli Arab tells him, "I always thought Israli Arabs could serve as a bridge between Jews and Palestinians." Yet Martin says that "in all my research for this book, this has been the most common warning--Israeli Arabs have had it up to here. The new generation will instigate the next intifada, which will be inside Israel." There is some feeling that Israelis are becoming too materialistic and soft, and the Palestinians just have to "survive and avoid a peace agreement Israel collapses from within."

He does make it to Gaza and gets stopped from approaching too closely by two soldiers with M16s who insist he delete the photos he took. He explains that that the warning signs should be in English and Arabic, not just Hebrew, and the soldiers agree.

He muses, "Imagine being a refugee only a few miles from your stolen home, watching strangers tilling your fields and harvesting the fruit from the trees your father planted....If an Arab creeps up at night and picks fruit from his old trees, is that stealing? Who here is the thief?"

The book tells of daily life in Israel, and Fletcher finds Arabs and Jews often live comfortably as neighbors, co-workers and citizens of Israel. Still, sadly, it often seemed that Arabs living in Israel are second-class citizens, subtly so, but still "not our kind."

It is a land of sunshine and memories; it is modern and ancient, colorful, lively, a country that in "2008, had more companies listed on NASDAQ than companies from Europe, China, India, Korea and Japan combined."

At journey's end, he is body-surfing in the sea in a celebratory mood, and a wave crashes him into a small rock and he calls his Hagar his "long-suffering" wife to come pick him as he likely had a broken nose.

Hagar--another strong association with the Bible from my childhood.