I am sitting in downtown Beirut with some London-Lebanese. It’s truly incredible to listen to the way people talk in this city. They’ll begin a sentence in Arabic, throw in some French words and then finish up in English. “So Habibi, where have you been.”

“You’ve been to Israel!”

They seem a little surprised. Israel and Lebanon have been in a state of war since 1948 and in 2006 a large part of both countries got severely damaged in a short and savage episode of conflict.

“What was it like?”

They seem simply curious rather than hostile, so I begin to explain what happened to me when I arrived in Israel.

The plane landed six minutes early. This surprised me. I stroll out of the plane regardless, through a long glass-and-marble corridor covered in proud posters.

“1948 – Year of our Glory.”

“1967 – Year of Jerusalem”

“1982 – Year of the Children”

“2006 – Year of Friendship”

Now Passport control. I put down my British Passport and smile politely.

“Mr Judah. Get out your Israeli passport. Where is your military ID.”

“I’m sorry.”

She starts to speak to me in Hebrew.

“I don’t understand.”

“Why do you have Visas for Syria, Iraq, Lebanon? Aren’t you afraid to go to these countries Mr Judah? Or are you a self-hating Jew, Mr Judah.”

I’m escorted into a little cubicle. Six Palestinians are looking deeply unhappy. A few French tourists are looking rather glum. It seems the average wait is six hours. An American-Jewess is having a paralytic fit at being detained. I try and pretend I’m not that nervous.

“Get your military ID out. You draft dodger.”

“But…I’m from London. I’m English.”

They laugh.

“Do you feel English…Binyamin? Or do you feel Jewish?”

An intimate question.

“I feel….London.”

The passport gets scanned. And they have twenty more questions. Rather personal questions.

“Do you have a girl-friend? Is she Jewish? So you’re single? You dated non-Jewish girls? Do you feel bad about that?”

Before I have the chance to get angry, a fat-man who looks eerily like my uncle comes in and whispers something in Hebrew to my interrogator. Then he leaves.

“Oh, we’re so sorry….We have over a hundred Ben Judah’s who’ve dodged service in the IDF. You’re not one of them. Welcome home Mr Judah.”

Exhausted I try and get out of the airport. It’s a glass and style air-conditioned maze, not a real building. But it amazes me. Hebrew script, that I’d only seen in a perpetually half-empty Synagogue in Maida Vale, is written everywhere. On toilet doors. On shop-fronts. I’d only ever met Jewish doctors, lawyers, journalists or accountants back home. But here I can see Jews selling burgers, Jewish policemen and Jewish bus-drivers.

The heat hits me immediately. In under a second – It feels like a ton weight was placed on my head. A young Italian women asks me for a lighter.

“Sure. You know where the bus is?”

We begin chatting. She’s good-looking. So I try and big myself up by teaching her Hebrew swear-words, and little things she might not know. Out of the bus window towards Jerusalem, thick pine-forests are planted over the dust and the rocks.

“You know, My father told me those are often planted over ruined Palestinian villages from the wars sixty years ago.”

The hills give way to Jerusalem. It’s a rose and sand-coloured stone city crowing a hill. My heart begins to beat a little faster. So this is it. But I’m trying to play it cool.

“This is the Jewish part of the City. By day Israel is a society that is determined to fight harder, care less and fuck deeper. Everyone has seen the devil.”

That seems to do the trick. “I’d love to have a drink.”

She takes me to a café-bar filled with Aid-workers and conflict-professionals. Suddenly it all seems a little real. I am trying to pretend I’m not amazed by the Golden dome in the sunset or by the Crusader’s Walls that circle the Old City. I dunno, She might realise I’m not 25 if let that on.

“Do you have hotel? I mean…You could stay at mine. We could have a barbecue on my balcony.”

Yes.

“So what happened. You slept with a thirty-year old?” Blurts the Fulham-Broadway Beiruti, as I tell him the story. Not exactly. It started out like a fairytale or an old movie, but since most fairytales turn out to be nightmares and most old-movies are crap, I guess that’s exactly how it ended up.

We are walking through the streets of East Jerusalem. She’s looking at me. It’s like a dance. I should feel great. But I’m feeling incredibly nervous. Where is this going? The evening-alleys are filled with Palestinian children. A couple of unemployed men are giving me filthy looks. There is rather nasty looking Arabic graffiti I can’t read. I’m getting a sense that these people aren’t that keen on being annexed to the Jewish-state. Maybe the other thousand and six Ben Judahs who didn’t dodge military service have given them a reason.

“This is the bus. I live half and hour away. It should take six minutes…but they built the wall right between Abu Deis and East Jerusalem.”

I board the bus. The driver looks stunned. Mothers start whispering. A Palestinian teenager tries to talk to me in Hebrew, but he speaks so fast I can hardly catch a single word. There is confusion. There’s a Jew on the bus to the West-Bank.

But she hasn’t noticed. She puts her head on my shoulder and points out the window. I am trying very hard to be Ben Judah, 25-year-old fearless war-reporter. After ten minutes we pull up at the wall. It’s massive. Every picture of the Berlin Wall fades slightly when I see it. Israeli soldiers start inspecting the bus from the outside, then they board it and with suppressed aggression inspect the Palestinians ID cards.

“Get off the bus.”

An Ethiopian Jew, my age pulls me off.

“What are you doing? I saw your name. I mean… they’ll kill you. What you don’t want to listen? Fine then Mr Judah – they can spot a nose like that a mile off. Think they won’t guess. Get lost then. We can’t protect you.”

What’s the matter, she begins to ask. Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. Over the line the buildings change immediately. Run-down, half-built and badly-lit. The electrics are hanging everywhere in the street. The quality of the road is appalling. Posters of Palestinian leaders are stuck to the walls. So this is the West Bank.

“Home!”

The bus speeds off and I’m standing outside a butcher’s in the middle of the Occupied Territories. She wanders into the shop and starts chatting to the owners. A thuggish looking guy is holding a mutilated sheep and a long knife. He’s staring right at me.

“Hello.”

He looks the other way. We begin to stroll back to her flat. Young-guys are hanging around in the street playing with fire-crackers. The atmosphere is tense. Depressed. Occupied. Whatever. She’s showing me up-stairs. She opens the door. Moves towards me. And screams.

Hundreds of cock-roaches are crawling across every surface. Flying through the air, eating the carpets. Breeding. I bet you could hear those screams in Damascus.

“I am getting the owners. Now! Go on the balcony.”

Ten minutes later, five Palestinian men are swatting the beasts, spraying the air and profusely apologising. I am left on the balcony with an old man. He’s pacing round and round in a perfect square. This is slightly disturbing, so after a six turns, I offer him a plastic seat.

“No. In the prison we walk like this. Like this. Ten years prison. Like this.”

Ok. I can hear the Palestinians trying to explain to my Italian ‘friend’ what is going on. “You see this…there settlement….this…they occupy…they invite their families…from Russia maybe…” There’s some laughter. This ruins the view. The illuminated Dome of the Rock, the mount of Olives, they valley curving down into the sea.

“So where you from…?” The 50 year old ex-prisoner asks me

“London.”

“Before London. You have not-English man face.”

“I grew up in Eastern Europe.”

I have to change the subject. “My Dad’s a journalist. That’s why I was there.”

His beady eyes swell.

“I am journalist. Politician. My movement. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has a news-paper. I am writing them.”

Apparently we are staying at theirs tonight. My Italian ‘friend’ is still shaking. Inside the little kitchen, I am told that the five men have 30 years of prison between them. And a huge bag of weed. I show them the latest back-flip roll of Kentish Town. And we start to get a little stoned. So we chat. About girls, cars, TV and for some reason South Park episodes. They put on some Arabic music. I am monging out a bit and go and lie down on the sofa. I have never felt closer to Arab culture.

“You got any cool-music?”

All five of them gather around me and start laughing. “You know what are the coolest things in the World? Hamas….Hezbollah…and Ahmadinejad!” They are in hysterics. And it’s a laughter I can’t share.

In woke up on the sofa the next day, alive and grabbed a taxi back to Jerusalem. I didn’t say goodbye.

The bus out of Damascus is dirty. The windows are smeared and little children are sleeping along the floor. A Syrian petrol-pump mechanic is trying to practice his English. “Welcome. Now Leban-non. Leba-non. Good country.” But I feel nothing but thick-sweat and back-ache as we draw up at the border.

There is thick dust on the road. Five lanes are filled with taxis, trucks and banged-up ‘70s cars, each being inspected by the Syrian border guards. I am beginning to see that a militarised society isn’t a concept – it means gruff and unshaven guys, our age, everywhere and armed. But that isn’t the menacing thing about Syria – mostly conscripts just sit around and chain-smoke on the street corners. It’s the posters that get you.

I count six placards of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad stuck to the lampposts. There are different types, of course. His favourite appears to be ‘Bashar – businessman.’ Sharp-suited, wearing a beautiful black tie and a stern look. He could almost be a behind-the-times French Lawyer. But there’s also ‘Bashar sportsmen’ – where the leader is smiling, fist-forward and wearing gold-rimmed aviators. You can’t move fives minutes in this country without him looking at you.

I shuffle with the bus-passengers, a hijabbed and bearded crowd of stress, into the passport control. On the door of the hall a faded poster of Bashar al-Assad looking rather grumpy reads. ‘I believe in Syria.’ I’m not sure Syria is something you can ‘believe in’.

The hall is filled with scenes I thought only existed in old-movies. Twelve fans rotate ominously above. Clumps of shepherds wearing dish-dashes and red-kaiffyahs, the ones you see as passé fashion items back home, are being inspected. Khaki-officers are leading a turbaned man into a plastic see-through booth for questioning. Lines of badly dressed men, mostly wearing lumber-jack shirts for some reason, are queuing in the line for ‘Syrians.’ Next to it a group of Saudis are waiting in line under a sign that says ‘Arabs.’ Immaculate white-dresses. Like a priesthood of pure money, clutching the keys to their SUVs. The box for foreigners is closed. So I move to the sign that says ‘Diplamats.’ There are eight pictures of al-Assad,  one for each wall. And a small one of his dad.

A bald man in epaulettes stamps my passport while an over-made up woman with blue eye-liner writes my details down in biro. Formalities finished we climb back into the bus and pull through the gates. The vehicle dips through a water-pit, then gets knocked on by some troopers. That appears to be it. I can see the Lebanese Cedar flag.

I notice a man actually sigh with relief as we leave the Ba’athist Dictatorship. But the first sign of change can be read in the faces stuck to the walls. A nervous looking General, with big bags under his eyes, is plastered about everywhere. Sometimes alongside the Hezbollah leader, turbaned and open-mouthed – the famous Hassan Nasrallah. Along the road to Beirut the pictures keep changing as we climb into the mountains. In some ways this is actually more stressful than being constantly glared at by one man. Some villages are covered in posters of a bald man with a thin moustache wearing a wooden cross. Others are adorned with the pictures of a white-haired man with a fat dyed-black moustache alongside what can only be his son. This is how you read the sectarian divisions of Lebanon. There is no clear racial divide between the sects, or even for the most part in how they dress. But the faces and the graffiti tell you who owns what.

An hour later the bus pulls above the capital. I get it in an instant. My eyes are bulging. Dozens of skyscrapers, at least six more than in Tel Aviv. The city curves into the sea, surrounded by wealthy suburbs that could belong in either Athens or Naples. A city of Western buildings and Arab façades. You can feel the money – this is a prize worth fighting for and it’s not what I imagined. This is Beirut.

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