Nothing about Israel is predictable. Certainly not to a naïve Gap Year student.

I approached my trip to the country with a genuine sense of trepidation. My primary worry about my three month venture was the interrogation I expected at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. I had been both part - and the cause - of many a queue as a Jew holidaying in the tourist ridden extreme south of the country. I felt that a number of factors would make me a prime candidate for intense questioning. My ticket kept me in the country for three months, the maximum time allowed for a tourist. I was travelling alone and I was there for an unpaid internship - a concept no Israeli I met understood.

The Israeli lady who taught me Modern Hebrew in north London, laughed at my suggestion that I could be a juicy target for Mossad at the airport. She was right, but my predication was far further from the mark than either I, or she, had realised.

I was not asked one security question during departure or arrival. The officer who stamped my passport was not interested in why I had come to Israel, and if she was, she didn’t show it by asking me the question. I was there for an internship at Haaretz, the country’s left-wing newspaper.

The paper was another reason for me to look suspicious to the Zionist border guards. Its former editor told Condoleezza Rice that the Israeli Government wanted ‘to be raped’ by the U.S.

To a stranger in Israel, as well as U.S. Secretaries of State, surprise abounds, on every street corner, or indeed, wherever there is human contact.

The relationship between people in Israel is very different to the one that we know in the UK. People are closer, yet further apart. They are closer in a presumed familiarity that allows the man in the falafel shop to boisterously tease a first-time customer, and a fellow passenger to turn around on a bus to correct a fact that arose in a private conversation.

This familiarity has its drawbacks. Crudely, to put these relationships into a single category, they would fit more comfortably in that of family than friends. Thus it was not uncommon to see confrontations between customers in the local corner shop, between owner and customer at a South Tel Aviv café, and between bus driver and commuter.

I spent the first week of my stay in a hostel in Jaffa. When it came to settle up, I was told that the management would not honour the price that they had quoted, because their rates depended on the dollar exchange rate. I began to get a little frustrated, but then my eyebrow was raised to its highest level of the week so far.

The lady behind the desk began to raise her voice, and point viciously. Thinking that this was not enough, she telephoned her manager, a woman who had appeared to me when I met her to be warm and gentle. My view changed when the receiver was passed to me, and she was in aggressive mid-flow, shouting threats, primarily offering to call the police. I decided to pay the bill, pack my bags, and leave them to it. But I couldn’t help feeling after the familiarity of that week that the women had come to think of me as a relative, perhaps a nephew, who tried cheekily to swindle his old aunts.

As my skin lapped up the Middle East sunshine, I flatter myself in thinking that I began to blend in. I was once nudged at a pedestrian crossing by a girl in her twenties who informed me, first in Hebrew and then in English, that my mouth was hanging open. It opened further on digesting what she had said, only then to broaden into a smile.

There is also a sense of solidarity within the family unit. On Yom Hazikaron, the day of memorial for fallen Israeli soldiers, a siren went throughout the country at 11 o’clock. The wail reached me as I was typing in my fourth-floor flat in South Tel-Aviv, and I stopped to look out of the window. The junction below, usually heaving and hooting all day and night long, had come to a complete standstill. Drivers stood by their open doors, heads bowed. Up the road away from the City were scattered vehicles with their owners standing next to them. After two minutes, the wail came to an end, and normal business resumed.

It did not take a great deal of effort on my part to be taken into the family. I was given access to relevant spokesmen when I was writing a piece based on my perception of Middle East reporting by British correspondents. I sat across a desk from, and interviewed the Israel Defense Force’s chief foreign spokesman, and held a 45 minute-long telephone conversation with the head of the government press office, because their respective staff had deemed it worthwhile based on the questions I had asked them on calling the offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

I spent my penultimate day in the country touring its capital city and political, social, cultural and religious melting pot. It began with breakfast at the religious seminary (orthodox) at which two of my school friends had been studying intensely for the year. Some of its older, post-university residents were keen to find out my background during the meal. One who had been sitting behind listening to the conversation, introduced himself afterwards and asked what I would be doing on my return to Israel. ‘Will you return [to the UK] and be an advocate for Israel?’

Later that day I dozed off on a bench in the rose garden in front of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. I was awoken with a jump by a bird who decided to aim at me from a branch above. Although I shall continue to be fascinated by the region, I think I shall leave the advocacy to the experts. I don’t wish to sound like I had a bad experience and hold a grudge. I suppose it was just an argument with the folks. I shall get over it.

Times recommends

• Minister sacked over fake degree
• Student grant blunder will hit 80,000 families
• Half of Cambridge students admit cheating