I recently read The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado. By the final third of the book I couldn’t see the words for sobbing. The book recounts the author’s family’s journey from Cairo—where they’d dwelled, as Orthodox Jews, for generations—to Brooklyn, where they landed after being forced out of Egypt, along with thousands of other Jewish families, by Nasser. Among other things, the book is a love poem for Egypt—and especially for the cosmopolitan and old-world culture of pre-modern Cairo, a place where business was conducted over Turkish coffee and Jews and Muslims lived side-by-side, in peace, for centuries.

It’s amazing to me how few Americans seem aware that the frenzy of Jew-hating that characterized the last century wasn’t confined to Europe, but in fact convulsed what we now call the Arab World as well—with hundreds of thousands of Jews being kicked out of Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, not to mention Egypt. But even more astounding is how the collected Jewish consciousness seems to have forgotten that Jews and Muslims lived together peacefully for hundreds of years.

And yet we have come to this: a lone Arab Israeli gunman walks into a yeshiva in Jerusalem, murders eight Jewish students before being killed himself, and the crowd of shocked Israelis who gather outside call for “death to Arabs.” Not that I’m sympathetic—God forbid—to anyone, from any camp, who hurts, intimidates, maims or murders Jews. I fervently believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, peacefully, within secure borders. Even so: “Death to Arabs” is not a winning slogan.

I’ve been to Israel four times: the first three times in my twenties, before I was married. Then I waited almost twenty years to return, traveling again to Israel in the summer of 2006 for the bar mitzvah of my husband’s nephew Itai in Jerusalem. Remember when it was a mark of pride among American Jews to have sent a family member to the Holy Land? My mother-in-law is still bemoaning that one of hers, my husband’s brother, made aliyah and is raising his two boys in the Promised Land. But then again: she’s Jewish: she worries. And there’s a lot to worry about. Just for starters, her eldest grandchild, Avishai, is now eighteen and about to be inducted in the Israeli Defense Forces. Her next oldest grandchild, my son Sam, is also eighteen: he’s a freshman at a small liberal arts college on a bucolic campus in Pennsylvania. Guns vs. books. Go figure.

Anyway, for reasons having to do with my own irrational fears more than anything else, for years I was afraid to travel to Israel, but then, suddenly, I wasn’t anymore. Finally returning, after such a long absence, was a spiritual triumph. For one thing, I now speak a little Hebrew, so I was able to argue with taxi drivers in their own language, which made me feel like less of a tourist than I might have otherwise. Also, I found that I wasn’t even one bit afraid—not of buses exploding, not of bombs going off, not of some lone, crazed gunman walking into a café and blowing everyone to bits. In fact, I’m more afraid of such random violence right here in the United States, probably because right here at home we seem to have descended to a level of insanity, violence, and casual blood-lust that my grandparents wouldn’t have even been able to imagine.

One night, a week or so into our stay, my husband and I flagged down a taxi to go to the Jerusalem Forest for a party. The taxi driver, a chatty fellow, gave us his cell phone number so we could call him when we were ready to be picked up. All went according to plan, and on the way back to our hotel later that night we again contracted with the taxi driver, this time to take us to the airport two days later. He showed up outside our hotel at the appointed, hideously early hour, ready to roll.

And off we went, Jerusalem uncurling and unfurling itself behind us as we wended our way down the hills and onto the plains and smack into some kind of army check point, where we were pulled over, and our driver was interrogated before we were allowed to continue on towards our awaiting El Al flight to Amsterdam. Our driver was a Palestinian Israeli who spoke Arabic, Hebrew, French and English, and who told us stories about German versus English tourists, and I felt bad for him as the Israeli soldier casually barked questions in his face. But our driver took it in stride, shrugging the encounter off as the cost of doing business.

As we got out of the taxi at the airport, he wrote down his name and again gave us his telephone number, instructing us to call him next time we came to Israel. He’d pick us up at the airport. He’d drive us down to the Dead Sea! If there was someplace we wanted to go, he’d take us there, and at a reasonable price. I thanked him, took the piece of paper with his name and number on it, and tucked it into a pocket of one of my bags. I just hope I can find it again.