The overnight bus from Cairo drops me in Taba early in the morning, as the sun climbs over the Jordanian mountains to the east, bringing out the pink-yellow sandstone beauty of the desert at dawn. There is no one at the bus stop to give directions. Tourism in Taba is yet to recover from the October 2004 bombing of the Hilton Hotel, in which at least 34 people died. But there can be no mistake about the way to the border: the transparent waters of the Gulf of Aqaba are a couple of hundred metres to the right, there are cliffs to the left, and a well-maintained road stretches ahead.
Egyptian border guards are obviously not morning people. I have to hunt around for someone to stamp my passport before I’m waved on my way. As the road beyond the departure hall narrows, a rocky outcrop creating a pinchpoint almost to the beach, the atmosphere changes. The Egyptian and Israeli flags jostle each other on the crag above the road, on their respective sovereign territories but close enough to be bumping chests. In a touch of whimsy, someone on the Israeli side has placed life-sized cut-outs of mountain goats below the wire that marks the boundary between barren Arab and Israeli Sinai rock. Yet entering Israel is no laughing matter.
If the mostly middle-aged Egyptian guards are still waking up, their younger Israeli counterparts seem wired on caffeine. As my foot touches Israeli soil, a tough-faced young man in a leather jacket appears from behind a wall and accosts me for my papers. A dour young woman scrutinises my passport as if it were a weapon and demands my airline tickets to prove that I am returning to Australia. Another checks my bags. There are no smiles. No welcomes. No bonhomie. Outside there is just one taciturn taxi-driver, who, as I discover later, rips me off extraordinarily for the ride to Eilat bus station.
For the first time in my 49 years I have arrived in Israel, the land to which, as a Jew, I have under Israeli law the ‘right to return’. Every year my forebears had raised the traditional toast, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Now I am on my way to that city. For others, this might be a moment in which to rejoice. So why do I feel like a stranger in a strange land?
When I was young, my grandmother