The Abraham Accords promised normalisation.
My lungs have lodged a formal objection.
Tomorrow, I am flying to Australia through Dubai. It will be my first international journey on an Israeli passport, assuming I survive packing, pneumonia, and the discovery that airlines apparently expect passengers to decide on footwear several hours before sunrise.
I am breathless with anticipation.
Also bacterial infection.
It is important to distinguish between the two, although both currently involve elevated pulse, poor judgement and the occasional need to sit down halfway through a sentence.
For the past few days, I have been staring at my blue passport with an intensity it has done very little to deserve. It is a small, slightly stiff booklet containing an unflattering photograph and several pages apparently reserved for countries ambitious enough to tolerate me.
It does not look capable of carrying the emotional weight I have assigned to it.
Then again, neither do I.
Tomorrow, I will place it on an airport counter and allow it to speak before I do, which may be medically advisable.
Israeli.
Not visiting Israel.
Not Jewish in the abstract.
Not spiritually affiliated with Israel provided Israel remains safely theoretical and does not require taxes, queues or fluency in government websites designed by people who resent navigation.
Israeli.
The passport belongs to the country I chose, and to the country that eventually agreed, after examining several forms, photographs, certificates, and possibly the entrails of a goat, that I belonged to it.
Israel did not so much absorb me as feed me slowly through a bureaucracy and see whether anything recognisably human emerged at the other end.
I made aliyah from South Africa in 2021.
Before then, Israel was an inheritance. A longing. A promise. An argument conducted over dinner by people who became constitutional scholars immediately after the soup.
Then it became home.
Home is not a place you admire without reservation. That is a hotel lobby.
Home is the place that knows exactly how to irritate you. Israel can raise my blood pressure before breakfast, exhaust me by lunchtime and leave me prepared to defend it against strangers by dinner.
I complain because I belong.
The right to be furious with Israel is one of the more convincing proofs that I am Israeli.
Tomorrow, I will leave carrying the state-issued evidence.
The destination makes the moment more peculiar.
Dubai.
For most of my life, the words “Israeli passport” and “Dubai” did not belong in the same travel itinerary unless the itinerary had been written in invisible ink and handed to someone called Avi who did not provide a surname.
An Israeli woman flying openly through the United Arab Emirates would have sounded less like tourism and more like the opening scene of an espionage thriller.
I would have been spectacularly miscast.
I cannot run in heels, remember code names or identify anyone at a hotel bar from the description “European-looking male”. I would compromise the entire operation by asking whether the hummus was included.
Then came the Abraham Accords.
Important men stood behind important lecterns and signed important documents with pens that presumably went home in velvet boxes.
But diplomacy does not become real when politicians shake hands.
It becomes real when an airline booking site permits an Israeli woman from Ra’anana to select Dubai from a drop-down menu, request a vegetarian meal and complain about the baggage allowance.
That is where history enters the body.
Or, in my case, the lungs.
Dubai is not my final destination. It is the glittering comma between Israel and Australia, where my family is waiting, and several people have already begun supervising my journey remotely through WhatsApp, the Jewish people’s most effective intelligence service.
At the insistence of three anxious relatives, I have packed away every visible sign of Judaism.
My Magen David necklace has been removed. My Star of David earrings are hidden. My rings bearing the word chai have been consigned to a bag.
I will therefore arrive in Dubai magnificently disguised as a woman carrying an Israeli passport with a menorah stamped on the cover.
No one will suspect a thing.
It is the geopolitical equivalent of hiding a pregnancy by removing one’s earrings.
I have also been reassured that I could pass for South American, provided the observer has never visited South America and has only a passing acquaintance with Ashkenazi Jews.
I occupy the paler end of the Jewish colour chart.
Not olive-skinned so much as someone to whom olives have been described.
Still, the instruction is clear: do not advertise.
This creates the peculiar situation in which I will present my Israeli identity to the Emirati authorities while accessorising as though Judaism is something I forgot beside the kettle.
I will not conceal who I am from the border official.
I will merely avoid providing supporting documentation in jewellery form.
And perhaps that is what unsettles me most.
I am accustomed to explaining Israel.
I have explained it to people at dinner parties, in comment sections and to strangers who acquired their knowledge of the Middle East from a pastel infographic designed by someone called Moonchild.
I have explained Zionism to people who believed it began in 1948, Judaism to people who regarded it as Christianity without the sequel, and Israeli history to people who could not locate Israel on a map but felt strongly that it should be moved.
Tomorrow, I will explain nothing.
I will hand over the passport.
The menorah will be visible.
The nationality will be printed in uncompromising government typeface.
And the official may barely look at me.
I hope he barely looks at me.
I do not want a symbolic embrace across the ancient divisions of the Middle East. I do not want to become an inspiring human-interest story involving several flags and an orchestral soundtrack.
I want administrative indifference.
I want fluorescent lighting.
I want the official to inspect my passport with the weary expression of a man who has already processed six hundred people and is thinking about lunch.
I want him to stamp it, return it and call, “Next.”
It is difficult to overstate how much Jewish history is contained in the privilege of being boring at passport control.
Normalisation is one of those sterile diplomatic words that sounds like a setting on a washing machine.
Yet perhaps normality is the most radical ambition available to this region.
Not love.
Not agreement.
Certainly not a sudden outbreak of intellectual humility on social media.
Just ordinary life.
Flights.
Trade.
Tourists getting lost.
People meeting one another before propagandists have had the opportunity to explain why they should be enemies.
Naturally, because this is the Middle East, the entire arrangement comes with an asterisk visible from the Burj Khalifa.
The country that issued my passport also maintains a travel warning for the country through which I am flying.
The official position is therefore roughly:
Peace has been established. Please do not become relaxed about it.
This is perhaps the purest expression of Israeli normality.
We sign diplomatic agreements while locating the emergency exits.
We book flights while monitoring airspace.
We celebrate regional progress while someone’s mother circulates a voice note from a woman whose neighbour’s nephew allegedly works in military intelligence, saying everyone should immediately purchase bottled water.
I am not mistaking an airline ticket for redemption.
The Middle East has not been healed because my luggage has been checked through to Sydney.
The region remains crowded with people who regard coexistence as a personal insult and every bridge as a target to be blown up.
But the bridge exists.
I can cross it.
That is not peace in its grandest form.
It is something smaller and perhaps more durable: precedent.
Once, the journey was impossible.
Tomorrow, it is an itinerary.
History is usually presented as armies moving across maps, governments falling and men making declarations behind podiums.
Sometimes history is a sick middle-aged woman wondering whether airport security will confiscate her cough syrup.
I had imagined my first journey on an Israeli passport would make me feel triumphant.
Instead, I feel exposed.
A passport is proof of belonging, but it is also a form of disclosure.
You cannot present half the cover and tuck the menorah discreetly under your sleeve.
Tomorrow, before an official in an Arab country, the identity I spent decades longing for will become a plain administrative fact.
Israeli.
No footnotes.
No defence.
No seventeen-part historical preamble beginning with Abraham and deteriorating rapidly after the British Mandate.
Just Israeli.
I am travelling through Dubai.
I am going to Australia to see my family.
I have pneumonia.
History rarely respects narrative structure.
When the aircraft rises above Israel, I expect I will look down, assuming I am awake, beside a window and not coughing into a paper bag, at the country that became my home.
Israel below me.
Dubai ahead.
Australia beyond it.
I will be jewellery-free, antibiotic-laden and carrying a small blue booklet that says where I belong.
Perhaps patriotism is too polished a word for what I will feel.
Belonging is less dignified.
It is loving a country that infuriates you.
It is choosing it when the choice is difficult.
It is exposing you.
It is leaving with the certainty that you are leaving home.
Tomorrow, I will fly through Dubai as an Israeli.
I hope nobody finds this remarkable.
That may be the miracle.