Guide books warn visitors to Jerusalem about an affliction well documented by medical practitioners. The Jerusalem Syndrome has many manifestations but basically the visitor, walking among the stones held holy by Judaism, Christianity and Islam (in order of chronology), is liable to be conquered by delusion. That s/he has been chosen for a divine mission or that s/he is privy to the time and place of the Messiah’s arrival. Local hospitals are equipped to dispense psychiatric aid to sufferers and, once removed from the spiritual intensity of the Old City, they tend to shrink back into their old measure of mortal frailty. Estimates for annual cases of the syndrome vary between a few dozen and a couple of hundred.
So, I can’t say I was not warned. But within days of a week-long journey around Israel I found myself stricken by the Distance Syndrome, and it began in Jerusalem. Inasmuch as a person can be relied upon to rationally describe one’s own mental preoccupations, when I wheel back to the start of the visit, this is how I see the ailment. Each place I visit, on a trip organised in most part by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, I ask, how old is it? Each person I meet, in official engagements or in casual encounters, I ask, when did you or your family come to Israel? Each time I look up into the distance, I ask, how far—from, for instance, the Tower of David in Old Jerusalem to the Dome of the Rock, or from the Nebi Mori outpost in the desert to the security barrier isolating Gaza visible ahead?
I’d like to believe that in being made to ask those questions and in getting astonishingly forthcoming and argumentative answers, I gained impressions of the ideas of Israel that chronicle the past and are constantly throwing up different visions of the future.

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