A day spent by the Mediterranean sea

In any other country this would be the title of an essay about sand and sun and sea and simplicity. Here in Israel it’s a Persian carpet of threads woven together like the one I stepped onto in my cousin Ricky’s apartment as the sun set on that day.

The beach in front of the Daniel Hotel Herzliya is my favourite in the world. I spent two years of my early 20s living two minutes’ walk from its powdery white sand, and clear, bath-warm water, which bring me a comfort I can’t explain.

I’ve been in Israel for the past five weeks, getting married, seeing family, touring the country, and waiting to vote. I’ve wanted to write, but couldn’t work out which of all the myriad experiences and conversations to recount. But yesterday’s beach visit provided a synthesis and a focus for this piece.

I took a taxi there from my sister’s house in Ra’anana. The driver was an Arab man from Kfar Qasim named Amar Amer. We talked, and I asked him who he was voting for: Ra’am (the United Arab List led by Mansour Abbas). What motivated him most? The insane amount of Arab-on-Arab crime in towns like his. We talked about how good it was that Jewish Israeli ex-police chief Yoav Segalovitz had joined the party, and how neither of us could understand why Abbas wouldn’t declare Hamas a terrorist organisation and enable them to join a coalition government as they had the Bennett-Lapid one that preceded this current Netanyahu term.

On the 15-minute drive we passed more than a dozen new buildings and neighbourhoods under construction. Despite the talk of brain drain and impending sanctions, the economy seems to be thriving, and the shekel is strong. Much stronger than it was when I visited last year – every time I buy something or see another crane I think about the dissonance between the BDS talk and the reality on this ground.

The suburbs are expanding to match the bellies of the Israeli women. There’s so much “pru urvu – be fruitful and multiply” in this country that the world wants to shrink to nothing, it makes me laugh out loud. Those round bellies filled two lifts down from the street to the beach before I could fit into the third. I couldn’t even count the number of them on the sand. Bellies swollen with new Jews. Our answer to October 7 and December 14 and every single Amalek in the endless procession of Amaleks.

On the beach there were babies who will grow up speaking French and Russian and Spanish along with their Hebrew. And many more speaking English, some with Australian accents, for all the reasons you readers know.

My friend’s son Dovi, once an Australian schoolboy and now a lone IDF soldier, buried two of his unit today – the two murdered in Hebron on Friday. The circle closes with a slam.

I was supposed to be in a village near Hebron yesterday myself, and not at the beach at all. I was going to accompany my friend Harvey, who has lived in Israel for 38 years now, to a Palestinian village where he and other Israeli doctors run a free medical clinic once a month. After the terror attack I told him I wouldn’t come – feeling guilty, but ultimately responsible to my mother, my children, and my new husband not to put myself in harm’s way. And then an hour later he told me the clinic had been cancelled, for the first time ever.

That relieved my guilt, but not my sadness or the bittersweetness of lying under the Mediterranean sun reading the brilliant and terrifying The Hidden Hand: The information war and the rise of antisemitic propaganda.

I looked up at the Daniel Hotel and saw an Israeli flag draped out of a window, which somehow reminded me of the white flags waved out the windows of the World Trade Centre on September 11 by humans doomed to jump or else burn to death.

I thought about New York and Sydney and Paris and how we are living in what Islam calls Dar al-Harb (the House of War), where they believe we exist until we’re either converted or subjugated.

And I remembered the (very old) joke my Israeli friend told at dinner last week: God calls a priest, an imam and a rabbi to tell them S/He is so disgusted with the mess we’ve made of the world, S/He is sending another flood in two weeks’ time. The priest returns to his flock and tells them they are all going to die. The imam tells his that because of the Jews they are all going to die. And the rabbi tells his that they have 14 days to learn to breathe under water.

I got back into the crystal clear Med and held my breath.

Lynda Ben-Menashe is president of National Council of Jewish Women Australia.