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How I remember it, with some writer's licence. Photos mostly plagiarised from the net.
Keeping me going until it was time to leave, I found building work that lasted more than a day, on a house project helping a builder named Fouad. I must have been disappointing company. I knew too little Hebrew for proper conversation, hardly realised it was his second language anyway, couldn’t report having a girlfriend, nor reciprocate by asking about his children and likely grandchildren. But he treated me kindly, like a temporary apprentice. I had a brief panic and sharp words when he was nowhere to be seen the day I left for Egypt as I came to collect my wages, but he was found and paid me in full. It was only then I realised Fouad was a hired Arab and not the paymaster.
I had so little political and cultural awareness. I had to be told who was an Arab and who a Jew, or work it out from names. If asked to judge by appearance, I would have said Jacky looked more like an Arab than Fouad. But then, as I saw it, that was partly the point. Two peoples of close ethnicity and values divided by prejudice, war, politics, law, history, language, religion, wages, opportunity. It never occurred to me that at the Peace Cafe marketplace I might be one of the people reducing Arabs’ opportunities to work.
Family tents crowded the beach as Israeli Independence Day approached. Young men and women in army uniforms sat round a campfire singing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. I slept with my Arab keffiyeh wrapped around my face to keep out the light and wind. I washed in the beach showers. My clothes dried quickly on the guy ropes of Jacky’s tent, or sometimes blew away. Tomer had gone, but Jacky was joined by his girlfriend Tali, who spoke more English. Jacky sat crosslegged in his tent as I said my goodbyes and swapped addresses. Israelis travel the world when they leave the army, and often say they will come to England.
- Be ready for him. He will come, said Tali.
He didn’t. He would have been one of the most welcome.
With Fouad’s final wages in my pocket, I was just in time to keep to my schedule for the bus to Cairo, though not by walking the six miles to the border as I'd originally planned. I had spent little and was pleased with my saved earnings in less than a fortnight: over six hundred shekels ($300), which would fund the next two weeks in Egypt. I took the bus south to Taba. Not commenting on the visa that had expired nearly a month ago, Israeli guards let me out and I walked across the border into the Third World.
Click for what happened next.
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