At a party in Tel Aviv, fashionable young Israelis were guzzling wine, smoking joints or washing down ecstasy tablets with mineral water. Trance music drowned the television, but the revellers kept half an eye on the news, just in case. Suddenly, a raven-haired young woman pointed at the screen and shrieked: "There's my tank! There's my baby!" In many ways, Israel is like any other western society: rich, free and subject to more-or-less predictable laws. Yet it is unlike other western countries in that it has been on a war footing since 1948, the year of its founding. Its colossal defence budget has declined, in relative terms, from 23% of GDP in 1980 to around 10%, now that its most immediate foes are not armies but guerrillas and suicide terrorists. Even this reduced burden, however, is far heavier than that borne by the citizens of any other western country. Israeli taxes are high and, with few exceptions, every Israeli faces two or three years of conscription and decades in the reserves. Israel's streets bustle with machinegun-toting 20-year-olds, its kerbs groan beneath armoured cars, and its nervous restaurateurs have you frisked at the steel-barred door.
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