It could have been a scene straight from John le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl, or perhaps Operation Shylock, Philip Roth’s biting satire on how paranoia lives, breathes and prospers in the state of Israel. In a tiny, brightly lit room, a hard-nosed Shin Bet agent is questioning an archetypal innocent abroad.
Yet this was no work of fiction. This was me, in a claustrophobic room, under harsh lights, sitting across from a senior member of Israel’s domestic spying agency at half past two on a Saturday morning, forced to rebut suspected links with Palestinian terrorists. On the wall in front of me, a picture of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister and self-proclaimed scourge of the terrorists, smiled benignly.
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