THE DARK SIDE OF A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY

I’D just like to clarify something. I wrote here about Israel last week in relation to the beauty of the country – and it is, truly, a stunning place. What I didn’t go into, because I didn’t consider it especially relevant in the ‘travel column’ context, was the fact that when I visited – some years ago now – I had serious difficulty with the attitude of many of the Israelis that I encountered, particularly in relation to their Palestinian neighbours. In fact, travelling as I was at the time in the company of four other journalists, our tourism hosts flatly refused our request to visit Bethlehem. Finally, when we said that we would organise a taxi ourselves, they acquiesced, an Arab driver was provided for us, and we got to visit the town of Bethlehem. Given that three of the other journalists worked for religious publications, the notion that they wouldn’t be able to visit Bethlehem seemed, to them, totally bizarre.

In the wake of the outrageous and brutal killing of more than 60 Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli forces this week, I feel the need to point out the problems I had when I visited the country.

None of that takes away, of course, from the beauty of the landscape or, indeed, from the overwhelming sense of sadness that I felt when I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It is heartbreaking. But as Churchill once said: ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ And what a tragedy for humanity that is.