We Three Kings

Being a classicist has its advantages. You are equipped with the raw knowledge to answer that obligatory ancient world question in pub-quizzes, subsequently no longer useful, and so at liberty to buy the next round of drinks; for both of which contributions your teammates are mildly grateful. You can etymologise your way out of, or into, any argument: 'Umm, I think you'll find that's from the Latin meaning 'your opinion is flawed because you don't know Latin very well''. And, at Cambridge, you can wince money out of the faculty for travel to any land that the Greeks or Romans touched in their, erm, fairly tactile imperial encounters. I think I speak on behalf of all professions and disciplines when I say, in all earnestness, that you would be mad not to be a classicist.

Fortunately, no one takes my career advice on board; and an equally fortunate corollary is that there remains a pot of cash in my faculty for travel to 'classical lands'. This time last year I dipped into the account for an excursion to Crete with good friend Volker. By law of there never being too much of a good thing, we decided to repeat the spring-travel pattern this year, keeping the company but riffing the destination. After characteristically small deliberation, we set on Israel as the target: close by plane, distant by culture, richly embroidered with some urgent world politics, and, above all, acceptably classical.

To lay my traveller's cheques square on the table, I have a history of arbitrary tourism syndrome. In 2006 - bored by the prospect of an honours year in my beloved discipline - a crew of the curious span the globe blindfolded and lighted a digit on...West Africa. And so it was, an extempore adventure through the legacy of French colonialism. But this time, my interest in the destination had deeper roots than those that grew from the small arbitree. Israel had been firmly lodged in my imagination ever since Rabbi Blackman (?) bribed dialectic out of our teenage minds with a smorgasbord of fresh bagels. Since that day - not the last time I, an unapologetic member of the Goy family, crossed that sacred threshold of lunchtime discussion - I've built long-lasting relationships with many Jews, and much Jewish culture. With the help of incidental snippets of conversation, text and site over the years, I felt I had pieced together at least the bare bones of the diasporic people of the Sabbath. My mental efforts paled in comparison to the real life reconstruction that is the state of Israel.

For a guy who struggles with opinions, more adept at scorning the misplaced conviction of others than forming his own, Israel is a hell of a place. This hotly contested patch of barren land is about as far from my (equally barren) Australia as you can get: the middle class suburbs of Sydney, famed for their generous apathy, are sites wherein the residents scarcely hold their eyes open enough to see themselves from day to day, let alone the rest of the world. No one looks at us; and we have trouble returning a favour that isn't given in the first place. If some Euro type is ever riling you with his/her swaggering cosmopolitanism and railing at the American parochial mentality over a perfectly rolled cigarette, just ask them whether they have an opinion on Sydney's proposed second airport. Guaranteed they'll pause for a puff and swiftly steer the conversation back to Israel. For everyone, everyone is looking at Israel. It is the capital of the cosmopolitan gaze, the naval of world politics. It is saturated with the cumulative opinions of the human race. A space (discursive and geographical) where it is impossible not to put your foot in it, because it is impossible to keep both feet out of it.

I suspected that I would have to run the 'prospect of a second airport' diversionary tactic many times over in the holy land, averse as I am to heated conversation even in this cold country. But on arrival, I had trouble finding the belligerent opinions I was steeling myself to avoid. Mostly, sadly, people (and by people I mean the small subset of relatively liberal, younger generation Israelis we had access to) spoke with a weary resignation: rockets from Gaza creeping ever closer to Tel Aviv, IDF airstrikes, terrorist bombings, full-scale war brewing on the horizon. People talked of these matters with a kind of fashionable nonchalance. Our cabbie to Ben Gurion airport spoke for the whole (insofar as this country could ever be uniformly 'represented') when he slotted the insouciant comment 'There will be a war in the summer....Nobody likes the mud.' Violence in Israel belongs to the realm of the banal, its relapse about as surprising as (and intimately linked to) the passing of the seasons. People would gossip about the escalating tension as if it were tangible as the thick air before a storm; they could 'feel it coming'. I found this meteorology of war as staggering as the casual melodrama with which it was processed.

The intensity varies from place to place; but certainly Jerusalem was a focal point within a focal point. My imagination fell short before such a city: every stone loaded with religious significance, an unfair burden when each piece struggles to maintain structural integrity at the same time. And for every stone, at least a hundred fans and fanatics. It was another eye-opener for this secular soul whose religious education amounted to committing the first five books of the old testament to memory. Only four remain. Anyway, in a relaxed overlap, the third holiest site of Islam forms a metallic mesh with the centre of the Jewish universe, fortuitously married to the home of Christianity. Happy family, happy family. But all the while a cowboy wearing a kippah, holding a cross and reading from the Koran whispers in the corner: 'There ain't enough room in this one-mule town for the earth's three Abrahamic religions.' Everywhere a sensation of hostile jostling grips you. In the narrow, crowded passages of the old city, a pimply young Hassid weaves an ungainly route through hordes of aging German protestants in his hurry to school - almost tripping over a young Muslim shop runner who is carting a load of empty gas canisters in a diagonal direction. Competing identities make grabs for space at a wider topographic level too: the old city is divided into distinct quarters (Armenian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish). The new city has its own abrasions, ironically magnified where there are no holy sites to fight over: ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim, a village of black-clad sidelocked men and invisible women, shares a main-road border with predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem. How about 'intra-religion' unity? Well, venture into the motley church of the Holy Sepulchre and feel the finely chopped love: every denomination has its own corner to whisper in (complete with whispering cowboy), and the Greeks intercepted any harmony of vista by putting up huge walls in the very centre of the place, walls that prevent border crossing through the most basic visual effort, being here and seeing there. From every vantage point, Jerusalem is a city of fractured views.

Not that walls in a church constitute the country's biggest mural problem. We took a day out from Jerusalem to venture across the hefty concrete slab dividing Israel from the West Bank (in recent years the quieter of the two Palestinian territories). Again, I carried my 'second airport' conversation in an emergency glass container. But all we found in Ramallah was construction, good cheer, and what appeared to be a whole lot of wealth: posh cars threaded through infrastructure that was brand spanking new, or will be in a year's time. The city seemed to be receiving a very direct, very conspicuous facelift when we were there; one of the central pedestrian roads was being torn up guts and all, in order to lay the foundations of what will be, fingers crossed, a new Palestinian nation. Seeing such a functional and - if a day tripper is licensed to say - prospering city was a much-needed complement to the images of abject refugee camps dominating western media. We were detained by the owner of a sandwich shop for a few minutes and listened eagerly to a spirited argument for sovereignty - all delivered (sandwich included) in a genial, non-aggressive manner. From our limited experience, this seemed to be an approach quickly snowballing into a zeitgeist: mainstream Palestine is committed to displaying an 'acceptable' face to the world, letting people (i.e. the west) into its primarily 'normal' everyday life. Mahmoud is just like you and me, Jimmy. While such a strategy might tend to occlude blemishes in favour of slapdash capitalist cosmetics, a change of image is not to be underestimated. Start building, acting, looking like an official state, and eventually you'll be treated like an official state, and eventually you'll be an official state. It worked for Dio Chrysostom, who became a philosopher by dressing up as one, until people started talking to him as one. And then he started talking like one. And then he was one. By no means the end of a complicated peace process; but it plays a role in this world of images.

As always in Israel and the territories, things change in the blink of an eye. The relatively rosy trip from Jerusalem to Ramallah was not the same thing in reverse: entering Israel is like entering a maximum security prison facility where the guards are convinced you're trying to kill them. All Palestinian residents had to leave the bus while their documentation was checked, and in the meantime, two IDF soldiers scoured the vehicle for bombs. Some poor sod had left a bag of snow-peas (or similar greens) under the seat. You could feel the tension surge as the soldiers reluctantly prodded it before picking it up and verifying its vegetable constituents. Then they ran off with our suspiciously unstamped passports. Guns a-swinging the whole time. I've had some distressing border crossings in my life. Senegal into Mali, for example: we gave it a fifty percent chance the bus would drive off without us as we waited on an interminable passport check. Even though I never worried about passport return this time, the crossing took the prize for sheer unpleasantness: looking out the window and seeing Palestinians herded through a wire gate while we surrendered our passports to some aggressive ambassadors already primed into a bad mood through suspicion of snow-peas, stuffed innocently into a guilty-looking opaque bag. The old Heathrow glare and robotic 'What do you study?' was looking like an immigration Club Med.

And all this rigmarole at the end of a period of relative quiet, when checkpoints were supposedly at their mildest and mobility for the Palestinians at a modest high. As soon as tensions re-flare, travel times will explode; what should, by the assumptions and calculations of modern transport, take half an hour to cover, will inevitably balloon to hours. Being a Palestinian in this world must feel a lot like physical disability, or incarceration, or any and every metaphor of impediment: doing time, not on your own time, but on someone else's, the one who decides how long it will take you to cover the same distance you covered yesterday and will cover tomorrow, but who decides differently on all of these days. Hemmed in by a wall of force separating you from your people on the other side (East Jerusalem), and on the other other side of another gigantic territorial wall (Gaza). Contrast our trip to Haifa later that day: straight on a bus and at the opposite end of the country in a few measly hours. Uneven travel times are by no means the worst inequalities in this bumpy region; but they are a quotidian index of frustration in a world that, increasingly, is rightly giving the finger to the tyranny of distance (this Australian joins the chorus). It is no coincidence that some of the most famous scenes of apartheid are played out on buses: places of transition that should highlight community, but often advert to segregation. I leave the image as sketch and not fully-figured parallel; but I know my foot is already deep in it, deep in the picture.

I left this place more confused than I entered it, muddled in the mess of culture, religion, ethnicity; even geography posed problems as I reviewed the 'neutral' flat map. What would a Palestinian nation look like? An Israeli one next to it? I couldn't even complete this simple task of two-dimensional rearrangement and rezoning of space in my own mind. It made we want to erase every line drawn on the landscape in the history of human civilisation and start again, from principles that would give up on an equation between politics and geometry. How about on the moon? No: an astronaut cowboy will still confront me, gesturing towards the national flags that continue to jostle even as they sag: surviving without the life support of all the rhetorical wind and hot air that are some of the unfortunate side-effects of an atmosphere.