Before I left to spend two weeks in Israel, most people who had already been said I would be taken aback at first by one thing: the machine guns. And it’s true. With required military service from the age of 18 (although I learned that there are a whole, colourful variety of ways to avoid this), you can’t suck down a falafel without having someone’s gun poke you in the thigh. But this wasn’t so shocking to me, perhaps because I had been prepared.

What I was not prepared for was somewhat more surprising.

The Mullet.

It is alive and well in Israel. Other than the varied “beard and curls” looks of the more orthodox Jewish communities, the Mullet is the most widespread hairdo in today’s Promised Land. At first, I would just whisper to AssRay in our invented creole language that someone needed to call the Mullet Police and then we would giggle.

But as the days went by, I began to view the omnipresent Mullet as an analogy for modern Israel, or at least for Tel Aviv. As a great sage once commented: “It’s all business in the front, party in the back.”

So true.