I volunteered on a kibbutz, and all I feel is sympathy for both Israel and Palestine

IN 1984, I spent a few months in Israel with my older brother, the then future but now former prime minister of this country.

- Rachel Johnson

Our summer started as volunteers on a kibbutz in the north, in a thumb of land poking out between Lebanon and the Golan Heights, on the banks of the Jordan river.

On arrival we were issued with canvas desert boots, shown beds in corrugated sheet-roofed huts, and then told to head to the work coordinator’s office to be assigned our jobs.

There were fruit orchards, a valve factory, vast chicken sheds, sheep. It was a collective of 600 men, women and children, who slept in a communal dormitory. Everyone ate the same food — tomatoes, yoghurt, hummus, eggs, pitta — at every meal, in the airy dining room. After dinner, everyone attended compulsory town halls to debate important things like the security fence. Everyone earned the same wage except, that is, for the day workers from Lebanon, who earned less, and the volunteers, who earned nothing.

The volunteers came last and we — non-Jewish, milky-pale — were the lowest of the low on this animal farm.

We gazed at a list pinned to a noticeboard, and found our names. Johnson, Alexander — kitchens/washing up. Johnson, Rachel — male sanitation.

At this point I am ashamed to say I played the only card I thought I had, aged 18. I was a blonde shiksa in the land of sexy gun-toting sabras, ergo I had one thing going for me. Rarity value.