Diary 
Charles Glass
At sunset on Christmas Day last year, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs from the once Christian towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour assembled outside the burned and gutted Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem to protest Israel’s blockade of their towns. The Paradise was damaged in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners aloft, the marchers sang the anthem of the American civil rights movement, ‘We Shall Overcome’, as they moved up the Caritas Road. Their route skirted the city’s main thoroughfare, sealed off for more than a year by the Israeli Army to anyone other than Jews visiting the site of Rachel’s Tomb. From a hilltop in a silent residential quarter, the vigil filed down to the junction where the main road to Jerusalem reopens – but only as far as the Israeli roadblock five hundred yards away.
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Charles Glass has recently published two books on the Middle East, The Northern Front and The Tribes Triumphant, and is writing a book set in France during the German occupation.
Other articles by this contributor:
Learning from Its Mistakes · Hizbullah
The New Piracy · Terror on the High Seas
Cyber-Jihad · What Osama Said
Is Syria next? · Charles Glass reports from Damascus
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