He thought the idea of managing a resort in the New Caledonian Islands sounded cool. It wasn’t till he got there that he realized what a hole-in-the-wall the place was. The air conditioners in the rooms didn’t work, and there were insurgents in the nearby mountains who tended not to bother anyone but for some inexplicable reason, probably boredom, liked to scare hotel guests who went out walking. The cleaning women categorically refused to go anywhere near the hotel’s industrial washing machine, which they claimed was haunted. They insisted on washing the sheets in the river instead. In short, the resort looked nothing like its brochure.

He’d been on the job for a month when a rich American couple arrived. From the minute they entered the small lobby, he had a feeling they were going to be trouble. They had that look of a typical unsatisfied customer, the kind that comes to the reception desk to complain about the temperature of the water in the pool. The Swiss guy sat behind the reception desk, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and waited for the couple’s irate call. It came in less than 15 minutes. “There’s a lizard in the bathroom,” shouted the hoarse voice on the other end of the line. “There are a lot of lizards on the island, sir,” the Swiss guy said politely. “That’s part of the charm of the place.”

“The charm of the place?” the American yelled. “The charm of the place? My wife and I are not charmed. I want someone up here to get that lizard out of our room, do you hear me?”

“Sir,” the Swiss guy said, “removing that particular lizard won’t help. The area is full of lizards. There’s a good chance that, by tomorrow morning, you’ll find another few like it in your room, maybe even in your bed. But it’s not that bad because—”

The Swiss guy didn’t get to finish his sentence. The American had already slammed down the receiver. Here it comes, the Swiss guy thought as he gulped down the remains of his whiskey. In another minute they’d be at the reception desk yelling at him. With his luck, they probably know some higher-up in the resort chain, and he’ll be screwed.

He got up tiredly from behind the reception desk, having decided to take action: He’d get a bottle of champagne and bring it to them himself. He’d suck up to them the way they’d taught him in school and get himself out of this mess. It’s no fun, but it’s the right thing to do. Halfway to their room, he saw the Americans’ car speeding toward him. It zipped past him, almost running him over, and continued in the direction of the main road. He tried to wave goodbye but the car didn’t slow down.

He went to their room. They left the door open. Their bags were gone. He opened the door to the bathroom and saw the lizard. The lizard saw him too. They looked at each other in silence for a few seconds. It was about five feet long, the lizard, and it had claws. He’d seen one like it once, in some nature film; he didn’t remember exactly what the film had to say about them, only that they were very scary, unpleasant things. Now he understood why the Americans had taken off like that. The image of one of those cuties in bed with them had sent them packing.

“And that’s the end of the story,” the Swiss guy said. It turns out that those Americans really did write a letter, and a week later, he was fired. He’s been traveling around ever since. In November, he’ll be going back to Switzerland to see if he can make it in his brother’s business.

When I ask him if he thinks there’s a moral to his story, he says he’s sure there must be, but he doesn’t know exactly what it is. “Maybe,” he says after a short pause, “it’s that this world is full of lizards and even though there’s nothing we can do about it, we should always try to find out how big they are.”

The Swiss guy asks me where I’m from. Israel, I tell him, and I had a hell of a time getting to this writers’ festival. My parents didn’t want me to come. They were afraid I’d be kidnapped here, or killed. After all, Indonesia is a Muslim country, and very anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, some say. I tried to calm them down by sending them a link to a Wikipedia page that said Bali has a vast Hindu majority. It didn’t help. Dad insisted that you don’t need a majority vote to put a bullet in my head. Once Israeli flags were burned in front of the Israeli Embassy in Jakarta, but since diplomatic relations were broken off, those flags have to be burned in front of the American Embassy. A living, breathing Israeli could really make their day.

Getting a visa was a hassle, too—I had to wait five days in Bangkok, and I would’ve had to go back to Israel if the festival director hadn’t managed to get to a senior official in the Indonesian Foreign Ministry through his Facebook page and become his Facebook friend. I tell the Swiss guy that in a little while, I’ll be reading at the opening event in the Bali palace in front of the governor of the island and representatives of the royal family, and if he’s able to stand on his feet by then, he’s invited. The Swiss guy really likes the idea. I have to help him stand up, but after the first step, he manages to walk without any help.

There are more than 500 people at the event. The governor and representatives of the royal family are sitting in the first row. They look at me while I read. I can’t really decipher their expressions, but they look very focused. I’m the first Israeli writer ever to come to Bali. I might even be the first Israeli, maybe even the first Jew, some members of the audience have ever seen. What do they see when they look at me? Probably a lizard, and from the smiles slowly spreading across their faces, this lizard is a lot smaller and more sociable than they expected.

Translated by Sondra Silverston.

Liav and Ofra, an Israeli couple in their late 30s, run Woodstock Village, in Arambol, north Goa. They seek to marry the spirit of a kibbutz with the rock ‘n’ roll spirit of the 1960s. It’s a peculiarly tight-knit place. Guests eat together, clean up after each other, smoke charas—Goan hash—together, and play music together. Everyone keeps their doors open, so when babies cry or women moan or dogs bark or someone farts, the sounds vibrate through the night. Couples swap partners, and younger singles regularly get together. Most of the guests are Israeli, and many bring young children. Liav and Ofra’s young children have been raised as much by the guests as by their parents.

Time disappears in Woodstock, because people smoke massive amounts of charas in more forms than I could have ever contemplated. Guests who initially intend to stay only a few days find a month has passed, and then they realize that their plans have changed. For some, Woodstock incubates a fear of the outside world, which everyone calls Babylon. I meet two young Israelis in Woodstock who served in combat capacities for the Israeli Defense Forces. My impression is that they were both damaged by the experience in a very real way. Naor fought in Lebanon; Ilya piloted unmanned aircrafts, or drones, in the Robot Wars.

Neither Naor or Ilya likes to talk about his army experience much. One night, when we both get high together, Naor tells me his feelings toward Palestinians. His attitude is one of pure and honest hatred. He draws an analogy that I can understand. Imagine, he says, seeking to describe his work in the army, if you could “vibrate your hand to kill Osama bin Laden.” They smoke charas every day and take LSD, MDMA, and Ketamine regularly.

Ilya is obsessed with a wooden trellis supporting the canopy of dried palm leaves that covered the courtyard, which looks like a sukkah. Beneath the leaves are five low tables with mattresses where residents sit and eat and get high and pass out. When I first came to Woodstock, Ilya was one of the guys who passed out on the mattresses. When I returned after a two-week trip he was climbing the trellis, which indicated that life was flooding back into his limbs. While the degree of his chemical addiction is unclear, the major damage appeared to have been inflicted on his soul by a life spent playing video games that had turned deadly.

Several days after I met them, Ilya and Naor were coming out of long acid trips and were distant and uncommunicative. Liav and others tried to engage them in conversation, but they were too far gone. Ilya half-yawned; it was as if he thought that he needed to yawn and then urgently realized that he shouldn’t. Naor wore a scowl. His Swedish girlfriend (they met at Woodstock) touched his arm, but he flinched at the slightest contact.

Liav, the proprietor, was a fighter during the First Intifida, and he hints to me that he also experienced a certain amount of trauma. His face reminds me of Bob Dylan circa Rolling Thunder, or the Joker in a deck of cards. He has a small blue tattoo on his left triceps that reminds me of the end of an Internet cable. He watches over Naor and Ilya like he would his own sons. This doesn’t mean he prohibits their drug use—quite the opposite. He himself has used drugs regularly since the army. But he is also a responsible father and businessman. He downloads studies on the effects of drugs so that he can join and coach the young Israelis. He points them to informative lectures and books on topics such as “synthetic happiness,” by which he means transforming your unhappy memories into happy ones through the process of synthesizing the two parts of your soul—anger and forgiveness. He believes that anger needs to be balanced with pain in order to create an emotional levelness that makes it possible to absorb happiness while resisting the large amounts of shit that the world will always throw at you. It’s a very Israeli version of strength, a homemade emotional putty that can repair the large gashes that run through the lives of the young men who make their way here.

The day Naor and Ilya find themselves deep in acid holes, Liav finds clever ways to keep them from digging any deeper. He asks Ilya to set up the laptop and find some music for everyone to listen to. He starts a conversation with Naor about synthetic happiness. After an hour Naor is making eye contact again, and by the end of the night he’s speaking coherently and even laughing and playing with his girlfriend. Ilya stays in a dark place for a couple more days.

On the plot next to Woodstock’s is a hotel called the Phoenix Homes, whose residents quote Hunter S. Thompson, drive loud motorcycles, hang from the hotel restaurant’s rafters, dream that they all speak the same language (they don’t) through transference of chemical energy by way of neural signals, and shout “Medicine!” when they “boom” a chillum hash pipe, which compared to shooting heroin is a form of recovery.

***

Liav is opposed to organized religion, especially Judaism. He shows inquiring guests online lectures to demonstrate how the major religions of the world derive from sun and moon worship. People here believe strongly that the Age of Aquarius has arrived, is arriving, or will soon arrive. The Internet, they say, will somehow deconstruct organized religion. The guests are not particularly messianic. They just enjoy weird conversations.

When guests arrive, Liav invites them to play chess, which is just a con so that he can discourse on religion to a new set of ears. “There are over 10,000 religions in the world,” Liav says to me during our chess game. “Their followers all have one thing in common: 99 percent only believe because of the other 1 percent, who know next to nothing about other religions,” he says. “So, how can they possibly say they know what is true?” Liav beats me easily in chess. He’s a crafty player. He’s even invented a new way of playing wherein he moves the pieces according to the movement of sound and light.

Liav is insistently argumentative, but not in a rude way. He enjoys playing word games. When he’s stoned, he talks in an odd code that involves oblique references to string theory, Radiohead, chess, Zen Buddhism, cartography, love, and principles of logic. He’s also very funny. His favorite saying is “For sure, maybe.”

He and Tomer, the leader of the Jewish House in Arambol, are good friends. Their children also play together. The two men love trying to prove each other wrong. Liav sometimes goes to the Jewish House and persuades Tomer to let him deliver his anti-religion beliefs to Jewish backpackers who come for Shabbat. Religion is basically absent from Woodstock, though occasionally Ofra puts together a Shabbat dinner and invites guests, guests’ friends, and staff and their friends. It’s a lovely affair, and Ofra asks one of the young men to bless the bread and another to say something. Liav loves throwing parties, so he enjoys these occasions in spite of himself.

Only later did I realize that Tomer and Liav had both served in the same division a generation apart. At first, each man perceived the other as a threat to his self-appointed mission of putting damaged souls back together in India, the first through faith and the second through reason. They steered clear of each other, but their wives met and slowly became friends. Ofra brought their daughter, Stavi, who was 3 years old, to Tomer’s house. After that, Tomer began to invite Liav to give his secularist sermons. In return, Tomer began appearing around Woodstock, dropping off books. The young veterans began bouncing back and forth between the two families and getting clean in the process.

***

In their time in Arambol, Nati, the wildest of the three Israelis, makes a point of separating himself from Liav and Woodstock. Nati refuses to sit on the floor, and the restaurant there has only knee-high tables and mattresses. His new haircut, which he tops with a funny hat, makes him look like an old man. He also refuses to speak English, something Liav requests so that everyone can join in a single conversation. “We’re not a part of this,” Nati says to me. “We speak our own language. If you want to speak it, learn Hebrew.” He picks a fight with an Austrian girl named Leia who mocks him for holding forth on the merits of Israeli hummus versus Indian hummus. “You laugh at our culture,” he says. She admits it. “Austrian food is terrible so you shouldn’t talk,” he shoots back.

By now, Maor, the homesick Israeli, has gotten his own room at a different guest house and taken up with a new group of friends. Nati and Elad, who have been best friends for 18 years, don’t see much of him anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time on the beach, where Nati wears his funny hat and Elad wears his kerchief. They also meet several more times with the fixer Hilik Magnus, who has succeeded in getting the three Israelis permission to leave the state of Goa, though they still can’t leave India. Nati and Elad immediately make plans to return to the “Hummus Trail.”

Before they leave, Nati argues with Liav about the meaning of truth. He interrupts a conversation between Liav and Ilya, the stoner I’d met at Woodstock, both of whom are speaking in stoner riddles. Nati, Elad, and Maor haven’t smoked since the arrest, and now they don’t like being around high people.

“We understand what we think is true,” Ilya says to Liav, “until we encounter something new, which we then try to fit into this old definition we lived by, until that doesn’t work anymore and we need to start all over again. It’s all very”—Ilya bobs out for a bit, then perks back up—“dizzying.” Liav agrees. Nati overhears and jumps in. He pulls quotations from the Talmud and Maimonides to explain his belief that there is a single truth, and it’s called Judaism.

“How do you know that’s true?” Liav asks.

“Because I know,” Nati answers.

“But I have my own truth that’s different than yours, which is that everyone has their own truth,” Liav says. “So, if our truths aren’t the same, how can yours be true?”

Nati doesn’t have a good answer, so he deflects with an aphorism I’ve heard him say many times. “First you do. Then you know.” This is a big part of the reason why he came to Goa: to taste other cultures in order to confirm the supremacy of his own.

“And this is stupid,” Liav answers.

“It’s only because you’re lazy,” Nati says. Liav rolls his eyes and walks away.

The conversation upsets Nati. “It’s very easy for you to sit here and laugh,” he says. The next day he leaves for Hampi. He’s angry that I’ve decided to stay at Woodstock.

I approach Liav about the conversation after Nati leaves with Elad. I ask him to describe what he was thinking when he decided to leave in the middle of the conversation.

“Leaving is a choice, and so is staying,” Liav says. “But staying is the lazier choice.” His message to Nati is the same lesson that he gives to the junkies: Don’t keep running from the reason that you are running; turn around and run toward your fear.

***

Liav enjoys clamming on the beach. He calls it “catching mussels,” with a wink. He likes to take people with him whom he feels have achieved something significant at Woodstock. On this occasion, the mussels are for Naor and Ilya, both of whom have released their torpor and weaned off heavy drugs (“medicine”) after their recent binge. They’re both leaving Woodstock in the next couple days. Naor and his girlfriend will go to Karnataka. Ilya will travel in the opposite direction on his Bullet motorcycle.

Together, we drive to a remote spot Liav calls Paradise Bay, which is still a ways from Paradise Beach, he says. Liav’s bizarre—the word I want to use is “zig-zaggy”—mantras are intended to lodge in your brain so that you play them over and over again to figure out what exactly he meant. In this case, he wants to give Naor and Ilya the idea that greater happiness awaits them further along their journey.

Ilya has carried Woodstock’s hatchet and rope on his Bullet, and Ofra asks him to build a fire. He straps together a bundle from heavy pieces of a broken log and carries it back to the group. The rest of the evening, he quietly tends the fire, tracing the flow of heat with his eyes.

We leave the beach after nightfall. On the way back, Naor’s bike runs out of gas. He’s riding with his girlfriend, apart from the other bikes in the convoy. As it happens, my bike also runs out of gas. I’m confounded—I just filled the tank that day. Liav and Ofra (with their 4-year-old daughter) see me and stop. Liav helps me find gas.

Naor and I discuss our odd predicaments later that night. He also thought he had a full tank. Liav overhears us and smiles. His face folds upwards into his temples.

Naor spots his meaning immediately. “Baba,” Naor starts, calling his mentor by their affectionate nickname for each other. “Are you telling me you took the gas out of my tank? Why would you do such a thing?”

Liav looks at Naor, then me. “Today we caught mussels.”

For a couple weeks I don’t see or hear from Elad, Nati, or Maor. Then one evening Maor returns to Arjuna, and the next day Elad and Nati arrive. All three seem happy. Maor loved every minute of traveling by himself. He bought new jewelry and clothing, which he shows me proudly. Nati and Elad head straight to Woodstock, where Nati chats amiably with Liav. Any past disagreements and bad feelings are water under the bridge. Elad tells me that Hilik Magnus succeeded in convincing the judge to release their passports and that they’ve returned to Goa to pick them up from their lawyer. Then they’ll all travel together to the north.

Nati is tired of India but he wants to learn more about Hinduism. He isn’t sure what he feels about going into Hindu temples yet. In Tamil Nadu, he and Elad went to a zoo and then to a water park, where he purchased a souvenir of his time in India—a T-shirt with a lizard stitched on the front. “Welcome to Goa,” it says.

Maor Hagay is homesick in India. He’s a handsome young Moroccan Jew from where Jaffa used to be who avoided his Israeli military service through a series of weird injuries that he would rather not explain. The real reason he ran away, his friends told me, was that he would have had to serve behind enemy lines in Gaza.

Maor loves Israeli music, food, the whole bit. He is so homesick that he can barely leave his room. The weather is perfect: Sunny, cloudless, and 90 degrees with very little humidity, as it is almost every day in Goa, a small state on India’s western coast. He is at a beach resort, but he doesn’t swim because of his new tattoos, which include lines of barbed wire across both biceps and a word in Indian script that he believes is his name inscribed along the length of his spine. Instead of going swimming, Maor sits alone in his room at his computer, looking at photos and listening to music by Israeli pop artists. The photos on his computer screen are from his first month in India, before he was arrested.

There is no shortage of Israeli head cases in Goa. There are said to be 30,000 Israelis traveling in India between October and March of each year, during which time the IDF could easily muster a unit of Israeli backpackers for a Goan field operation. The Israelis who are most screwed up after leaving the army—those who served in special brigades like Nahal, which combines military service with social welfare programs—often enclose themselves in undemanding protected spaces within Israel proper, working on a kibbutz or delivering pizzas in their hometowns. Everyone else goes to chill out somewhere beautiful, warm, and far away from Israel. The ones who are into climbing mountains go to South America. Those who seek to disappear with no redemption look to Thailand. India is for young stoners in search of some mystical experience by way of pot, acid, and Breslov Hasidism. India is a decompression chamber that keeps these young Israelis from imploding and revivifies them so that they can rebuild themselves and function in the civilian world. They tend to travel a circuit called the “Hummus Trail,” which stretches up India’s spine from Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, in the south, to Manali, Himachal Pradesh, in the north, through Hampi, in Karnataka, and Pushkar, in Rajasthan.

Back when he was in the military world, Maor went into the office of the Israeli army psychologist and begged not to wind up like his older brother, who served in Gaza and didn’t come back. Maor believes his actions were brave. But in the context of a society where all young men of his social class are expected to serve in the army, he is a coward.

Maor is of medium height with short hair and a long stitched-in braid down his back that makes him look like a Jedi Knight. People call him the Black Boy of Tel Mond. He has dark skin, and his family is poor. He’s here in Goa with his two friends, Nathanel “Nati” Ezra and Elad Koren.

Nati is a wild man. He’s tough, sharp, and funny, even though he looks like a caveman. (“My grandfather lived in a cage,” Nati jokes.) Nati has a broad chest and large head, with ears the size of saucers. His hands are big enough to snap open a coconut. He wears cartoon shirts, like a “Chef Goofy” T-shirt with Goofy energetically stirring a mixing bowl with the accompanying messages “It’s only silly 9-cents” and “Wholesome meal in a box.” He’s also a sharer. I met him because he offered me a smoke from his hookah. I proceeded to knock over the hookah, which is a tendency of mine, but Nati only laughed.

Elad has gentle features, blue-gray eyes, and a straight nose perched over an even smile. Before the army, Elad’s weight of 265 pounds was the butt of Nati’s jokes, but now he’s down to 155. Elad is 22, Nati is 24, and they’ve been best friends for 18 years. They, and Maor, are from Tel Mond, a village of around 15,000 people near Tel Aviv, built on top of what was once the Biblical city of Jaffa. They’ve been in India one month.

For now, Elad and Nati are sitting with Prasad, the manager of their guesthouse in Anjuna. The Sai Prasad guesthouse is owned by Prasad’s father, who never once shows up during the course of my two-week stay. There are 13 rooms situated around a closed courtyard of red stone. The walls are off-white with red, yellow, and blue trim. It’s a pleasant spot.

The three Israelis say they owe Prasad everything. They love him like a fourth brother. Prasad is in his late thirties and has very large and prominent ears. He bailed Maor, Elad, and Nati out after three days in a Mapusa jail. Prasad also found them their lawyer, the best in Goa, he says. Before the arrest they would all sit in the courtyard, looking at the ocean, smoking the hash derivative called charas with Brendan, a California cannabis farmer who came to India to smoke dope.

Maor, Elad, and Nati were arrested in this courtyard six days ago. A Delhi woman in her early twenties had died of a drug overdose near a place called Shiva’s Valley, just down the beach. She was from a wealthy family, and her father, who is connected to a local member of parliament, spurred an investigation into how foreign tourists were influencing the drug trade in Goa. The result was a spate of arrests across Goa, over a one-month period, which rounded up the three Israelis. Brendan was with them at the time of their arrest, but he got away.

The Israelis spent three days in a private jail cell, where they slept on concrete slabs three meters long by one meter wide. On one end of the cell was a filthy squat-style toilet, something they had never seen before. On the other end, some bars in the wall separated them from the outdoors. For three days, they hardly ate for fear the jail food would make them sick. (They all keep kosher.) By the end, they were covered in mosquito bites and deeply affected; jail in a strange third-world country was an unfamiliar trip for them. They had no idea why they were there. And now they won’t talk freely about their experiences.

Nati became obsessed with the details of the police report. He studied it like a puzzle. He became convinced the police fabricated the arrest report to inflate the quantity of drugs. In order to protect Prasad, whose father is a member of the local Panchayat, or caste government, the police had also changed the location of the arrest to a nearby city. The report said Nati carried 20 grams of hash in his pants pocket when he was arrested. At the time, though, he was wearing pocket-less exercise shorts issued during his army service.

Together, Maor, Nati, and Elad fantasize about winning their trial. They want to beat India. Alone, Nati obsesses over the pocket-less shorts, Maor dreams about leaving India and what he’ll think of it when he gets home, and Elad is focused on recovering their passports and money, which the police confiscated. Their bail conditions prohibit them from leaving Goa.

***

Goa has become a global tourist destination. Many Israelis and Israeli-run restaurants and guesthouses remain all over Goa, but Russians now outnumber Israelis, as do Scandinavians, Canadians, Australians, and Germans. Goa is easy to navigate, its beaches are pristine, things are cheap, and during the non-monsoon peak season, from October to March, the weather is ideal. It’s crowded with tourists, but not crowded in the Indian sense of the term, and many foreigners come to India only for Goa.

Some restaurants in Goa post menus in Hebrew, but most of the keyboards in Internet cafes are now in Russian, and I met only one shop owner who speaks Hebrew: Shimon at Shimon’s Falafel in Arambol. Outside his restaurant, Shimon hangs a signed picture of Mosh Ben Ari, an Israeli pop musician who pioneered a style known as “shanti” (for the musician’s long hair) in the mid-1990s. The meaning of “shanti” as used by Israelis is hard to peg but might best translate to “chilling out” or “taking it easy.” Shanti people often like to smoke marijuana and listen to Bob Marley. They wear baggy clothes with complex stitching and slacken their concern for material and grooming matters. Israelis use “shanti” to describe the carefree life people seek in India.

Some Israelis wind up here by accident or word-of-mouth, looking for the cool places where their older brothers went and where the members of Infected Mushroom, a popular trance band that blends elements of Radiohead, the Grateful Dead, and electronic music, might be found. Maor, Nati, and Elad fall into this category. Others Israelis, the ones who are badly screwed up from the 2006 Lebanon War, or from serving in special units, are sent here through networks of older veterans, who fought the first Intifada, or served up through Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. The Israeli Defense Forces don’t maintain networks to send kids suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to India in order to chill out and get high. The army has ways of keeping tabs on the kids, through a semi-formal network of insurance companies, hostel owners, and rabbis who minister to lost souls. They do drugs and share their experiences until it feels safe enough for them to fall apart. In Israeli circles, this exorcism is known as “flipping out.” A person who has already flipped is called a “Falupe.”

Nati and Elad planned to travel in India for six months; Maor for only two, because he is poor. Maor sold his car and everything else he owned to come here. They settled in Anjuna precisely because there were fewer Israelis here. They wanted to meet people from all over the world. Nati loves Judaism. Maor loves everything about Israeli culture. When he’s relaxed in a restaurant, smoking a cigarette, he often says, “Now, this feels like home.”

Israelis tend to carry their country with them. Maor has packets of Israeli coffee that he prepares every morning. Elad carries cans of tuna fish. Nati brought his tefillin and prayer books. He also promised his mom he wouldn’t “lay with Goys” in India. Maor promised himself he’d try everything. Elad promised Maor’s mom he would take care of her son.

But after the arrest, their priorities changed. Wounded, they became more adamant about their Israeliness and sought other Israelis for support. They began to distrust Indians and came to hate everything about India except Prasad and his guesthouse. Their friendship suffered, too. Maor pulled away and became more and more self-absorbed. Nati’s humor turned to anger. With their legal fate in doubt, each day brought more reason to worry. Brendan, the American, was their closest friend during the month before the arrest. He was in their room when the police came, and 10 grams of the hash on the bed was his, but he left the room before the arrest. Only Elad ever spoke to him after that, and only to say, “You have to leave, now.”

Brendan has since been replaced by Oleg, a taut Vladimir Putin lookalike from Ufsa, Russia. At the beach Oleg wears 1950s-style bathing trunks and oils up his hairless torso so it gleams. He is winsome in every way. He talks incessantly, but he doesn’t know any English, so he rambles in Russian, punctuating his thoughts with an inimitable laugh. The Israelis understand a little of Oleg’s Russian from what they learned from friends who emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the early 1990s.

Oleg’s only English sentence is “I go fishing,” and Oleg loves fishing. Every morning he casts from the rocks using frozen prawns as bait. Prasad, the guests, and all the Indian women and children selling jewelry (and men and boys selling DVDs) on the beach watch him in perplexity. He brings a spear so he can kill his catch with due mercy and expediency. Oleg used 70,000 rubles, some $2,400, in casino winnings to pay for his holiday and paid Prasad up front for an entire year. In the afternoons, Oleg walks the perimeter of the guesthouse’s courtyard, spraying bug repellent in the bushes. At night all five of us get drunk together. Oleg shows softcore porn stills to Elad and Maor while trying to sell them on the idea that there is no difference between Jews and Russians. It is unclear if he’s trying to buy their souls.

The three Israelis don’t believe nationality had anything to do with their arrest. But I wonder. Sex and drugs in Goa foster resentment. Before arriving in Goa, I read a pamphlet called “Claiming the Right to Say No: A study on Israeli tourist behaviour & patterns in Goa.” It’s an anti-Israeli tourist screed issued by a local group called The Students of Rachol Seminary. The pamphlet is difficult to get through. It accuses Israelis of implausible things, like importing drugs into Goa from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for being responsible for the local sex trade, which is allegedly organized by Israeli backpackers who are said to travel by land to Goa from Israel through Mumbai and Pune.

The sex traffic in Goa is just as visible as the drug trade. I was offered sex with a child on the very first day I arrived in Goa, even before I was offered drugs. The Israelis I met showed no interest in the sex trade. They wanted to understand what had just happened to them in the wars they fought in, or avoided. Their method was to get high and listen to Radiohead’s “Standing on the Edge of Time” and to learn from older veterans—some of whom were married and had children of their own.

***

For a long time, traveling to India was a dream of mine, too. I don’t exactly know what I was looking for, but as with many travelers, I found something that put my life on a different path. I went to places of religious and historical significance and tried to learn everything I could. I came to love the people, their food, and their culture.

Israelis come to India under different circumstances than I did. The screwed-up ones come here to empty themselves out. They come here because they have to. Chances are high that they will end up at a campsite run by an older Israeli who understands their trauma and tries to structure their experience before summoning their family to take them back home. This passage offers a bridge from the army—as well as a childhood shadowed by anticipation of service—to a nascent adulthood of university applications or job hunting.

But Maor, Elad, and Nati carried a great shame with them to India. Maor avoided service altogether. Elad decided he didn’t want to serve in a combat capacity, so he switched to a military police unit and finished his three years of service as a guard at a training base. Nati, who for his whole life had wanted to be a fighter, completed eight months of combat training only to find that strict discipline turned him off. Then, faced with a drug test he knew he’d fail, Nati made a plan. He complained about a sore tooth at the base infirmary, where he managed to persuade a dentist to extract a molar, so that he would be sent home. When he returned from his leave, he transferred to a noncombat army job. He says that he’s too jolly to carry a gun.

Tomorrow: The three Israelis leave Prasad’s guesthouse behind and meet a man who might help them.

Matthew Schwarzfeld is a New York-based writer.

“If you look at my comics outside the context of what they’re making fun of they might seem even more outrageous, but if you’re familiar with the Jewish community and what I’m making fun of, it’s actually not that great a leap,” Valley told Tablet. He declined to comment on why the Forward killed the comic; Forward editor-in-chief Jane Eisner said she had no time to speak because of the paper’s impending deadline. So, for now, the answer to why a Jewish newspaper refused to run a comic in which Israelis are depicted as non-brain-eating primates must remain a mystery.

Dawn of the Chimpanzee! (Relax Folks, They’re Just a Metaphor) [Gawker]