But I'm going to have to leave it there for another day or two, because it's well past one o'clock in the morning and I have to be up at six. Given my well-known tendency to keep vampire hours, you can be sure that I've got a compelling reason for dragging my carcass out of bed when it's still dark (and cold). I'm going to be attending an all-day literary forum of Israeli (Jewish), Palestinian and Arab writers - some of the latter from countries that are not exactly known as lovers of Israel.
It's all rather cloak-and-dagger. I cannot reveal the location of the event, nor the names of the participants, until it's over. And even though the chairman of the event invited me to attend, I had to supply my identity card number in order to secure a place on the bus that will take me there. It seems that the organizers are worried about attracting the possibly violent attention of "extremist elements." It should be a fascinating day, and if I can't flog an article about it to a publication then I'll blog about it.
Oh, and more news: I called Achbar Ha'Ir, and have obtained permission to search their archives for the cover I wrote about in Part Four. If I find it, and if the editor agrees to let me scan it, I'll post it here. Consider it my gift for your patience in waiting for Part Six.
And here's the teaser:
On an unusually warm and sunny Friday morning in the winter of 2002, a friend picked me up in his luxurious new Audi and drove us to the marina in Herzliya. We sat at an expensive waterfront restaurant that was filled with sleek people who looked very cote d'Azure, dining outdoors under the blue Mediterranean sky. We ate a meal of fish accompanied by white wine. The sun glinted off the gold frames of my friend's sunglasses as he told me about his most recent business trip to Switzerland, and his plan to purchase a pied a terre in Manhattan. After we'd eaten, and he'd paid the bill with one of his many credit cards, we went sailing with a group of people on his friend's yacht. They talked about their plans to take the yacht to Sardinia the following summer.
In other words, not everyone was suffering during the height of the political and economic troubles of 2002. While the queue at the unemployment office on Brenner Street, near my apartment, began to form more than an hour before it opened, and while the number of unsmiling armed security guards at the entrances to shops, cafes and restaurants increased until I felt as though I might as well walk around with my bag permanently open for inspection, there were a lot of people whose money bought them a lovely protective bubble. They lived in Tel Aviv's quiet, leafy northern suburbs, drove to work at one of the city's new office towers and left their cars in the well-protected underground parking garages. They could - and did - frequently escape the pressure cooker that was Israel by hopping over to Europe for a few days' holiday. For the plutocrats, terrorism was mostly something that affected other people. Like poverty.
