DAY 3 It’s just 50 miles to Tel Aviv, but it’s another world. First stop: the Airport City Technological Park, and meetings with CEOs recounting conversations with Indian professors, the start of an idea, the appearance of American investors who have still not been to either country but were sold on the idea, the setting up of operations in India, and—for our benefit—demonstrations of applications ready to be marketed.
At the end of one presentation, one of the hosts quietly says, so you are from India. The accent is familiar, and Eliot Abraham explains he emigrated from Bombay after high school, a connection that came back to him some years ago when on a visit to India his old classmate Aamir Khan offered him a walk-on part in Lagaan.
Then it’s a giddying helicopter tour tracing the snaking path of the separation/security barrier on the West Bank. A range of ‘‘non-government’’ organisations and think tanks here do advocacy work for Israel. This air trip—two hours total flying time—is organised by the Israel Project. It shows how difficult the Green Line—and thereby the demanded borders of the future Palestinian state—makes the security of Israel. We see the barrier—fortified fence in portions, concrete wall elsewhere—partitioning parts of the West Bank. In fact, the Supreme Court has admitted appeals against some portions. When we cross over to the Gaza stretch and then fly over Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast, our guide says, if Hamas hits this town, Israel will be forced to react militarily. The Israel Project docket measures the distance of key cities from the Green Line and other borders, and it brings to mind one of Thomas Friedman’s observations: these sort of maps always show rocket ranges inward, not outward.
Evening-time, and another way of imagining the foundations of the state of Israel. A walking tour through the heart of Tel Aviv traces the restoration of the city’s Bauhaus architecture, the internationalist style that early Zionists adopted when they first rolled up their sleeves and founded their ‘‘garden city’’. Today Tel Avivans work and party around the clock, their seaside cafes offer breakfast till 1 pm, and they exclaim, ‘‘Aren’t Jerusalem and Tel Aviv two different worlds!’’

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