'Would you have a receipt?" "Of course," says the teller at the bureau de change, "a receipt. Just like at home. See. A receipt is no problem."

"My cousins," says the taxi driver, "they live in Florida and when they come here to Tel Aviv they tell me they could have retired here. There's no difference, they say. And it's true. We have everything they have."

Tel Aviv is a bristling kind of town. Being here is like sitting down on the bus beside the most unpopular kid in class. You feel the eyes of everyone else burning into the back of your skull. Israel??? How could he? In your ear, though, right beside you, there is this constant yak yak of confident self-justification, all delivered in the third person.

Whatever you may think of Israel, you'll find Israel is not like you imagined. In many ways Israel is a lot like you. Just the same as anywhere.

Being like the rest of us, only stridently and determinedly so, is a constant and slightly irritating theme of Israeli conversation. It provokes that same feeling of uneasy guilt you might get at home when the taxi driver assumes you share his perspective on, say, immigrants. He tells you some tall ones. It's raining though and you just nod. You haven't the energy for argument.

And the more often an Israeli tells you not to worry, that Tel Aviv is just like any other place that you might have been, and the more often you nod and say that, yup, the waterfront sure is lovely, the more often it occurs to you that this is all slightly unnatural. This spot of the Middle East isn't supposed to be a little corner of desert which is always western.

Even all that lush greenery which caresses the eye when you look out from the ninth floor of the Hilton, it's not natural. Generations of Jewish American schoolkids sent dimes to buy palm trees to "make the desert bloom". The sheer western-ness of Tel Aviv is the product of $2 billion-a-year worth of aid from Washington, and when you walk from the Hilton to the Inter-Continental it seems like every cent was spent on cars and hotels.

Being like us is the point of it all and it's the flaw of it all. You can't imagine the Manhattan which the American Indians sold. You can look around Tel Aviv, though, and still imagine the land before 1948. Look further and imagine that before 1967. The more you are told it's the same, the harder you look.

The FAI, who surprisingly are sometimes just as smart as the average bear, have done a nice job of smoothing the way, however. In meetings in Dublin, as it became clear that the visits of football teams, especially well-followed football teams, was an important little stimulus to Israel's lagging tourism trade, the football panjandrums handed back the advice that good word of mouth would best be generated by a lack of fuss and hassle.

So, the security is diligent but not overly heavy-handed. If there were armed agents on the plane across, they weren't as diverting as the cabin crew slapping us in the face with our own stereotypes by wearing tall black hats shaped and creamily headed like pints of Guinness.

The five minutes of security questions in Dublin Airport were perfunctory and almost comical were it not for their grim subtext.

- Why are you travelling to Tel Aviv.

- To attend a football match?

- I see. Which football match? I see.

Another pot-bellied, green-shirted, grinning fan steps forward.

- Why are you travelling to Tel Aviv?

- To attend a football match.

- Hmm, I see. Which football match?

The in-flight questionnaire mysteriously wanted to know your grandfather's first name, but once we'd got over the childish itch to write Moses or Nebuchadnezzar we were fine. We just put Joseph (of Aramathea) and we were done with it.

In Tel Aviv it's virtually pointless to look for signs of conflict. It is, as the locals tell you, the most western town in a little country which prides itself on its western-ness. The streets don't teem with displaced Palestinians: movement for that abased people is increasingly restricted as Israel gets on with the business of walling itself in.

The presence of the Irish is a boon. Israelis aren't a humble people, but you can tell even behind the confident front that the return of international football signifies to them a brittle normality and a reassurance that Israel really is just like everywhere else so long as you don't look over the wall or bother the neighbours.

At the cavernous Inter-Continental Hotel where the Irish team are staying, the doorman announces breezily that the British Davis Cup team stayed here, as did Madonna, and then, afraid he might be acting a little to parochially for the denizen of a great western city, he announces that he has no idea where the footballers of France are staying next week. "There are many hotels where they could stay."

Out on the streets, Tel Aviv has the boisterous feel of a market town. Everywhere is shops and busy commerce and shopkeepers standing out on their stoops. Again the trouble of lazy stereotypes sets in. If the Israelis see us as walking vats of porter, we see them as a nation of Jackie Masons.

Oy vey, but who'd of thought six words of Yiddish could make a Hebrew scholar out of a goyim putz. The bad jokes are endless, but they usually involve a query as to whether the Israelis will play with orthodox wingers and advice to be wary of crosses given the weekend that's in it.

The local currency comes in for its share of titters too, and it has to be said the shekel is a hard denomination to deal in without lapsing into our Life of Brian voices. But listen, that's the sort of schlemiels we are.

Innocents abroad in a land that's a lot less like home than it lets on to be. Who knew?