The first thing I did when I arrived in Israel was leave. I had booked a three-day tour of Jordan, picking me up at 5:30am in Tel Aviv¹ the morning after I arrived. I generally avoid tour groups — planning your own travel is almost universally cheaper and gives you far more control over where to visit — but the things I wanted to see in Jordan are all spread out from one another, and I didn’t fancy renting a car and driving for hours and hours on my own. Not to mention I’d have had to navigate the border crossing into and out of Israel by myself. I figured it was best to pay someone to worry about all of that.

The tour started at Jerash, which was founded by Alexander the Great² and later taken over and greatly expanded by the Romans. For some reason after a certain point the locals just left the ancient city alone while the modern city grew around it — most places reused the stones, leaving just the foundations — and it’s left this incredible oval forum and streets with a nearly intact colonnade along each side. It’s considered one of the most complete set of Roman ruins outside of Italy, and was well worth the detour.

After a night in Amman we took the bus all the way south to the Wadi Rum desert. There was a jeep trip — more like a pickup with two benches jammed in the back — included, so we got driven in and over and around the sand dunes, in the middle of spectacular rock outcroppings. We got to stay overnight in what was advertised as a luxury Bedouin tent, although it was sitting on a concrete slab and had stone walls and plumbing, so I took that with a grain of salt.³

But the highlight was the next day, when we arrived to Petra. Petra was the capital city of the Nabataean Empire,⁴ a nomadic people, and the city is carved out of the rocks. The entrance is a long walk through a narrow chasm in the stone on either side, before you enter a broad open area. The stunning Treasury is the part everyone knows⁵ but the whole site takes hours to walk around, and there’s temples and tombs and colonnades and stairs scattered all over the place, in a weird melange of styles.⁶

The Nabataeans were gifted engineers, and more stunning to me than the architecture was the series of elaborate conduits and dams and cisterns which enabled the populace to channel and control what water there was. It’s a desert, so there’s precious little to start with, and what rain does fall is prone to flash flooding. Petra is built to channel and store all that water. They made their money by selling water to the many caravans which passed by.

One could easily spend a day or two, but I had only booked a half-day and, honestly, that was okay. There was a lot more to see but it all involved a lot of stairs and scrambling up and down trails, and after three days of being in the sun I really just wanted some quiet time inside. The bus ride back was excruciating⁷ but I eventually found my way back to my hotel in Jerusalem.

I was genuinely getting ill from worry the next morning, when I was due to travel to the West Bank. I was seeing a lot of mixed things about the border crossing, plus I was still confused about the bus system.⁸ But I found one of the crowded buses which runs between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, got on board with all my luggage, and … the bus never stopped at a checkpoint. This was odd, but apparently not that odd. You should expect to be stopped and have everyone’s papers checked. It’s not a given, though, especially traveling in to the West Bank. Sometimes they do more extensive checks.⁹ Sometimes they just wave you through. The route I was on is generally regarded as having pretty light security, so maybe it was that.

Palestine is one of those areas where the history is super-confusing and also critical to understanding what’s going on, so I fear I’m going to have to provide a brief¹⁰ summary in case your understanding of history is as crap as mine is: in 1920 the British, having driven the Ottoman Empire out during the war, established Mandatory Palestine, encompassing what is now divided into Israel and Palestine. The Arabs revolted against British rule (unsuccessfully) from 1936-1939, and the Zionists (successfully) ran a violent insurgency against the British from 1944-1948. The UN proposed dividing the country between the Palestinians who lived there and the mostly newly arrived Jewish settlers in the area,¹¹ a plan the Zionists accepted and the Arabs rejected. The area fell into war from 1948 to 1949,¹² which ended with Israel controlling 80% of the land and Jordan and Egypt controlling the West Bank and Gaza respectively.¹³

The Six Day War in 1967¹⁴ ended with Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza. That’s largely where things have been ever since. The West Bank was divided up into zones under the Oslo II Accords granting the Palestinian government control over 18% of the area (Area A), joint control with Israel over 22% of the area (Area B), and leaving Israel in sole control of the remaining 60% (Area C). Palestine finally got around to forming an official state, although it’s only recognized by 138 countries.¹⁵ The situation has resulted in several violent (and unsuccessful) insurgencies by the Palestinians, but the Israeli government remains firmly in control as an occupying force.

Whatever your thoughts of the philosophic merits of either side,¹⁶ as a practical matter it’s been nothing but a disaster for the Palestinians. The area was divvied up by drawing circles around everything that was Area A and Area B, leaving everything else Area C. That means in addition to the checkpoints into and out of the West Bank there are hundreds of checkpoints between Palestinian-controlled areas; traveling through them¹⁷ often requires special permission from the occupying forces and a slew of identifying documents you’re required to carry at any given time. Families were cut off from their farmland. The boundaries give Israel control over the water supply, the vast majority of which is directed to Israel and Israel settlements, so Palestinians make do on one-fourth the water that Israelis do. Israeli-only roads were constructed which Palestinians are forbidden from driving on. Everything in Area C is under martial law, meaning the military decides with minimal oversight what rules to create or enforce on any given day.¹⁸

This has only gotten worse as Israeli politics has swung from right wing to ultra-nationalist right wing over the last 30 years.¹⁹ The Israeli settlements in the West Bank are one of the most obvious results of this political shift. Despite being repeatedly condemned by the UN as a violation of international law, Israel continues to establish new settlements and expand old ones in the West Bank. The point seems to be to make any attempt to resolve the Palestinian conflict as difficult as possible.²⁰ There’s a reasonable fear the latest Israeli election results are only going to accelerate the process and potentially spark fresh rounds of violence. That may have already started.²¹

So I had some trepidation when I crossed the border and arrived in Bethlehem. I was completely²² unprepared for what I found. Things were perfectly normal. Pleasant even. I had been expecting something that looked like the scenes you regularly see from the news — angry protestors throwing rocks, troops in riot gear, bombed out buildings²³ — but Bethlehem was a perfectly bustling little tourist town, not all that different than Split or Tangier. It’s poorer, but not extremely so; I’ve visited places both worse off and better off but less charming despite it.

I noted how odd wandering around Jerusalem was the last time I visited. It’s one thing to see the Stations of the Cross marked around the walls of a church, but it’s quite another to see them marking the literal places in the street where they happened.²⁴ You get the same kind of feeling in Bethlehem. I saw the Church of the Nativity (purportedly where the manger stood)²⁵ and the Chapel of the Milk Grotto of Our Lady nearby.²⁶ If you visit — and there’s convenient day trips from Jerusalem for tourists — there’s a great Palestinian restaurant²⁷ called Afteem nearby.

After Bethlehem I hired a tour guide to drive me around to some of the monasteries near Jericho before dropping me off in Ramallah. I had made a point of visiting someplace non-touristy to try and get a better sense of what things were like, and it’s even weirder than Bethlehem. Ramallah’s the economic capital and as such caters to business travelers, which means there were a lot of upscale restaurants around. The one I ate at the last day I was there wouldn’t have been out of place in New York, with its take on Mediterranean fusion cuisine.²⁸

I toured the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah, which has a detailed rundown of Palestinian history over the last century²⁹ and includes the small compound where Arafat was confined, surrounded by Israeli tanks, in the years before they died. But I mostly tried to relax. There was an Irish bar nearby³⁰ where I hung out a bit. I got a haircut. I shopped in a convenience store that had virtually the same selection you’d find in a 7-11 in the United States right down to the slushies.

It felt normal, in other words. And the Palestinians I met were all warm and friendly and polite. I really, genuinely liked the people. I felt completely safe walking around, even at night, even places I had never been before. It felt welcoming in a way I’ve rarely felt from a place.

But that’s only if you stick to Area A.³¹ It’s the places in between, where the borders dividing the Palestinian-controlled areas from the Israeli-controlled areas are, where it all falls apart. The only time I felt any sort of danger in Palestine was when there was an Israeli soldier wandering around. On the drive to Ramallah my guide helpfully pointed out the checkpoints leading to Israeli settlements where you’ll get your car hosed down with assault weapons if you approach with Palestinian plates.

If you visit, you can stay at the Walled-Off Hotel in Bethlehem, Banksy’s art-project hotel that has morphed unexpectedly into a going concern. It’s an amazing resource. Even if you aren’t staying there they run daily tours of the security wall and a nearby refugee camp,³² along with a small museum highlighting what everyday life is like under the Israeli occupation. There’s also a gallery featuring local artists.

And the whole thing is just heartbreaking. Living in the West Bank as a Palestinian, you are under a constant reminder that Israel controls every facet of your life. Israel issues your papers and decides, sometimes on a day-by-day basis, whether they’ll permit you to travel.³³ Everything is expensive because commodity prices are set and taxed by Israel, but you make a fraction of what Israelis make. You are forbidden from joining any Palestinian political party; Israel has declared them all illegal. If you’re arrested, even for a traffic violation, you’ll be tried by a military tribunal. I can’t imagine living under those conditions. There aren’t very many Palestinians left who remember anything but.

You can see the new Israeli settlements being built from virtually everywhere in the West Bank; they’re easy to pick out because the roofs aren’t studded with storage tanks for when the water gets shut off. Each one makes it harder to find peace. Each one is intended to make it harder to find peace.

When I visited Jericho I toured the Monastery of the Temptation on the cliffs above the city. It’s where Jesus was tempted with dominion over all earthly kingdoms by the devil. The story is often interpreted as a parable, which warns of the danger of losing your soul while grasping for temporal power. But it’s a New Testament parable. The Israeli government strikes me as Old Testament types.

I had about another week in Israel but it was hard to really enjoy it, given the whole The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas vibe I got from the West Bank. I spent a little time in West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv seems like exactly the kind of place I could get into, with its Bauhaus architecture and late-night restaurant scene,³⁴ but I wasn’t feeling it.

I did take a side trip up to Acre, and I was thoroughly enchanted by the place. Acre was a major port in the Levant since before Roman times — it’s mentioned in Egyptian texts — and passed between Christian and Muslim hands multiple times during the Crusades. It was the chief port of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and served as the de facto capital those times when Jerusalem had fallen to the Muslims.

The history of that period is inextricably tied up with the Knights Templar³⁵ and they were headquartered in Acre for a century after the loss of Jerusalem. The Knights Hospitaller had also established a base in the city, and there are gorgeously evocative ruins of the Hospitaller complex and a Templar tunnel running under the city connecting what would have been their palace to the port.³⁶ I never wanted to run around a place with a wooden sword pretending to be a knight so badly in my life.

Otherwise I stayed in my hotel room for more or less the whole week. For some ungodly reason I booked a 7:30am flight out, so I found myself booking a car from the hotel at 5am in order to catch it. I’m on that flight now, heading back to Europe, relieved to be leaving the Middle East behind. I need more time to process what I’ve seen. But I have that luxury. I can leave.

I mentioned how friendly and welcoming all the Palestinians were. That’s all true. But there was a real, deep anger and sadness there, as well, when they talked about the Middle East, the situation they were all trapped in. The first tour guide I had in Palestine took a moment, after asking where I was from, to point out the unflagging support the United States supplied Israel, and how that support directly enabled the security state the Israelis have built. They then asked me to do three things, no matter what side I supported or what my opinion was: to remember what I had seen and heard, to tell people about it, and to tell the truth. So I am.

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Footnotes

¹ I cannot and will not recommend this, but it was the only option.

² Or maybe Antioch IV, or maybe Ptolemy II. Sources vary.

³ I’ll be honest, there were a lot of these kind of semi-permanent structures going up in the desert, and I sure hope the Jordanian government is on top of it, because they weren’t giving me much of an oversight vibe. I’d hate for Wadi Rum to get overrun with tourists, and it feels like it’s close.

⁴ They’re contemporaries of the ancient Greeks and eventually became a client state to the Romans.

⁵ It’s the bit you’re thinking of in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

⁶ As befits a trade empire, the Nabataeans seem to have borrowed whatever they liked from whomever passed through.

⁷ We had to go 1½ hours south to get to the border crossing with Israel, which means we had to spend that additional time heading back north afterwards. We left around 5pm and didn’t get to Jerusalem until after midnight.

⁸ You can’t pay with cash or a credit card on the bus, so you need to hunt down someplace that will sell you a transit card, except you can use the transit app and pay online instead, except when I got on the bus there wasn’t anyplace to scan the QR code you need to pay, so I just gave up and hoped nobody checked.

⁹ Sometimes they make all the Palestinians get off the bus and let the Israelis and the tourists sit there and wait.

Incidentally, I’m going to be talking about Israelis and Palestinians, and obviously those are imprecise terms since they conflate political and ethnic identities. My meaning should be clear from context, but it’s worth remembering that 20% of Israeli citizens are ethnically Arab and most of those identify as Palestinians.

¹⁰ As brief as I could manage, anyway. And necessarily heavily reductive. Look, I’m trying to be even-handed here, but I don’t know how you can look into the history of this region and not come away with strong opinions favoring one side or the other. I’m doing my best.

¹¹ Jews had been returning to the Middle East in scattered numbers before 1897, but the foundation of Zionism in that year accelerated the trend, which was further accelerated in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.

¹² Displacing about 700,000 Palestinians in what the displaced refer to as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.”

¹³ The original proposed division by the British would have put the Jewish state, in control of 56% of the land and the Arab state in control of 42%. At the time 33% of the population in the region was Jewish.

¹⁴ Triggered by Egypt’s attempt to blockade the Red Sea to Israeli vessels.

¹⁵ Israel being one of the ones refusing to recognize it, but notably also not the United States, the United Kingdom, nor most of the countries of Europe.

¹⁶ Although I suspect the narrative of plucky settlers moving to a foreign land to forge a new destiny and displacing the local population through grit, determination, superior technology, and warfare doesn’t play the same today as it did in the 1950s.

The Zionists, of course, believe God wants them to live there, and that’s the end of that argument.

¹⁷ As a Palestinian — tourists are largely exempt from the restrictions.

¹⁸ Note that Israeli settlements and citizens in the West Bank have a special dispensation to operate under civilian law, which as a practical matter means Israeli settlers have legal protections which the Palestinians do not. This is one of the reasons that Israel is accused by many groups of engaging in apartheid.

¹⁹ The Israeli government which was just elected is regarded as the most extreme ever, bringing together a number of religious Zionist groups and nationalist groups to form a wobbly coalition.

This is exemplified by the appointment of Itamar Ben-Gvir as the new National Security Minister. Ben-Gvir was convicted for incitement to racism and support of a terrorist organization in 2007 — they’ve been affiliated with Kach, a banned political party which supports abolishing the Israeli constitution, deporting the Palestinians, and establishing a Jewish theocratic society in which half the country works and the other half studies the Torah — and in Ben-Gvir’s short time in office they’ve already banned the Palestinian flag as “incitement” and visited the Temple Mount in what was largely interpreted as a deliberate provocation.

²⁰ The Russians quicly moved settlers into the lands they invaded in Ukraine, under largely the same principles.

²¹ Last Thursday there was a Israeli military raid in Palestine which killed nine, identified as a mix of militants and civilians. That was followed by rocket attacks from Gaza, which lead to air strikes from Israel, which was followed on Friday by a Palestinian gunman killing seven Jewish worshipers at a synagogue in East Jerusalem.

²² And stupidly

²³ Several of the Palestinian tour guides I met commented on how the media portrays them and the area.

²⁴ I mean, in theory — none of the New Testament was written down for years, so I’m not putting a lot of faith into them getting all the details exactly right.

²⁵ The spot of Jesus’ birth is helpfully marked on the floor with a star.

²⁶ According to tradition, it’s where Mary lactated a drop of milk which stained the floor white. This is fun; it’s typically Greek mythology which goes for the magic bodily fluids.

²⁷ It’s just about next door, very well-known, and has the most amazing masabacha — hummus served warm and studded with whole chickpeas — I’ve ever tasted.

It was crowded and cheap with a lot of turnover, so you won’t be waiting long. When I was there there was some kind of girl scout troop on a field trip, and I don’t have a clear enough picture of their badges to be able to figure out what troop they were or where they were from.

²⁸ The dessert I ordered had ice cream topped with bird’s nest phyllo dough and candied nuts, and when it was arrived the server came out with a copper pan of melted caramel and poured it over the top, table side.

²⁹ It’s not particularly balanced, but it’s less unbalanced than you’d imagine.

³⁰ Featuring no one who was recognizably Irish working there, and apparently they can’t get Guinness. No worries; there are two breweries operating in the West Bank and they’re both excellent; I’d have toured one or both if I had access to a car.

³¹ Or, I imagine, inside the walled compounds reserved for Israeli settlers.

³² The refugee camps are nicer than you’re thinking, because the people in them have been living there in many cases for generations — ever since 1948 — and have managed at significant personal cost to build permanent structures.

³³ The guide I had for my walking tour said they had applied for permission three dozen times over the years to visit Jerusalem and had never gotten approval.

³⁴ I imagine that’s from the summer heat, same as most Mediterranean cultures.

³⁵ They’re called “Templars” because the order was founded on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

³⁶ Acre during the Crusades was apparently incredibly rife with sectarian disputes between various Christian orders, so it wasn’t uncommon to need private ways around the city. The Hospitallers built a bridge connecting their hall to the church so they could avoid walking across the street.