reflections of a holy land sojourn

Our last day of holiday. We have travelled 200 km north to the ancient walled city of Acre, home to a civilisation going back nearly 3000 years and infamous for being taken by Richard the Lioneart in 1191, who then proceeded to put almost the entire population of several thousand to the sword- an action that is remembered with bitterness by Arab peoples even to this day. Less well known appears to be the fact that when the Mamelukes regained Acre for Islam exactly 100 years later, they dealt out exactly the same treatment to all the Christians still foolish enough to be living there.

I had wanted to come here mainly for the very well preserved crusader castle that still stands proudly overlooking the eastern Mediterranean. The interiors are certainly very impressive, though recent developments around it have crowded in on it so densely it is actually quite hard to see it from the outside at all. Our hotel, for instance, is partly built into the old city walls.

So, what have I come away with from my trip here? As always, the best insights come from the people one meets, and in my case it was the friends my wife had made in her previous trips over here. The majority of these have turned out to be Christian Arabs, who to my surprise form a substantial minority, about 20%, of all Palestinians in the West Bank. And all of them, somewhat to my dismay, choose as their main target of vitriol, not the Jews, not the segregation wall, not the huge array if other indgnities they have suffered at their hands since they were displaced from their lands in 1948, but their own muslim neighbours. Maybe they are reluctant to voice their hatred of the Jews too openly, but they are certainly not backward in coming forward about the raw deal they get from their majority co-denizens, getting ripped off in land deals, for example, being just a small part of it. They almost seem to display the same "orientalist" attitudes so prevalent in the West eg: you can't trust a muslim, not with your daughter and certainly not with your money. As an outsider this is very strange to me.

For me, the fate of the Palestinians (may they be muslim or christian) is analagous to the fate of the native Americans or Australian aboriginals: seen as a backward, troublesome irritation by a far more powerful invading force, they have been brushed aside, marginalised and forced to live in ghettos or reservations, where their plight is very rapidly forgotten by a world with other things on its mind.

The solution? No one seems optimistic that things will change in a period even as long as the next hundred years (one German volunteer I spoke with said "they've hated each other for 60 years: what can you do about it now?"), but I wonder. The fact is we are seeing the decline of the American Empire, that body which props up Israel in everything it does or wants to do (despite the weasel words of people like Hilary Clinton) and 9/11 saw the beginning of the Barbarian invasions. In much less than 100 years China will be the dominant world power, and I do not believe they are quite so enamoured of the Israelis as the Yanks.

In 1985, with America and Britain firmly behind it, who would have predicted that the apartheid regime of South Africa was in fact on its last legs and would be brought to its knees in less than 10 years? Yet it happened. And now the white fascists of South Africa have gone, the plight of the Palestinian people is the biggest single human rights issue in the world. And I believe the time is coming for a real change in this extraordinary and really rather wonderful land.