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.

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.

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.

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........

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