As the siren sounds at 10.00 am on Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day

The siren is sounding as I read this magnificent pastiche by Walter Laqueur on Melanie Phillips' blog:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/643971/the-lost-world-of-disraelia.thtml

How Israel might have been. As I sit here at my desk, looking out over our patio, flowers blooming, watching the ships come sailing in to Haifa harbour, I am struck especially by this passage from Walter Laqeur, in which Haifa becomes the centre of the Jewish world:

'[Disraeli] died in 1882 and is buried in the garden of his villa on Mount Carmel. After his death, this building became a refuge for distinguished political refugees from all over the world.

Trotsky spent several years there in the 1930s and later also Che Guevara, Solzehnitsyn, as well as Ayatollah Khomeini and most recently the Saudi entrepreneur Osama bin Laden. On fine autumn evenings in the late 1960s one could watch these four walking in the Carmel forest, surrounded by several learned rabbis, heatedly discussing fundamentalism, pro and contra.

The impressive building also served as an Institute of Advanced Philosophical Studies. It is difficult even to imagine the intellectual history of the late 20th century but for a number of historical confrontations which took place in this building, such as Heidegger debating Wittgenstein.'

Well, 'If you will it, it is no dream'.

As someone remarked during Pesach,

'Isn't it amazing that we have to come up the Carmel via Freud St to access you on Einstein St and just a bit further on lies Haifa University in the grounds of the glorious Carmel Forest.

Delusions of grandeur? No, not really. Just the fulfillment of a dream.