Elephant

A friend was talking about a recent visit to Kenya and the tension there between Africans and Asians. Whatever the rights and wrongs, it struck me that much of the blame actually lay at the door of the colonial administration, which had "imported", for want of a better word, a ready-made middle class from its subcontinental possession. The colonial elephant may now have left the room, but it had certainly broken the crockery and someone was going to have to get a shovel.

I had a similar feeling on my recent visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Christian NGO-working friends we were staying with were, rightfully, highly critical of the brutish Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and their church was busy organising a boycott of the company that produced the bulldozers destroying Arab property.

But although I could recognise the many wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis and reinforced by our stateless, Islamist taxi driver who despairingly pointed out the settlements encroaching on Palestinian land and the wall dividing families, I could not bring myself to condemn them. After all, they had been persecuted with even greater severity for 2000 years, culminating in an orgy of butchery which left 6 million dead. They had learned the hard way that might is right, brutalised for millennia by us, the Christians.

When the Christians wrested Jerusalem from the Muslims back in the 12th Century, they slaughtered every living thing in the city - Jews, Muslims and even their own kind. A few centuries later the Muslims took back the city and gave its Christian occupiers safe passage out. This was the end of meaningful Christian occupation of the Holy Land, but their brutal legacy remains the source of the suffering we see today.















They left their mark - Crusader crosses etched into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre