Home from the Holy Land, with Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale on continuous loop in my head, I try to remember why I took this trip. Regular readers of my books — and I like to think there are one or two — would know that in recent years I’ve cultivated a bit of an aversion to “mass tourism” — the sort that involves pulling into bus parking lots with twenty other tour buses, sticking things in ears, passing through turnstiles and experiencing audio-visual spectaculars and long historic monologues.
But is there any other way to see Israel and Jordan? Whether you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim or none of the above, there’s a lot of history crammed into here, not all of it pleasant. If nothing else, a visit to the Holy Land will confirm — should you have any doubts — that we humans, supposedly the most intelligent of animals, are remarkably good at persecuting and killing one another.