Beach life and Bauhaus

People ask me how I found Tel Aviv and I say... very Jewish. That's not the best Jewish joke. A young woman convert to orthodox Judaism (her father was Turkish) whom I met there told me a better one, involving three clergymen – a Catholic priest, an Anglican bishop and a rabbi – who are sent into a wood to convert a bear. The rabbi comes off the worst. He emerges from the wood, bleeding, his clothes all tattered and torn, and says: "I guess I shouldn't have started with the circumcision!"

Most people know about the Jewish sense of humour. Fewer people know that the Jewish state, Israel, is – not to put a remotely fine point on it – a nation of babes. You would certainly think so if you went to Tel Aviv, anyway. Visiting any of the beaches that stretch almost uninterruptedly along one whole side of the city is a humbling experience. The sand is a vista of beautiful bottoms, jostling along like the box-fresh products of a tennis ball factory.
 
Tel Aviv was at some point labelled the White City, because of all the Bauhaus architecture there – of which more, unavoidably, later – but I doubt many people still call it that. I mean who but an idiot calls New York the Big Apple? I propose a new name for Tel Aviv, and that is Ping Pong Polis. The city is clearly ping pong crazy. On the beach, in the sultry air, the water looks unbearably tempting, but to reach it, on a crowded weekend anyway, you have to pass a literally unbroken line of ping pong players (minus tables). The collective racket they make is unlike anything I've heard in the world but, if you reached for a comparison, uncomfortably reminiscent of a mortar barrage.

An army of ping pong playing babes. You can imagine my consternation. Traverse them I did, though, to find the water something of a disappointment: flat and tepid, like someone's abandoned bath, and with mysterious unnatural things floating up from its not very great depths.

To return, however, as you forcibly will if you take a guided tour of the city, to that architecture. Bauhaus, Bauhaus, Bauhaus. If there are any Bauhaus fans not already living in Tel Aviv, they should get here quickly. Tel Aviv is a young city, founded exactly a century ago, and in the 1920s town-planning types decided it needed a distinctive kind of architecture. As it happened, a stream of architectural graduates soon began arriving from Europe, steeped in the latest Modernist styles but up until then, because of Hitler, frustratingly prevented from practising them.

A profusion of Bauhaus buildings was the result. The school had all the right credentials for Tel Aviv. Its disdain for any kind of ornamentation not only marked a departure from the gaudy old palaces of Europe but was thankfully cheap for this fledgling city. Experimentation meant architects could – and did – fiddle endlessly with things such as air vents to let the blessed breeze into the otherwise unbearably stuffy stairwells between apartments. Many of the blocks have flat roofs, for sleeping on, on summer nights; balconies are everywhere, for catching that breeze again and for shooting it with your neighbours.

War, transvestite pop singers, religion, military efficiency: think of Israel and these are some of the things that come to mind. And some of them can't be denied but, when it comes to being efficient, Israel isn't, terribly. The waiters are all hopeless, either far too chatty (wait; don't talk!) or so sluggish as to seem suicidal. In her book of reportage on the country, The People on the Street, the Anglo-Jewish writer Linda Grant makes a similar point about the supposed steel machine that is the Israeli army. The young recruits, she says, are more concerned with make-up and rap as with the state of their Uzis; the Palestinian houses they occupy become strewn with teenage apparel. The rookie soldiers have to use their own mobile phones for reveille.

Likewise, much of Tel Aviv has a flaking, careworn appearance, and I have a theory why that is so. It is because the inhabitants of the city would much prefer to be sitting in cafes. There is a kind of traveller (I am one) for whom travelling is in a sense just moving from cafe to cafe. Arrive in a city: investigate its cafes – you probably won't feel comfortable until you've found the right one. Tel Aviv is a cafe city par excellence. Most streets contain a cluster, each tantalisingly different. Everyone in Tel Aviv has a favourite cafe, Grant says, into which – eventually – you'll be as warmly welcomed as if it were a second home.

Or perhaps Tel Avivites would prefer to be wandering around a market. The city has some fine ones: small but fine. The kitsch tendency of the craft market on Nachlat Benjamin St would probably appeal to transvestite pop singers but the artisanal knickknacks are curious for all that: quantities of colourful baubles shaped like menorah or stars of David, to dangle about the house and tempt good luck into it.

Next door, Carmel Market is the storehouse of, they say, Tel Aviv's freshest produce. Figs and cherries tumble off the stalls and in the smallest alleys off the thoroughfare you'll find smoked meats and cheeses, herring, pickles – the classical ingredients of sour but punchy Jewish cuisine. Many of the stallholders are Arab; at a falafel stand I popped a free sample into my mouth and instantly every other falafel I had eaten anywhere became a dull, cardboardy thing, so well spiced and juicy was this example from the region of origin. Nor, to shoot down another cliche, are the Israelis especially religious, and especially not in Tel Aviv. "Chosen people – chosen for what?" remarked my dinner companion in the city one night. Young people gravitate here, for the night life and those beaches, depriving the rest of the country, some complain.

Take the hour-long drive to Jerusalem if you want a contrast. There, cars are banned from certain parts on the sabbath, the day of rest. Special lifts in the hotels stop automatically on every floor on the holy day, so the ultra-Orthodox don't have to operate machinery themselves. There's something unreal about being in this Biblical city, what with its Church of the Holy Sepulchre, stations of the cross and Bethlehem and Nazareth not too far away. Where to next? Heaven?

Tel Aviv has its old part, too, 4,000-year-old Jaffa, but there the venerable buildings seem all to have been transformed into boutiques. You do wonder what the ancients would have made of this tendency throughout the world to turn their construction efforts into dress shops, but I doubt it would bother your average Tel Avivite. Chosen people? Chosen for what? To buy a frock! 

TRAVEL FACTS

Simon travelled to Israel with bmi, which has two daily flights from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. Return flights start from £294 in economy, £449 in premium economy and £794 in business, including taxes. Business passengers have access to bmi's new international lounge, bmi Number One Heathrow.

For more information on visiting Israel, see Think Israel.