In the Danger Zone (41 page)

He tells me that he used to be a fisherman, but set up this place after blowing a fortune on gambling. His wife now holds the purse strings, and by the wry smile on her face, she had to fight to get him on the straight and narrow. The restaurant, however, is bursting with customers, with people queuing up along the quayside to get in (to the irritation of the neighbouring restaurants). It's hugely successful, but non-kosher, serving shellfish
and
opening on the Shabbat (bang out of order for kosher observers). The Torah explicitly bans shellfish or any fish that don't have scales.

Beny cooks my lunch himself, talking as he cooks: 'I've been a fisherman all my life. In the last 20 years things have changed. You couldn't sell seafood before. People wouldn't buy it. Then young guys started going abroad and developed a taste for it. Before, Israel wasn't that cosmopolitan, then everything changed. People came back with a new take on stuff like seafood and other things.'

I say that Tel Aviv seems to be on a different planet from Jerusalem and Beny explains, 'They don't have sea in Jerusalem. Here there is the beach, it's summer. Summer, sailing and fun, that's Tel Aviv. Jerusalem is the holy city. People there are a bit different. You go there to pray, to visit. People who come here from Jerusalem don't want to go back.'

I'm slightly confused about secular Jews, though. Lapsed Christians I know back home tend to say they are no longer Christian, but here in Israel, people can be totally secular, yet totally Jewish. Do people come to terms with levels of spirituality or do they just ignore the issue?

Beny is a case in point: as well as this cheeky non-kosher joint, he also owns Beny Hadayg, apparently one of the strictest kosher restaurants in the city (double-kosher or kosher kosher, as they call it). I visit the restaurant to meet a kosher cop and try to work out this culinary/spiritual relativity. A kosher cop is someone who makes sure that all the food in a restaurant is prepared to kosher rules laid down in the Torah, so he should know what it's all about.

In Beny Hadayg I meet Raffi, an orthodox Jew complete with
pe'otes
tucked into a skullcap and dressed in thick black clothing that shows up all the flour, sweat and assorted greasy detritus of a working kitchen. The roaring fires and hissing grills make it too hot for me in here so Raffi must be boiling underneath all those clothes.

Raffi scuttles about the kitchen sifting the flour for bugs, salting meat to remove the blood, slapping chops on the grill, fish in the oven, and livers on the rotisserie. He blesses the meals, blesses the bread and checks everything for provenance and kosher authenticity. There are hundreds of specific food rules, but the main ones are: no pork or shellfish, no mixing of meat and dairy produce and no bugs. As he potters through the lunchtime prep, Raffi tells me he's 'looking for cockroaches or worms or any other bugs'.

Raffi is not, however, the chef. The chef is a small, cheerful Arab bloke by the name of Malik who looks on bemused as Raffi runs about doing his kosher thing. Malik says, 'We also have our religion and we have to follow its law so I respect any other religion.' But I get the sense that he thinks this is all a bit silly. He and Raffi have to perform an elaborate dance around each other, with Malik preparing and seasoning all the food, then Raffi checking it and placing it on the grill, then Malik stirring, fiddling and plating everything before Raffi checks it again. It looks suspiciously like me meddling with the food on the rare occasions that my wife does the cooking. Malik concedes that there were lots of arguments to begin with, but they are now a good team.

I ask Raffi what kosher rules are meant to achieve, and he tells me 'We are commanded by God, who told us what we can and cannot eat. By eating only kosher food I fulfil God's will.'

I'm still confused about
why.
'So if someone doesn't eat kosher food is it possible they'll go to hell rather then heaven?'

'It's not for me to judge. But foodwise, I feel that by keeping kosher I improve my chances. It's not automatic that if you eat non-kosher food you'll go to hell.'

I confess to him that I'm still confused, and ask what spiritual difference there is between kosher and non-kosher food, but he doesn't understand – he just says that the rules are there and if you don't obey them, you might go to hell.

'I can understand that, but
why?'

He thinks my question is absurd. 'You don't ask what the rules are for – you obey them.'

Beny sits at a nearby table and says, 'I opened this place because my daughter eats kosher and I love my daughter very much and I eat kosher but sometimes, you know . . .'

Now I'm completely baffled, so I drag Raffi over to try to sort out this kosher thing once and for all. I ask him, 'Is Beny going to heaven or is Beny going to hell'?' He says, 'I can't tell. But sorry to say this, according to religious law a man that opens a non-kosher restaurant is responsible for leading people astray. But if a man opens a kosher place, he is helping people to do a good deed.'

Beny is sanguine: 'Everything is weighed. How much good and how much bad. That's how you are judged.'

I take a long look at him, and suggest, 'You've been bad, haven't you?'

He laughs with a Cheshire cat grin. 'Maybe,' he says. 'Look at Raffi's phone,' he says, 'that's kosher too.'

Raffi shows me the orthodoxy approval stamp on his mobile. 'Approved! Some one has checked it that there is no SMS, and no way to access unsuitable things. You can't do anything with it. No Internet, no camera. It's good for the spirituality of kids and parents not to expose them to bad things.'

After I leave the restaurant, I confess to Efrat that I still haven't got to grips with the issues of kosher, orthodoxy and secularism. She says, 'I am very secular.'

'Does that mean you're less Jewish?'

'Don't be insane,' she says. 'You're either Jewish or you're not.' She just doesn't believe that she's going to hell for observing fewer of the rules.

Haifa

The ancient port of Haifa is a ghastly sight: a concrete rash that spills inland from the Mediterranean, crowned by a vast oil refinery. I presume that everything in Israel was built in a blinding hurry after the state of Israel was established in 1948. You can imagine the panic: 'Oh, my God, the cousins are coming, and there's nowhere for them to stay.'

I drive to an immigrant dormitory town with row upon row of crumbling concrete apartment blocks, all ugly, functional, but gratefully received by the newly arrived diaspora. Aviva is one of approximately 53,000 Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted from Ethiopia in two secretive and controversial operations in 1984 and 1991. Back in Israel there was much debate over whether the Ethiopians were really Jews at all, or just freeloading, welfare-seeking migrants. It certainly wasn't easy for them to leave their homeland and all their possessions behind, and integration into Israeli life for Aviva has been difficult.

She takes me to her local shop to buy food, and I ask her if it's anything like the shops back home in Ethiopia. She laughs and explains that when she first arrived, she burst into tears at all the food on the shelves after a lifetime of struggling to feed her family. 'I took armfuls of food, but the shop owner had to explain that I should come back when I had some money.' The food was unusual too: 'We didn't know how to eat things like pasta or lentils, let alone digest them, and many of us had malnutrition problems to begin with, but we soon learnt.'

Aviva remembers the traumas of the five-day journey from her home to the airlift points: 'We were hunted and intimidated along the way – my father was an important man so the authorities imprisoned him for some time to stop him from leaving, but eventually we managed to get out. We couldn't bring anything with us – we lost it all.' She arrived at the airstrip and remembers seeing the huge white bird for the first time. She didn't know what to think, but it had always been her dream to come to Israel.

These days Aviva makes Israeli staples such as hummus, bread, pizza and chicken nuggets, but today she wants to make some of her traditional food for us. She cooks injera, made entirely of fermenting yeast, poured out from huge bags of Dutch-produced dried yeast. They look like oddly honeycombed crêpes and taste only of yeast unlike the ones I ate in Ethiopia itself. They're not entirely pleasant, but they are fun to eat. Aviva's parents, her absurdly beautiful daughters and some old friends from Ethiopia join us and we all cram into the sitting room to eat. I ask them about the old times in Ethiopia and how their lives must have changed, but they prefer not to talk about the past. She cries when she remembers the journey she's had and their hard life in Ethiopia.

Aviva gives me some traditional beer to drink. It has the consistency of mud, a taste of salt and a flavour of yeast. It must be extremely alcoholic to be this disgusting, so I drink a huge slug of it. But when Aviva tells me that it's not alcoholic, it's just a traditional drink, I give up. Eventually her eldest daughter puts on some traditional music and we all get up to dance around the coffee table to Ethiopian drum-and-wail. Her daughters teach me how to dance: it's all about the shoulders, apparently. Everyone, including the grandparents, looks funky and cool as their shoulders float around as if they aren't actually part of their bodies, but I just look like Vicky Pollard, shrugging manically. It helps clear the air of sorrow, however, and by the time I leave I am sweaty and exhausted.

The Bedouin

I head into the baking hot, bone-dry Negev desert in the south of Israel to a village called Tel Arad. About 140,000 Bedouin live in the Negev and they were incorporated into the Israeli state and offered citizenship when it was set up, but their lifestyle has made the transformation difficult. And, as they point out, they are Arabs in a new Jewish state.

The Bedouin have lived here for centuries, but their nomadic methods of subsistence, and ancient systems of traditional land ownership (usually lacking any sort of formalized documentation), have made them a thorn in the side of the Israeli authorities eager for land for the continuing influx of Jews from around the world, even in the relatively difficult environment of the desert. Under pressure from the government to become house-dwelling citizens, about half the Bedouin have now sold their land and moved into government housing. Many more, however, have refused to sell and live in what are called unrecognized villages, like Tel Arad.

I'll be honest – I wasn't expecting anything like this. My romantic idea of tents and wandering nomads haven't turns out to be just that – an idea. The reality is a messy wreck of a village, desperately poor and crumbling. The only clues as to its inhabitants are a few raggedy, filthy-tempered camels.

I meet one of the village elders, Hajj Audeh Abu Khaled, who's lived here since he was a boy. Many of the Bedouin are refusing to move from the land they're on until their claims are met. They've been refused access to basic amenities by the Israeli government, and their houses are under threat of being demolished because they either won't move off, or because they've been built without permits (which they say are almost impossible to obtain). It's a stalemate that has been going on for decades.

Abu Khaled says, 'I am an Israeli citizen, but only on paper. They bring in people from all over the world, from Russia, from Britain. Me, whose people have been living here for centuries, since the time of Abraham, I don't have the right to live on my own land or build a house.'

The Bedouin of Tel Arad try to maintain aspects of their traditional culture, hence the presence of camels, which aren't a whole lot of use for anything else. I ask to meet one of the women in the village in order to find out about food supplies, but the Bedouin are very wary of letting strangers meet their women. I persevere and I'm eventually introduced to an elderly aunt called Hajjah Eidah Omm Mohammad who is making the flatbread that's a staple of the Bedouin diet. She rails about Bedouin men: 'They don't get involved at all; they don't touch one single thing. They just bring in the money and everything else is done by the women. Even to do the housework, we wait for them to go out, and then we do everything. They could be dying from hunger and they still wouldn't do anything. Women do everything.

'Life is tough for Bedouin women. I would like to see men share some of the burden.' Blimey, I wasn't expecting that.

Later over dinner (no women allowed), I ask the men what they think the future holds. Abu Khaled says, 'Our future is full of problems, and if the policy of our government doesn't change, it will be even more difficult. Every day that passes is more difficult then the day before.

'What are my dreams? I don't want much. I'm like a hungry man. First of all I have to feed myself. If I'm thirsty then I have to drink. Only then can I have bigger dreams.'

How to Milk a Camel

Abu Khaled shows me the village's illegal water supply – the Israeli authorities have banned water supplies into unauthorized villages, so an enterprising bloke has laid down a pipe and pumps in water and charges for it. Even when people are this deprived, they find a way of making cash. Then I am taken off to find a camel.

Camels used to be the main transport and food supply for the Bedouin, but now they're mostly status symbols. A good young camel can cost the same as a second-hand car. They do provide some milk, however, and it's very high in vitamin C and richer than either cow's or goat's milk so it is often used to nurse very young babies.

We find an exceedingly grumpy camel, and Abu Khaled's cousin shows me how to milk her. The technique seems to be to grab one of her vast teats, and to employ much the same hand action as used with a goat, but all the time, dodging its flailing legs and snapping teeth.

When a camel has a calf, the Bedouin traditionally reserve one row of teats for the calf and one row for themselves, although no one seems to have discussed the tradition with this particular camel. I finally manage to get one enormous gushing squirt of milk into a cup and take a good swig. It has a deep, gutsy smell to it but a surprisingly clean taste, like cow's milk.