The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘The memories don’t fade’
As a foreign correspondent, Harry de Quetteville witnessed turbulent times in Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad and Belgrade – but each location also proved endlessly rewarding
The mind does not draw boundaries as cartographers do, in miles and metres. Memories steeped in the senses dictate what is near or far. Heat, of course, is a key tell of abroad. But where the summer bake of Cyprus is brought close by familiar resorts and high-street shops; sights, smells and tastes put that other vestige of Empire – the Middle East – a world away.
And yet Tel Aviv is just an in-flight bag of peanuts further than Larnaca. Indeed, when I was living there, more than a decade ago, I used to think that Israel should be Britons’ long weekend destination of choice, combining the beaches and nightlife of Mykonos, the history and monuments of Athens, and a spritz of the Eternal to wow even the most faithless.
Of course, there were bombs and bullets aplenty, too, which may explain why the tourists mostly stayed away. But I miss it, particularly now, when spring is sluggish and a glance at the weather charts tells me the beach outside the Dan Hotel’s rainbow facade will be a cloudless 28C.
I once interviewed Shimon Peres walking along that Tel Aviv seafront, north to south, away from the swanky apartment buildings and offices of Herzliya, now home to so many of the tech brood that make this start-up nation, down towards old Jaffa, with its winding streets and its minaret, ochre in the sun. He looked relaxed in his black leather jacket, talking away, as everyone talks, Israeli and Palestinian, direct and gossipy, journalistic heaven. Even his minders, those elite secret service bodyguards, seemed at ease, all an illusion of course – Shin Bet agents never sleep.
Nor does Tel Aviv. Its nightlife is there for those that want it, but to me it was not clubbing but late-night dining that appealed, then nargilah pipe with double apple tobacco brought down to the waves as midnight ticked past. My sounds of the summer were not drum and bass but the relentless tack-tacktack of the Matkot paddleball players on the sands. Last summer, between lockdowns, I played with a friend on Sandwich Bay, and found it brought a little of the magic home.
Shimon is sadly gone now, of course. But the internet tells me Manta Ray, a seafood palace out on the sea, endures.
I liked to take visiting friends there straight from the airport for lunch, if the timings were right, and anything between 10am and 3pm seemed to be right, dry white wine washing away jet lag better than any hot towel.
Then up, up, up all the way, for the 40-minute drive to Jerusalem. I was also posted to Berlin, that other town divided between east and west, but never loved it as I loved the honeyhued bricks of this City on the Hill. I lived west, in Rehavia, near the prime minister’s office, a neighbourhood that became ever more orthodox year after year. By the time I left, some streets were shut off after the Friday night Sabbath horn, driving not considered restful enough for the seventh day.
Further east, in the Old Town, it was Friday morning that was the focus of attention, as Palestinians poured in, if permitted, for prayers on the immense esplanade of the Al-Aqsa mosque. To walk there, to look down upon the bowing heads of those at the Western Wall, or the pathway from Gethsemane
to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to see for yourself the sacred spaces of Islam abut those of Judaism and Christianity, is to understand the architecture of monotheism itself.
I liked to buy freshly squeezed orange juice among the old town’s food stalls, pick up some falafel and Hebron glass, and take in the view from the roof of the Austrian Hospice.
Those were the halcyon days, too, of the American Colony Hotel, where hacks and diplomats drank and dallied, where this paper’s great foreign correspondent Patrick Bishop drank martinis with his wife Marie Colvin after a day’s reporting in Gaza or the West Bank. I miss her, too.
We should not forget, of course, the reason that so many of us were there – to cover the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian uprising. It was a time when finding the key to peace was the dream of every US president, as if it
j would also unlock stability across the region. How long ago that seems now that it is the Sunni-Shia showdown between Saudi and Iran that dominates headlines.
Even then, though, there was little danger in a trip to Ramallah or Bethlehem in the West Bank, even if the wall, the checkpoints and ubiquitous weaponry shocked and still, doubtless, do. Safest of all was the long, winding road down the hill, not west to Tel Aviv this time, but east to Jericho, a descent through extraordinary desert scenery, past Bedouin shepherds and outcrop monasteries. At the Dead Sea, I would sometimes turn right, south, for the marvels of Ein Gedi’s botanical blooms amid the sands, past Qumran and the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or much further to Eilat and the Sinai border with Egypt, where a friendly monk at St Catherine’s once showed me the treasures of the library before I wrapped up to climb before dawn to Mt Sinai’s peak.
But mostly I turned left, north, and drove to Lake Galilee, where banks of white and purple bougainvillea were as great an attraction to me as the waters to pilgrims. I stayed so often at Vered
Those were the halcyon days of the Colony Hotel, where hacks and diplomats drank and dallied
Hagalil, a ranch in the hills overlooking the lake, that they let me linger on my own in 2006 to cover the war with Hizbollah just over the border in Lebanon. The rest of the region had been evacuated because of the rocket attacks, and when the air raid sirens went, it’s true, there was little else to do but pray.
You can cross the country there back towards the sea, to Acre if the crusades are your thing, to Haifa if not, and zip back down the coast, perhaps just stopping off to dip your feet at Caesarea and imagine Herod there in his baths, marvelling at the same view two millennia ago, enjoying his ultimate infinity pool.
Then all that’s left is to trundle back to the airport, stopping off if time allows for one last game of Matkot. It’s a circuit you can do in four days or four years but trust me, the memories won’t fade.