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Every fact was countered by another fact. I drilled back through time, as though penetrating layers of sediment. There was yesterday, when an Israeli bulldozer demolished an Arab home; then last year, when the Arab family had squatted on the property; then 1967, when the Israelis had taken the property in a defensive war; and on back to 1948, when the Arabs had fled their Jerusalem homes. Then there were the British and the French, who everyone said had messed things up in the first place. And on and on it went, to the Bible, to millennia ago, when God had granted the land to the Israelites. If you had a stake in things, maybe one narrative or the other eventually started to make sense. If you came in with an equivocal view, things remained irresolute.
    We travel in the hope of bonding with new places. To get that feeling of belonging, we side with the locals. We pay attention to their hopes and dreams. We try to imagine ourselves in theirplace. We listen to their music, try on their clothes, eat their food. In return for our sympathy and respect, we ask them to love us back. This longing for connection is the traveller’s neediness. Connection, though, requires bias. I had come without one, and the way I spent my time made it difficult to get one. I pinged back and forth every day between enemy lines. They didn’t look like enemy lines; there were no check points, and I could walk between the two sides, but as I did, the language and dress changed, the things people thought and said changed, and suddenly I found myself in a new country.
    The one thing that didn’t change was the food. Falafel sandwiches with hummus were served in both halves of the city. Oranges, eggplants and olive oil were consumed. Mint and tomatoes were chopped into salads, and meat was slaughtered as specified in the holy books.

    I befriended Ben, a television producer who worked across the hall from my bureau. He was short and black-haired, the son of Moroccan Jews, Israeli-born and US-raised. He had grown up in the Northwest and, like me, had attended the University of Washington. We talked about professors we had in common, and I felt a connection to him through our shared background. He was an American who knew my grey-green home turf. He was an Arab. He was a Jew. The first time we went out he ordered me lemonade with mint.
    Ben called at midday and said he wanted to show me the
shuk,
the Jewish market. He led me into the Mahane Yehuda, a sprawling web of tightly packed alleys and stalls. I had poked around its edges but had never been into its heart. Now he took my hand and guided me in, past hawkers shouting, ‘
B’shekel, b’shekel, b’shekel,
’ over mounds of vegetables.
    Leading me from a wide alley into a maze of narrower lanes roofed with tarpaulins, we entered an unsigned restaurant, ducking under a low door into a cramped, white-tiled room that was packed with men. Some wore Orthodox black-and-whites; others were brown-skinned and rough like tradesmen, with stubble and dirty clothes. The heat, the close quarters and the absence of women made it feel Arab to me, recognisably Middle Eastern. We sat next to a wall, facing each other across a long table that quickly filled with diners. They trapped us into place. Ben ordered for both of us, and a man with a dish towel over his shoulder delivered bowls of hot savoury soup filled with vegetables and balls of dough. I asked what we were eating. ‘
Matzo kleis
,’ Ben said. I felt like I had penetrated an unknown place, and was grateful to him for taking me there.
    A few weeks later Ben invited me to a dinner party at his home. It was a Friday, and I had seen Israelis buying and giving flowers on the evening before their Sabbath. On my way I stopped at the
shuk
and bought a bouquet, thinking I would emulate the custom. Ben’s apartment was in Nachlaot, an older part of the city where the white rock buildings had aged to shiny yellow. The homes there were divided by footpaths, stairs