3 june 2010, off on holiday

With immaculate timing, we are off on holiday to israel. We were going to go to the lake district in cumbria, but decided it is just too dangerous. Instead we're off to cyprus and then will take a boat towards the holy land. No, actually we're spending several days in tel aviv with my brother (who's there for 6 months), a few days by the dead sea and a couple of days in the middle of the desert, with camels and beduin. I bristle with contradictions on trips to israel, as I have the strongest of views about policies such as the blockade - see here. This is not a mad right-wing government, as the old "centrist" administration also followed an exclusionary "treat them like terrorists" policy, as israel did with the plo for several decades. It's mainstream. It's also wrong and self-defeating, creating a self-fulfilling phrophecy. At the end of the day, you need to make peace with your enemies not your allies, and so the sooner israel's own friends and allies convince or force them into that realisation, the sooner we'll be back on a path to peace. No signs of any of that at the moment.