Sometime in 2002, the cover of Achbar Ha'Ir (City Mouse), a Tel Aviv weekly that is sort of a combined equivalent of The New Yorker and Time Out, featured a cover drawing that was a strikingly accurate reflection of Tel Aviv's attitude in the face of what was then universally referred to as "the situation." A young man lies on his back on his living room couch, his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head as he listens to music via his stereo headphones. A purring cat lies curled up on the man?s belly. A statue of the Buddha sits on top of his television. His shelves are filled with novels and potted plants, and his walls with framed art posters. Outside the window, which is behind his head, soldiers in Israeli army uniform and Palestinian fighters with keffiyehs wrapped around their necks shoot at each other, teeth bared in animal rage, against a background of tanks and exploding bombs.

I guess you could say that 2002 was Israel's annus horribilis. The economy had bottomed out; suicide bombers were detonating themselves in Israel's cities nearly every day; and Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen were killing each other in the occupied -and re-occupied - territories. Each day brought a stupefying new tragedy, for Jews and Arabs alike. Confined by the IDF to his headquarters, the Muqata, in Ramallah, Yasser Arafat had become an international media darling  - 'cause everyone loves the perceived underdog. Many international airlines had suspended their flights to Israel, having deemed it too dangerous. The hotels were empty of tourists; Israel had become a pariah nation.

So we disconnected. We put on our headphones and turned up the music.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to where I left off -November 2000.

The major suicide bombings didn't start until the end of May 2001. For the first six months of the intifida, daily life in Tel Aviv wasn't really affected. This was not the case for Jerusalem. Gilo, a Jerusalem residential neighbourhood, was shot at by Palestinian fighters in bordering Beit Jala throughout the month of December. Residents of apartments facing Beit Jala put sandbags in their windows, kept the lights turned off at night, and crouched low when they moved from room to room. One evening I was at my local laundrette, watching the news on the television mounted on the wall while I waited for my clothes to dry. The woman sitting next to me pointed her long, thin cigarette at the footage of bullets tracing streaks of light through the darkness and said, "It's madness. Forty-five minutes away from here, there's a war going on. And we're sitting here doing our laundry." 

Other than that, inside Israel there were a few small bombs in a couple of towns that were close to the border with the West Bank. They killed one or two people each time, but Tel Aviv remained quiet. I don't quite know how to describe the general feeling in the city at that time. On the one hand we were very shocked by the intifida, but on the other hand life went on pretty much as usual, and there was still some hope that the genie could be put back in the bottle. But the general consensus was that Barak, due to his failure to negotiate a final settlement with Arafat at Camp David and his utter ineptitude in dealing with the uprising in the territories, was a bankrupt leader. He resigned and called elections, and the people - many of whom had voted for Barak just two years previously - chose Sharon, because he was regarded as a real tough guy who would take an uncompromising attitude to Palestinian violence. By then both Palestinians and Israelis were saying of each other, "They only understand power. Power and violence." Well, there was plenty of violence. But I didn't notice anyone getting the upper hand.

Soon after Sharon was elected, I saw a rather interesting interview on CNN. A veteran member of Barak's just-ousted Labour party and a prominent member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) were interviewed, simultaneously but from different locations, by a studio moderator. At one point the Palestinian shook his head mournfully and said that Israel's willingness to discuss peace had been called into serious question by the recent election of Ariel Sharon, the man who many believe was indirectly responsible for the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres. At that, the Israeli Labour politician grew red in the face, rose up halfway from his chair, and, pointing his index finger at the camera, shouted, "We did not elect Ariel Sharon! You know who did?! You did! You! With your decision to initiate this violence instead of negotiating!"

"And we're out of time, gentlemen," said the moderator. "Thank you both very much and goodnight."

At work, things were going quite well. We hired several new programmers, and had received some serious inquiries regarding our product from a couple of Fortune 100 companies. By then the U.S. State Department had issued a travel warning for Israel, so none of them was willing to run the risk of sending a representative to visit us. We tried to explain that Tel Aviv was perfectly safe, but they all seemed convinced that we were cowering under our desks, waiting for the next bomb to explode. So we spent a lot of money on sending the business development manager and the CTO abroad.

A few interesting things happened in the spring and summer of 2001. One day I received an email from a Ramallah-based software outsourcer, inquiring into the possibility of mutual cooperation. At first I thought it was a joke; by then army checkpoints had been set up along the Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank, and freedom of movement for Palestinians was pretty limited; Israeli civilians couldn't get through many of the checkpoints, either. I checked the company's Web site and saw that it was for real. But how were we supposed to meet? How were we supposed to pay them? The whole thing was ridiculous, but also a rather poignant statement from normal Palestinians just trying to make a living - proof that, contrary to the impression given by the international media, not all Palestinians were out on the streets braying for Israeli blood.

Around that time someone from the University of Dubai hacked into our company Web site. The enterprising student from the Gulf replaced our homepage with a news photograph of a Palestinian boy who had been throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. The photo shows two heavily armed soldiers dressed in full battle gear, each twice the boy's size, grabbing him by his shirt collar and lifting him off his feet. The wet stain where the petrified boy had peed in his jeans was clearly visible. The Dubai-based hacker let us know that our files were safe and retrievable, and that he was just sending us a message. We increased our firewall protection. I wrote a supercilious and unwise email from my computer at home, using my personal email address, in which I asked what, precisely, this student at the University of Dubai was doing to help the Palestinian people in their time of distress. Besides staying up late and hacking into the Web sites of Israel-based companies that produced business software. Funny, I never did receive a response.

Then we all got excited because we were on a short list of three companies to provide a business solution for the European branch of an important international corporation. This was great news, because our CEO was running through the VC funding pretty fast, and we needed to see some progress. Based on the flurry of emails and phone calls from Europe, we were convinced that our company would be chosen to provide the solution. But we weren't. And you know why? Well, the Europeans wrote us, unfortunately we are on a very strict schedule. We must have the product customized within six months. And given the current situation in Israel, we are concerned that you may be short-staffed if your programmers are called up for army reserve duty, making it impossible for work to continue as scheduled.

This happened about one month after the major suicide bombings began. I was at home when the first one occurred - at a discotheque patronized mostly by teenage immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It was called the Dolphinarium, and it was about 10 minutes' walk from my apartment, on the beachfront. The suicide bomber detonated himself shortly after midnight on June 1, 2001. I'd just escaped from a very raucous and boring wedding celebration, and I was padding around my apartment, barefoot, drinking a glass of water and enjoying the blessed quiet after the loud wedding, when suddenly there was a loud, distant, concussive "whump." One of the open windows slammed shut. About two minutes later I heard one siren, then two, then three - and then there was just a huge cacophony of wailing sirens, all merging together. Of course I knew what it was, so I turned on the television. And spent the next three hours watching the horrifying scene where 17 teenagers were killed in the parking lot outside the discotheque, while queueing to enter. The terrorist had mingled with the crowd, and then detonated his bomb.

The next morning I took a book to read over my morning coffee at the branch of Arcaffe located on the corner of Allenby street and Rothschild boulevard. I ordered a double espresso and a croissant, and sat at an outdoor table next to a father with two young children who were drinking freshly-squeezed orange juice and eating cookies. It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning, but the atmosphere was very, very muted. Even the children seemed to have absorbed the sense of heaviness in the air. They sat quietly and drank their juice.

After breakfast I walked down to the scene of the bombing. I'd heard that there was an anti-Arab demonstration going on, and I wanted to see it for myself - instead of relying on the television to tell me what to think. What I saw was not very impressive. Basically, it was a crowd of young men who probably spent most of their free time hanging out on street corners, smoking cigarettes and bitching about how society had screwed them. Or committing petty crimes. There were a few women as well - mostly the type referred to in 1930s Chicago as "mafia molls." Some enterprising businessmen had set up stands selling boiled corn on the cob and soft drinks, to nourish the masses - one gets thirsty and hungry, no doubt, from yelling out crude racial slurs. Later I heard that Abulafia, a popular Arab-owned bakery in nearby Jaffa, was set upon by a crowd, and that the mosque across from the discotheque was attacked as well. But I didn't see that.

One of the consequences of that bombing was the suspension of flights by many foreign airlines to Israel. A British Airways flight crew was staying at the Dan Panorama hotel, located across the street from the Dolphinarium, on the night of the bombing. They saw and heard everything, and they were - understandably - terrified. They told their bosses at BA that they refused to fly to Israel anymore, so BA decided to suspend their flights to Ben Gurion airport. A few other airlines followed their example. Those who continued to fly to Israel decided not to wait on the tarmac to refuel and clean the plane, but to fly to nearby Cyprus as soon as the passengers had disembarked and refuel there. This, of course, contributed significantly to Israel's growing sense of isolation.

After that, things really started to go downhill. There were several major bombings, and many small bombings. By the summer of 2001, they were a daily occurrence. Pretty soon there was a routine: wait for the news of that day's bombing, determine its location, call everyone you knew who might have been nearby, to check that they were okay, and then go back to whatever you were doing. Once I was running on the treadmill at the gym, trying to ignore the boredom of running in place by watching some American sitcom on one of the televisions mounted on the wall, when the program was interrupted with the usual "initial reports" icon. The guy running next to me didn't have the earphones one needed to plug into the little console on the treadmill, so he tapped me on the shoulder and puffed, "Where is it?" I lifted one earphone away from my ear and puffed back, "Jerusalem." "Oh," he said, "Not in Tel Aviv. Good." And he kept on running.

So bombs were going off all the time. Riding a municipal bus started to feel like some weird form of Russian roulette. Sitting in a cafe on a busy street looked like a risky proposition. A couple of times I caught myself checking to make sure my apartment was clean before I left for the day, in case I didn't make it back and some strangers saw the hairs in my bathroom sink or the dust bunnies under my bed. If things were so bad, why didn't I leave?

Well, here's one of the interesting things about human nature: people don't usually leave a place because of the risk of random violence. Yes, they'll run away from a war zone, but Tel Aviv was not a war zone - as strange as this may sound, the fact is that life was mostly normal. We sat in cafes, went out to restaurants, visited art galleries, threw parties and went to work. And I love Tel Aviv. I love its unique rhythm, its throbbing cultural life, its cafe scene, the beach, my social life. Tel Aviv was my home - the only place I ever missed when I was absent.

People do leave a place, however, for economic reasons.

By the autumn of 2001, the bottom had fallen out of the global high-tech market. My employers had run through most of the VC funding, and there was no more coming in. There were also no customers on the horizon. First we fired a couple of QA people, then a few programmers. The office grew quieter and quieter. Then, in November 2001, it was my turn. Over the previous year I had been on a not-very-cheap trip to Paris, I'd moved into an apartment for which the rent was comensurate with my income, I'd bought furniture and clothes, and I'd also spent a fair amount on having a good time. I hadn't saved anything. And when I started looking for a new job, I discovered very quickly what a lot of people already knew: there weren't any.

And that's where I'll leave it for tonight (er, this morning). Is there a category for "longest blog post" in the Guinness Book of World Records?

NEXT: Jobless and broke in Tel Aviv. My special relationship with Eva, the Algerian-born bank manager. Moving in with two flatmates to save money on rent. The Israeli economy in a complete shambles. The horrible week of Passover, 2002, when there were five major suicide bombings over five consecutive days. Operation Defensive Shield. Jenin, the massacre that wasn't. The feverish flowering of Tel Aviv's night and cultural life. Finding a job, at last - but in Tokyo.