Sinai. I am renting a hut on a weekly basis. I love the dry woody scent of the split cane and how light filters inside in mellow yellows. At night, candlelight takes over: severed plastic bottles filled with sand and with a candle stuck in the middle. The floor is covered with colourful patchwork rugs. Pretty much the standard setup on the beach.

It's dry and hot. Freshly baked bread becomes crisp in an instant and breaks off like potato chips. The wind blew an empty cardboard box that stopped inert right in front of my door. I couldn't decide if it was going to be a table or a garbage bin. Later on the same day another box landed at my feet and the matter was settled.

The main hang-out of a typical Sinai camp consists of several open tents where you sit on rugs and cushions and where food is being served. The beach huts are aligned in rows along the seashore, while some are encroached in the hills. Split cane and woven straw matting are the most common construction materials. Some of them are erected directly onto the beach sand, others are constructed on poured concrete slabs. Some have natural stone footings and some have vented roofs.

The kitchen, behind the main hang-out, is generally a solid construction (clay or wood). On the menu, a non-controversial list of dishes. The stock vegetable accompanying rice is okra. Karkade, a cold hibiscus infusion, has allegedly been the refreshment of the pharaons. Tea is traditionally served with salvia leaves. There are some nice fish restaurants to be found as well, but none offer genuine Beduin cuisine, let alone Egyptian.

I have stocked a pile of groceries in my hut and cook as much as possible. I have a camping stove and fishing prospects. Despite the heat and the lack of refrigeration, I do not feel restricted. I buy fresh fruit from the camp supplier that stops by every now and then with his overloaded truck. No need to specify "bio", that's part of the Sinai deal: untampered nature. For more serious shopping and internet connectivity, I travel to Nuweiba, the chief town district. Its port has ferries to Jordan, but otherwise it's a rather small and sleepy Egyptian stronghold lost in Beduinland.

Breakfast translates to taheena. It is the ideal nutriment for our kind of environment. No need to refrigerate. Holds forever in its rough and unprepared paste form. Mixed with water and spiced with lemon salt, garlic powder and cumin, it provides a solid starter for the day. An interesting commodity available everywhere is an excellent buffalo cheese that holds one year in its package (tetrabrik). A local refreshment based on orchid petals (sahlab) is available in powder form, already mixed with skimmed milk and nuts. All you need to do is pour hot water over the mixture while stirring, and optionally enhance the brew with slices of banana.

The camp system works on credit. You pay for all services on check-out or whenever you ask for the bill. If for a particular reason you like to hang out in a camp that you don't belong to (the restaurant is better, your lover stays over there), chances are that you will get credit there, too.

The Red Sea is known worldwide for its coral reefs, the beauty and variety of its submarine fauna rivalled only by some spots in the Pacific. I am adjusting from the familiar Mediteranean, learning and discovering a different environment. For one, the sea doesn't extend to the horizon. The mountainous coast of neighboring Saudia Arabia is only a couple of miles away. The sun rises from there and sets amidst the Sinai mountains. In between, a translucid sea bustling with underwater life and yet very quiet. Its waters die gently on the reefy shallows four feet from the hut. For days it can lie still with not a single motion. Sometimes, when little fishes are being chased by predators, they jump above water-level, and the effect from a distance is that of a shower of light-drops reflecting on the surface of the sea. When a ferry travels along the strait, 45 minutes later come the turbulence ashore. A tranquil sea, not torpid like the Dead Sea, but closer to it than from the jostling Mediterranean. Only the sea cucumbers look as cumbersome as their Mediteranean counterpart, only bigger. The urchins, too, are bigger in size.

But for the rest it's a different game. The underwater world is very alien. Each dive is a meeting with the unknown. The reef has a sound. A continuous crackling noise. Something very low and discreet and easy to miss. It's the sound of the reef. It's always there. The shelf is populated by bleached branch coral, all sorts of brain coral, table corals that blush neon and fan corals that swarm with dayglo fishies. Thousands of colourful fishes of all sizes and shapes brush along the delicate tracery of fire coral while stingrays prowl at the foot of the wall on the white sand slope that disappears into the Blue.

Snorkel divers and bathers worry about sharks (accidents do happen, but they are rare), unaware that half of the exotic fishes that surround you at all times are not to be dealt with. The inocuously looking lionfish, a superb avatar of nature - a fish with feathers! - has a very nasty sting. There is only one rule to keep you safe: do not touch anything.

I often get tangled up in huge baby fish banks, dense clouds of fluttering newborn fishes swimming in unison. Their quick movements are synchronised as if they were one living organism. In a split second, the undulating mass can operate a 180 degrees turn. The fascinating thing is that out of these thousands sperm-shaped offspring not a single one bumps into the intruder. There is an ethereal feel to be among them, like experiencing some oceanic intimacy, a chance to visualize the universe's higher mathematics, the tight formulas of reproduction ruling life on earth and below.

In the perspective of evolution, each species developed a set of peculiarities aimed at survival in a highly competitive environment. The mimetic fishes are of the most striking type. They imitate elements in the surrounding environment so well that they disappear from sight. The stone fish, for instance, whose sting can be lethal, blends with rocks at the bottom. Some fish imitate algua. Some can freeze totally still.

The parrot fish has a powerful mouth reminiscent of a parrot beak which serves him well when pounding the sand bar. In the water, you can actually hear him crunching away at the coral. It nears so much on the shallows that when he balances himself in position its rear fin sticks out of the water. But what purpose serves its beautiful colours?

One type of fish squats a poisonous anemon to which it is immune. A small cute fish, red with white stripes, the twobar anemonefish. On one occasion, the specimen, seeing me as a threat, struck as lightning and bounced against my goggles. Then I saw the small fish that it wanted to protect.

Beduin women stroll along the shoals with long sticks, preying for octopuses. A tricky catch. The octopus hides in cracks and crannies and barricades the entrance with pebble. Only the eyes bulge out of their hides. The women are busy for long hours under the burning heat.

Ten-years old Beduin kids go fishing with barebone equipment and lots of patience. And yes, they do return with the day's catch.

There is a touching story of a young deaf and dumb Beduin (the high percentage of this deficiency among Beduins is a known genetic phenomenon related to endogamic alliances) who made friends with a dolphin. The dolphin would come to visit the boy everyday. The story made it to the Jordan media and a French journalist made a book out of it. Since then, Olin gave birth but the newborn died. She gave birth again. Yesterday, mother and child were spotted on the beach where I am staying. The excitement was big. Some people even got to touch them or swim with them for a while.

Sharm-El-Sheikh is the international resort of the Sinai: european tourism, political summits and the Arab jet-set are all concentrated here. Sharm-El-Sheikh is 236 km away from the Israeli border. In between, only two small cities are encountered, Nuweiba and Dahab, with hundreds of Beduin beach camps interspersed. These host a particular type of tourism, since it's almost exclusively Israeli.

During the glory days of the Oslo agreement, when peace looked within reach, Egyptian investment in the Sinai was at its best. Infrastructures were raised or improved, and there was a building frenzy along the coast. Today, construction is halted, many sites are desolate, and most Beduin camps are alive only during Israeli holidays. As a result of the heavy competition, camps try to set themselves apart by distinctive traits, topographic (Red rock lies on a the slope of red coloured rock) or conceptual (Said's camp is a 100% eco-friendly camp with selective rules: smoking hash, for example, is forbidden - that alone excludes most of Sinai visitors). The success of a camp is often a factor of the arrangements that the owners have with the taxi drivers that depart from the border. Regulars know to which particular camp they want to go, but many don't and leave the decision of the final destination to the drivers' fancy.

Knowledgeable travelers flock the 'hot' camps outside of the season as well, passing thru recommendations by word of mouth. I heard that there was a camp at Ras Shittan frequented by travelers and musicians.

Ras means head in Arabic, used geographically for something that juts out, like a promontory or a cape. Shittan means Devil. Trying to get precise toponomic information is deceiving, because in the Beduin mind it is pointless. Any kind of question asked is a pretext for human interaction, not scientific. Inquiring about the name of the place, I was even told a fully fledged legend of classic arab folklore: the shepherd boy, the hidden cave and the beautiful woman who is at the same time devilish.

I gathered that the previous name of the place was Ras Shittein. Shittein is the dual form for shatt', beach. Hence, Ras Shittein meant the cape of the two beaches. My version is this: among Israelis it became Ras Hasatan, the Devil's head, because this is a natural phonetic deduction for Hebrew speakers, albeit mistaken, and since the cape itself has a funny shape and can easily lend itself visually to anything, especially after a smoke, the name stuck (even among locals).

I wasn't cheated. Some top of the notch world music artists take a break here between recordings or concerts. Guest musicians pay for their stay at the camp by performing instead of money. There is always someone playing music for your enjoyment. Tonight it's Hicham, penetrating eyes, sitting with airs of an Arabian prince, his Saudi galabiya immaculate as his fleshy cheeks, always in-between Jordan, Sinai or Israel. The sheikh is venerated by all. I was unimpressed until he started getting serious at the Oud (lute). Another recent highlight was Omar, from Syria, singing classical songs accompanied on the guitar by Yaron.

This type of coming together is called a chafla, a party or celebration. Israeli musicians know the Beduin repertoire, and vice-versa. On some nights, the music sessions are meditative and spiritual, on others it is upbeat and rythmical. Sudanese people chant traditional songs every second evening.

During a single week, I got to listen to varying line-ups with instruments such as bouzouki, lyra, darbouka, tablas, santour (Persian string instrument played with sticks which gave the xylophone), qanun (arab sister intrument but played with the finger), setar (Persian), rebab, saz and cubus (Turkish), ney and other kinds of flutes. And then there is abou nafcha - Kelvin the wizard carved his own instrument out of the shell of a blowfish.

The overall atmosphere is nothing of what the media knows best to portray in the region. Sinai is a crossroads, arguably the best kept secret in the Middle-East. Of course, there is a conflict that endangers the region and maybe, as geopoliticians like to put it, the whole world. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a good example of a phenomenon whose sum is bigger than its parts. Peace in the Middle-East is also reality. You just need to know where to look.

I have been educating myself about the conflict during many years, reading from different sources and discussing with people from all sides. I am now trying to recover some kind of innocence towards the conflict. Imagine someone who has never heard about the issue (if that sounds improbable, let's pretend he's from another planet). Now let's take him to the region and walk him around. He doesn't know anything about borders, nor who is in control here or there. He cannot even tell the difference between Jews and Arabs. What will his perceptions be? He will see a state of war in Ramallah and Gaza, a state of peace in the Upper-Galilee or in the Sinai. He will see that between these two extremities, Jews and Arabs coexist with varying degrees of success. When having to explain to his race what is happening in the region, he might draw a map and apply indicators for each place. Not binary logic, but fuzzy, say on a scale of 0 (peace) to 1 (war), each place receives a mark, for example 0.1 for Nahariya, 0.9 for Han-Younes, 0.4 for Jerusalem. Our observer will come to the conclusion that most people live in peace most of the time, while some wage war some of the time. What do we have to gain from such a perspective? Possibly it allows us to free ourselves from the cultural reflexes that haunt us when dealing with those issues, and secondly it brings all of us back to our human weakness, regardless of which side we belong to. How is that different than any other conflict on the planet?

Israelis are raised into fighters, yet the picture here is of a chanting and dancing pack with naked children running around. The spirit of the platoon is retained, but the purpose has been inverted. You see skinny people with long hair, white gowns and bushy beards climbing hills to watch the sunset. These loosely defined tribal circles bring to mind the hippies and the spirit of the sixties.

Men go chest-naked, wearing sharwals, Thaï pants or wrapped in longhis (lava-lava). Awareness is the buzz word. A graffiti in the camp reads: Peace begins with me. New-age is very strong in Israel, partly because it allows people to escape from the harsh reality into the ethereal realms of Eastern philosophies. It provides a way to evade political issues. The demise of the dominant political discourse has brought about a new vocabulary, a new perspective, a new zeitgeist.

The camp at Ras Shittan is a meeting point, maybe a scene. Many people are into the Rainbow gatherings. It is not, as one might think, a small group. There are people who spend most of the year in Goa, in the Thaï islands or in the Himalayas and sell merchandise during Christmas at festivals and fairs in Europe. There are people who have traveled too much to remember where they came from. People who realize that establishing themselves in their own society is not an option anymore. Misfits, as one might choose to call them. Or beautiful souls.

As I was watching Kelvin, dressed in rags, his feet with infected wounds (streptococcus), playing on his instrument (or being played by it, as he likes to put it), as I was watching him, thus, his face distorted by great emotion, I thought to myself: why did God make some of us so sensitive, so sensitive, actually, that they do not stand a chance in society.

Kelvin often talks about the oneness of the universe and his efforts to connect to it. It's the only thing that matters to him. His eyes are sad and his smile is true. He gives attention to kids and talks with cats. He cleans up other people's mess on the beach. He always minds his own business.

There is a little number of foreign long-term residents: a single mother from New-York with her baby, a Frenchman of Tunisian origin, a Swiss who knows the desert like a Beduin, Kelvin the wizard, a Brit who spent many years in Hungaria.

Among the Israeli regulars, a cripple of war, a healer, a girl that is recovering from a car accident, a gifted musician, a blind man who sees more than the rest of us.

The average, consensual Israeli, if any such thing exists, can be found as well, of course. He comes and he goes.The Sinai offers a singular vantage point to observe Israeli society. People from all backgrounds come here to relax. Or to reflect.

David, a combat officer, tells me he came to think about his next steps in life. When he finished his service, he went to study yoga in India. Milu'im is approaching. He considers to join the ranks of objectors. He knows he faces a jail sentence and the incomprehension of his comrades, at least some of them. He feels it is a tough decision. It goes against his upbringing, and yet he feels it is the right thing to do. "We inflict pogroms on them, he says, I do not want to be part of this." He feels lonely in his dilemma. I remind him he is not alone, and he agrees. An organisation called the courage to say no is aptly named.

In Israel, the individual is subject to a tremendous amount of social pressure. It is a performance oriented society with a fast-moving economy and in this regard it can be compared to Japan. Because India has become an essential stage in the life of the Israeli, some kind of ritual passage, another phenomenon has appeared as a side effect: the return back home. People traveling to India often discover the world of spirituality, open their senses and slow down to a natural rhythm, not the one dictated by society. The return back home can get difficult indeed, if not totally disconcerting. People get into serious crises. How to reintegrate society and preserve the inner wealth awakened during these journeys of the soul? How to share it with family?

Sinai serves as a decompression unit for people returning from remote countries. In this great spiritual unrest experienced by Israeli society, religion is not absent. Many people realize that the answers they have been looking for so far can be found at home. Judaism is being reinvented. Non-orthodoxical, dynamic and with a heavy slant on the mystical. Religious centers as Jerusalem and Zefat are blooming, but secular Tel-Aviv is not spared from the renewed interest in Judaism. It's a mixed bag type of thing. Everybody finds an answer to his needs. From worship of rabbis (the Nahman of Ouman cult), visit to saints' tombs, to workshops in sexuality. Religious academies are erected and communities are built, things as curious as yeshisvashrams or the hassidic libertarian-egalitarian community near the Dead sea.

Consequently, all kinds of religious Jews visit the Sinai. Some girls, like the Beduin ones, bathe fully covered. On Fridays, new-age Jews gather at sunset and celebrate Shabbat with traditional songs. Chalot are baked and blessings are made.

Last night at dawn I saw a man pray and chant in front of the rising sun, wearing tefillim and talith. His silhouette reminded the wrapped-up Muslim woman I saw a day earlier on the same spot, bowing down for prayer in the direction of Mekka, on the other side of the Red sea.

Beduin women of Tarabeen sell merchandise on the beaches. Every morning, they are dispatched in little groups at different locations and they will spend the day walking kilometers of beaches. The bag holding the merchandise is carried on the back with the handle resting on the forehead, leaving the hands free. They will regularly take a break under the shade. If a Beduin man is present, they will salute him traditionally, sit apart and never look in his direction. They might smoke a cigarette, but without removing the veil or, eventually, using the head cover to cast herself off the male audience. At sunset, they'll climb again on the pick-ups that will drive them home.

There seem to be no minimum age for this kind of activity. And no maximum age neither. It is difficult to estimate the age of an adult Beduin woman since she leaves no part uncovered, except for the hands and the eyes. The eyelids are darkened with kohl. Judging by the parched skin and the sacked eyes, and also by watching salutation protocols, I infer that some women are elder grandmothers. Meaning that three generations peddle side by side on the beaches.

I know the names of the little girls by now. Abira is 5 years old and follows her eight years old sister and her friends. It looks like they're having fun, spending lots of time playing in the sea, interacting with both the adult women and the tourists. They already speak good hebrew. They are selling lower grade garments: kafia, sharwals and cheap necklaces and bracelets made of plastic or strings.

Boys may sell ice-cream. They're carried in closed buckets with ice. I have yet to see another expression than the disappointed one on the face of the customer discovering his melted ice-cream: cream, yes, ice, no. Older men drive camels for the tourists. I rarely see anyone mounting on them, though.

A black clad, veiled Beduin woman passes by my hut. She smokes a cigarette through the veil. I ask her why. She tells me Beduin men are around. Are you married, I ask her. Thanks to god, she replies. (Alhamdulillah).

Egyptians are the rulers of the land and own the heavy tourism industry: hotels, casinos, facilities. Beduins, although formally also of Egyptian nationality, see them as a colonial power and don't like them. They have seen the rulers come and go: the Turkish, the British, the Israeli and now the Egyptians. The conflict over land repeats itself over and over again.

Beduins are organized in big tribes which exert influence over territories whose boundaries are known to all but recognized by none. Southern Sinai is divided between the Tarabeen, the 'Azazma, the 'Aligat, the Hamaouda, the Guerarsha and the M'zena, the biggest tribe. In Northern Sinai, between Nitzana and El Arish, the Roumeilat tribe reigns. And the Jebalia live in the mountains. Egyptians have put the land of Sinai on sale. Which means that the Beduins have to buy their own land if they are to become legitimate landlords. Anybody can buy a piece of land, provided he has the money. Most Beduins don't.

Another piece of discord is authority. Beduins don't like interferences in their affairs. They settle conflicts internally through custom law. There is always tension with law enforcement representatives, and sometimes it gets out of hand, like the recent shootings with police forces in Tarabeen, next to Nuweiba.

The Sudanese community is the available workforce and the most important non-Beduin group in Sinai, outnumbering the Egyptians. The team working at Ras Shittan, for example, is Sudanese. Sudan is the biggest African country in terms of size. Only 30 million people inhabit 26 cities. It has lots of natural ressources over which many eyes prey. One of the worst and longest civil war of the century was waged in Sudan, and matters are not yet settled. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced. Egypt, being the Northern border of Sudan, supports the Arab elite ruling the country. The Nile streams in from Sudan so strategic interests are at play. Sudanese people are allowed to reside and work freely in the allied country. Some of them have pulled themselves to the top of the social pyramid, playing as bosses. Individuals who managed to buy land so as to run a camp by their own.

The encounter of those different social groups in Sinai has its rules of its own. Hebrew is the lingua franca. Beduins know it, Sudanese people learn it as well, only Egyptians don't. Informal trade is taking place with exchange of gifts. Beduins value diving equipment, mobile phones and luxury goods sold in the duty free at the border crossing, like perfume or whisky, better priced in Israel than in Egypt.

Trade goes further with sex and cross-ethnical alliances. Many Beduins have Israeli girlfriends (not the opposite). A mixed married couple, Israeli and Beduin, are the owners of the camp at Ras Shittan (another mixed couple run the next camp and yet another one the restaurant across the road). Today though, Ayash and Sigal wouldn't have been able to unite. Egyptians are now forbidden by law to take for wife an Israeli citizen. Basata is a beach camp where Israeli are not allowed. To my knowledge, it's the only camp that practices such a policy. It was put into practice after the first intifida. Was the motivation purely political or was it economical? Many Egyptians refuse to mix with Israelis. Spending a holiday in the Sinai inevitably leads to just that. How could they possibly relax in their own country when outnumbered by the "enemy"? The solution for these people, therefore, was a camp "cleansed" from Israelis. The fact that the camp in question is held by a German lady (married to a Beduin) puts even more discredit to the whole affair.

Of course, not all Egyptians reason like this. Neither all Gemans. Rock sea is a perfectly friendly camp run by a couple of Germans welcoming people of all creeds. Many Egyptians do mix with Israelis in most camps. In Ras Shittan, a number of regulars keep coming back. They belong to the higher social groups, and are typically young people with good jobs in Cairo or Alexandria, and they are free spirits. I met Akram, born in Gaza, now the owner of a jazz club in Cairo, Iman, an air hostess at Dubai airlines, Karim, an english teacher at Berlitz, etc...

Unfortunately, this is not to the taste of the Egyptian authorities. Camp owners are obliged to report to local officers about the presence of Egyptian citizens. And their movements are subsequently watched. Subversive behavior includes drugs, sex with foreigners, political activities, etc.

The Sinai desert is not a sand desert, it is a bare rock massif, pre-Cambrian granite that form huge mountains. The red tint characterizing it was peculiarly transferred to the name of the aqua-blue sea flanking it. Or is the Red Sea so-called because its waters, at sunset and sunrise, glow red while reflecting the desert mountains? At any rate, sea and desert are a strange couple, each mysteriously enclosed in its opposite element, the dry and the wet, defying each other face to face in a stubborn and sterile confrontation.

A short intrusion in the desert is sufficient to understand what sets Beduins apart. I use the word intrusion with intent, because this is how it feels: you're intruding into forbidden territory. The mineral stillness is chilling. The heat is suffocating. The sight is grandiose.

The red granite bedrock was pushed up by violent volcanic activity and then cracked in sudden cooling. Later geological activity forced other types of molten rock into these cracks, which also cooled suddenly and crumbled. The result is a frozen picture of extreme seismic activity. How long has it taken? A day? a second? Then it stopped, setting the decor for thousands of years.

On the top of a hill, I tried to imagine that frozen drama coming alive, huge bursts of lava and melting matter furiously rising from the depths of the earth. It is not that you feel small or lost in the wilderness, you don't understand where you can possibly *fit*.

Everything was still. I clapped my hands. I got my echo back, a slick, whizzing sound, like the special effect accompanying a side-kick in kung-fu movies.

And then, suddenly, you see the silhouette of a man taking a nap under a big stone. He has been there forever. He might be on his way to visit a relative, or he might be composing a poem in the intimacy of God's creation.

Familiarity with the desert equals a whole set of eco-knowledge, a holistic view of man's place within nature. Men have adapted to all kinds of extreme habitats, and they in turn have shaped those men. It is no wonder that the Beduins see themselves as a fierce and proud people. Non-beduins can and do understand the desert. Wilfred Thesiger, a Brit, lived five years with Beduins in the Arabian peninsula and wrote a classic in anthropology. More modestly, Marco, the Swiss Beduin from Ras Shittan, treks in the desert for weeks. He has learned the subtleties of survival: how to find water, how to set camp, when to walk and when to halt, how to choose itineraries, how to calculate distances, what objects are useful and what is superfluous. A mistake in behavior, of benign importance anywhere else, can prove fatal.

A couple of Israeli died last year. They had maps and equipment. They went astray, the weather changed, they ran out of supplies, they died. It's as simple as that.

But for beduins who grew up in the desert, reflexes are so ingrained that doing the right thing is automatic. No Beduin ever died of thirst. Life in the desert is like walking on a thin line. The trained acrobat impresses its audience with his skill. The Beduin dances on that line with no other audience than silent stones.

Islam was born in the desert. Its poetry and veneration to the One result from the tremendous power of desert nature. Its rigor and severity are derived from the strict social codes ruling the society inhabiting it. In its time, Islam was a modern worldview formulated against crumbling empires and the rising of a new power: Christiandom. It has been one of the most impressive civilization in human history, it is still the religion of millions. And yet within the Arab world, except for Saudia Arabia, Beduins are a powerless minority group perceived negatively: backwards, primitive, dirty. Those who have achieved the classical language of the Quran, and retained it better than the rest through the ages, are now object of loathing and disdain.

It is most striking that all three monotheisms are in fact related to the desert. Mohamet was a shepherd boy in the Arabian desert. Jesus was familiar with the Judean desert. Moses and the ancient hebrews dwelled 40 years in the wilderness and the Torah itself, following tradition, was given at Horeb, Mount Sinai.

It is not surprising that Israelis identify strongly with the Beduins. Who else can bring to mind so vividly the ancient Hebrews? In speech as in mental perception, Israelis always make a distinction between Arabs and Beduins. Another strange paradox: the 'true' Arabs being the latter. Nonetheless, this apparent sympathy has not turned into favor to the Beduins within the Jewish state. The efforts of the apparatus is geared towards strengthening and expanding the Jewish population in all areas. The nomadic customs and lack of civil representation of the Beduins have turned them into forsaken losers in land settlement issues. Beduins of the Negev have been parked in slums with high crime and disease rates.

Modern history has been ungrateful for the Beduins: excluded from the bastardized pan-arabic nation, they were left out of all power equations and continue to suffer hardships under the centralizing approach of modern bureaucracies.

In the seventies, when Sinai was under Israeli control, attempts were made by Begin and his counsellors to unite the tribes and give them some kind of autonomy. The rationale was that it woud be easier to deal with a representative body of authority than with a myriad of chieftains. A historical conference was held that brought everybody together, but nobody could agree on a common agenda.

Since then, Sinai has returned to Egypt and Israelis have made of the place their favorite hang-out. In fact, it is the most important tourist destination abroad after India (in which 25 thousand Israelis journey at all times). Those who have known it before it was given to the Egyptians are sentimental, talking about how untainted it was, how they would go around naked in forsaken beaches, how it was a policeless country attracting hippies and free spirits from all over the world.

I have met an Israeli in his fifties on his first day in his Sinai trip after twenty years. He couldn't get himself out of his nostalgic talk. Sinai was 'his', an embodiment of freedom, a warm place in his heart holding his best memories in life. Now look what they've done, he said bitterly about the human touched landscape. A week later, I saw him all pepped up. He had decided to stay more than planned. Despite all, he admitted, Sinai had retained its magic.

I had been 10 years away from Israel. Coming back after such a long time was quite an experience. I had forgotten how real the country was, how different from the image portrayed abroad, how varied its people. I had forgotten the smell of the streets, the sights of the country, the liveliness of its youth. I had forgotten what it meant to feel at home. The country had changed, of course, except for its disastrous politics.

There were many places and friends I wanted to visit. In Tel-Aviv, I took a pulse of the heart of the country, beating nervously, its face geared towards the West. Jerusalem was as beautiful as ever. I had spent seven years of my life in that city, and one afternoon, on the terrace of the YMCA, a beautiful historical building facing the walled city, I realized that during all those years of absence, I had never stopped hearing the city echoing within, never sure if it was a longing for the Jerusalem of above or down below. It was still impossible to say.

I also made a prolonged stay in a kibbutz in Northern Galilee. The kibbutz is disconnected from life in the cities. It is an autonomous cooperative where people work and don't get paid: the kibbutz itself is striving so everybody receives more than merely needed. Really, the quality of life is higher than anywhere else. But the kibbutz feeds on old-school Zionist ideology, while I had witnessed during traveling in the country lots of alternative community building, to which I was more drawn. I had actually compiled a list of initiatives and found that lots of interesting things were going on. I even thought writing something about post-zionist utopias and social experimenting in Israel.

Atop of a hill in the Judean desert, I had joined a group of four that had set up camp here. Their idea was to build an eco-friendly leisure village. There were two big tents generously furnished, power supply from a generator, warm water,etc. The group had already spent four months there, and considering the field conditions, they managed to get quite comfortable.

The view atop of the hill was stupendous. Arad, the chief town, was only two kilometers away. Massada, the historical site of the Roman siege, 20 km away. The air was crisp and the light very pure, which made it possible to see 30 or even forty kilometers ahead. The Dead sea was stretching on the horizon, and beyond one could see Jordan and its border settlements.

While the group was aiming to set up an alternative village, I came to rest and think. I was supposed to cook dinner for everybody in exchange for the accomodation. Everybody had its own agenda and it seemed to work for a while .

But in the Judean desert, the encounter with the Beduins was more akin to confrontation than friendly interaction. The struggle for the land could be felt with every move. Some Beduin families of the region would customarily spend the winter down in the valley, and summer high on the hills. Obviously, they had lost one hill, since it was now occupied by young Israelis, fully supported by the authorities. On the surface, the tiny settlement was not political. The entrepreneur who had bought the land and achieved the permits after two years of bureaucratic hassle, was a Tel-Aviv businessman with a vision. And the volunteers on the spot were young post-zionist nature freaks who returned from India. Unwittingly, they were serving national interests: strenghtening Jewish presence in the Judean desert. That is why they were fully backed up. Water pipes were already hooked on the city network.

Slowly, it dawned on me that Sinai may be the biggest post-zionist utopian offering to Israelis. Here, outside the realm of sovereignty, Israelis can gather free of guilt and meet a biblical past with no intermediates. Beyond the boundaries of religious orthodoxy or zionist ideology, Israelis mix and exchange with Beduins, enriching each others' life the way human variety allows. Israelis and Beduins evaluate each other in the light of the forces that make up for modernity, look at each other across history, from worlds once shared and almost forgotten, each with its own memory of the past and its projection into the future. And it is there, at this intersection, that they meet, in the here and the now, a present escaping History, because desert time flows differently, with no chimes and no history, silent and conciliating humans with their deepest anima.

Desert nights are delightful and you forget to sleep. Lying on a mat in front of the hut, I watch the sky, immense, regularly traversed by shooting stars, drawing long trails of exploding matter. The dark sea answers back with the blinking phosphorence of marine coleoptera. At break of dawn, I am finally lulled to sleep by the sea' splashy murmurs.

August 2004