It makes sense really, that Pesach 2001 was the best Eilat of all. Partly just because I had just turned 14, which was the perfect age to be there: old enough to run wild, young enough not to notice the place was a bit naff. My grandparents were still energetic and mobile; my siblings and cousins were still unmarried. Most of us remember it as our best family holiday.
But also 2001 makes sense because it speaks to the strange and jarring duality of our many trips to Eilat. Just as we were enjoying ourselves most, smoking our first nargilas, having our first kisses on the beach, the savagery of the second intifada was beginning to ravage Israel and the West Bank.
What an era that was though, the turn of the century in Eilat, toasting the end of history outside the Three Monkeys pub. Tel Aviv at that point hadn’t yet become the Rio of the Mediterranean, so for a while, half a decade perhaps, it seemed as though most of north London would decamp for Passover to this small, crassly developed, gorgeously situated resort town on the southernmost tip of Israel. Some years we even went at Christmas too.
For my friends and I, privileged teenagers from Hampstead Garden Suburb, Israel then was really a heritage theme park. It meant something of course, to visit a Jewish state steeped in ancient history and modern sacrifice, but mostly we were there to sunbathe, chase girls, eat non-repulsive kosher steaks at the wildly expensive Ranch House restaurant, purloin wine from our parents’ dinner tables and then throw it up again the next morning.
If Israel was a theme park, Eilat was the big dipper. We loved it.
Thanks to the indifference of youth, we were shielded from the bloodshed just 200 miles away. Cocooned in the hulking five-star hotels that guarded the Eilat beachfront, our enjoyment was not punctured by the intrusions of smartphones or social media, neither of which yet existed.
Fin de millennium Eilat was one of those moments in time, like the Bournemouth scene of the 1950s, or the Catskills in the 1960s, when the Jewish community holidayed en masse, with children and parents in rare agreement that this was the place they wanted to be.
It was a fascinating social tableau, the blending together of St John’s Wood and Stanmore, each family’s choice of hotel and restaurant speaking to minutely observed class and wealth distinctions. Those hotel names still ring out for me today: the Dan (lush, art deco, had a water slide), the Royal Beach (even lusher, sprauncy, for the Ralph Lauren brigade), Herod’s Palace (even glitzier but never quite the thing), the King Solomon (for those who couldn’t afford the former), and the Sport (all inclusive, full of yelling kids).
Fin de millennium Eilat was one of those moments in time, like the Bournemouth scene of the 1950s, or the Catskills in the 1960s
One of my favourite parts of the holiday was an early evening ritual my father and I had. As the sun set over the Gulf of Aqaba, bathing the Hejaz hills in a warm, orange glow, we would often go down to the beach for a Diet Coke. He would point to the four countries all crowded around one little bay: Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He would tell me stories of the wars that had been fought over the straits of Tiran and the sands of Sinai, and the warriors that had fought them: Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal, Ariel Sharon, Yitzchak Rabin.
To me this all felt like the romantic and brutal past. Peace had come to the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon and its existential wars ended a generation before. 9/11 was still a few months away. Like most teenage boys, I was primarily focused on whether the girl I fancied liked me back (she didn’t) and if my football team was going to win the Premier League (it did).
Eilat Dolphins’ Reef (Credit: Dafna Tal – Israeli Ministry of Tourism. )
But many of us I think missed something about Israel then. The peace process was alive and we thought it must succeed eventually. In the meantime, we wanted this country to become our second home, a place of sunshine and shawarma, somewhere we could frolic on the beaches and gawk at the tough young soldiers and feel the call of the ancient at the Western Wall. We wanted Eilat to be our Miami Beach and for a while it was. But we forgot or conveniently overlooked the fact that these privileges had been bought by blood. And that more blood would have to be paid to keep them.
The signs were there, for those who cared to see. Just a few months before that 2001 Pesach, at the Hilton in Taba, mere metres away from where we were boisterously banana boating, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat had come as close as anyone before (or since) to achieving a real peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. How tantalising that failure looks now.
Just days after we left Eilat, sunburnt queues filing through tiny Ovda Airport, two Israeli teenagers, Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran were kidnapped and murdered, their beaten and bound bodies found in a cave the next morning.
A few weeks after my own first clubbing adventures, watching awestruck as the older boys downed flaming lamborghinis in Eilat’s Base Bar, an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber detonated himself at the Dolphinarium dance club in Tel Aviv, killing 21. On and on it went, with hundreds of Palestinians killed in Israel’s retaliatory strikes across the West Bank.
The second intifada died down eventually, but it took the peace process with it. It put Israel on a darker path and now here we are.
A few years after that glorious Pesach of 2001, we stopped going to Eilat; we grew out of it and our parents grew tired of it, transferring their affections to Tel Aviv and Herzliya and beyond. I barely gave the place another thought until October 7, when those big handsome hotels were used as a recuperation spot for survivors of the massacre and the Houthis started using the town for target practice.
And now? I don’t really know who still goes to Eilat now. That golden window has closed, the unity of that moment fractured and its coddled innocence lost to history. I wonder if I’ll ever go back. Perhaps not. Perhaps some things are better left as memories.
• Josh Glancy is News Review editor at The Sunday Times. You can read more of his Jewish News columns HERE
