The flight from Cairo to Lod (Israel's airport) could take just 30 minutes -assuming the Arabs recognised there was such a place as Israel on the map. But as they don't, the traveller must change planes at Athens or Istanbul, or else pass through Lebanon and Cyprus. This last is the most economical itinerary: leaving Cairo at noon, a Caravelle plane took me to Beirut, an old DC4 bore me thence to Nicosia, a taxi then ferried me to Limassol where, at midnight, I boarded the Modelet, an Israeli ship coming from Marseille and headed for Haifa. I disembarked at seven in the morning and it was midday when another taxi dropped me in Tel Aviv: exactly 24 hours since the start of my journey.
Theoretically I would have needed two passports because the Egyptians refuse to issue a visa on a passport previously stamped by Israel. The clerk at the Egyptian consulate in Paris had even asked me to strike out "Israel" from the list of authorised countries printed on my document. So I arrived in Israel with no visa and a passport which wasn't valid for that country.

But Israelis are pragmatic people. A clerk stamped a visa on a scrap of lined paper (so as not to invalidate my passport for future journeys to the Arab world) and completed the formality by selling me a stamp for 10 Israeli pounds (about $30), which he glued onto this same scrap of paper. Then one of his colleagues invited me into his office to ask me some questions about what I'd seen in Egypt, which made me realise that Egyptian jumpiness about being spied on isn't just a product of paranoia.

In my first few hours in Tel Aviv I was disabused of one of my preconceived ideas, namely the concept of "one world". This is a belief widely held in newspaper offices, according to which all places in the world will become increasingly similar as people watch the same movies, sing the same songs, drink the same Coca-Cola and dance the same twist.

In Cairo I had already been able to establish this wasn't true for the twist: the dance is forbidden in Egypt (as are all dances which involve physical contact between men and women). And, as my journey proceeds, I come to realise how widely people's value systems differ from one country to the next. I ask an Israeli student what quality he considered most important in a woman: "her intelligence," he answers without hesitation. To the same question, an Egyptian student replied, "her staying indoors and not showing herself to other men."

Any schoolteacher in Cairo will tell you that Israelis are child-killers. Conversely, an otherwise well-informed Israeli physician looks at me with a politely sceptical air when I dare advance the view that Arabs aren't all savages, and that Nasser isn't a replica of Hitler.

The contrast between Tel Aviv and Cairo is so striking that one imagines each inhabitant is forcing himself--consciously or otherwise--to underscore it. Here in Tel Aviv, people don't just scorn the facade, they also cultivate a certain snobbery for the informal, from the open-collar shirt to the badly buttoned uniform with no braid.

Even the solitary beggar in front of the synagogue door doesn't bother to highlight his role by his appearance: comfortably seated on a pile of cushions, he reads his Talmud, stubbing out his cigarettes in orange peel with only a conspicuously positioned bowl to show his calling.

Ben Gourion did not want televisions in Israel under the pretext that this would require too much investment. But nobody stops Israelis from buying sets and watching programmes from Cairo (except that the luxury costs them dear: televisions are imported and carry 200% duty).

The Egyptian student I interviewed had never heard of Picasso, didn't like jazz and was unaware of Freud. The last foreign film he'd seen was Gone with the Wind.

In Tel Aviv, the films by Antonioni and Bergman come out at the same time as in the avant-garde studios of Paris and New York-but here they are shown in large cinemas and in their original languages. Yaffo-which predates Tel Aviv and from whence Arabs were expelled in 1947-is about to become a kind of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Artists and intellectuals meet at the Hammam, an old Turkish bath which has been converted into a contemporary art centre combined with an avant-garde theatre and a night-club.

But the greatest difference between the streets of Tel Aviv and those of Cairo is the presence of women and the way they look. Israeli girls often have the same features, the same skin colour, the same tendency to plumpness as their Egyptian counterparts-but they have the right to show themselves and look about.

And they make the most of it, too. The place where all eyes meet is Dizengoff Avenue. At about five in the afternoon the merry-go-round begins whereby the eyes looking out from the café tables meet those from the pavements, and this game goes on till late in the night.

But it remains true that Tel Aviv is a small city and Dizengoff a rather modest meeting-place: on the third evening I had already checked out the two dozen most eloquent pairs of eyes and learnt to recognise their owners from a distance. The problem was that the girls had also spotted me-in order to avoid me: they disliked my way of training the lens on them without ever meeting their gaze directly. Though they did not express their annoyance openly -maybe because the idea of prohibiting anything was foreign to their spirit -they visibly turned their backs on me, which intimidated me even more and relegated me further to the role of unwelcome voyeur.

After the intellectual and material poverty of Cairo, this city had seemed like a promised land but now, as a subject of photography, it was proving just as frustrating. I had decided that my reportage had to be about these girls and boys of Dizengoff Avenue, fresh out of kibbutz or the army, often still in uniform, inhabiting a universe much closer to Greenwich Village than to Cairo, whose points of reference lay somewhere between Picasso, Antonioni, Ray Charles and Brigitte Bardot.

I am aware that I did not get my story: possibly because I was still tangled up in the reflexes I'd acquired in Cairo and was therefore unable to establish a personal contact with these young people, limiting myself to photographing them on the sly, from a table outside the Chassid café or leaning on the counter at some milk-bar. I should have realised that, despite their open collars and their pride in the success of their army, their position is still too precarious in their little corner of the world, they are too unsure of their identity, too similar to Jews from anywhere and any time, not to react with hostility (or with the suspiciousness of somebody who thinks he's been misrepresented) towards a stranger trying to pin down their gestures and their looks.

It was perhaps this fundamental insecurity, this need for a facade despite their informality which was expressed by the young policewoman with the very beautiful blue eyes directing traffic on a crossroads of Dizengoff. She had stopped me to know why and for whom I was taking photographs. In turn, I asked her why two out of every three traffic policemen in Tel Aviv are girls. "When our military service comes to an end, a lot of us don't want to give up our uniforms. So we join the police…"