I persuaded Clive to take me on a
camel trek. Apart from our guide, there
was no one else. We slept under the
stars. I wanted to experience the emptiness of the desert and hear what it
sounded like. It is a sort of hanging stillness unlike any I had ever
felt.
We walked along the crests of the
magnificent dunes and looked out over the endless landscapes. I felt as if we
had traveled beyond our world.
The Israelites fleeing Pharaoh
required forty years for that which our plane accomplished in less than two
hours. If one had spent weary decades
wandering through sterile wadis and
scalding plains of baking sand and gravel, then the eastern region of the
Mediterranean might have seemed an oasis by comparison. But to the modern traveler it can be a
letdown.
“It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken
land, with no dreamy blue mist to soften the perspective. The naked hills appeared to have committed
some terrible sin for which they had been stoned to death”, wrote Mark Twain.
A hundredfifty-some years later I
saw nothing to amend that assessment. For
thirty centuries, “Cut down all the trees!” was every general’s order at the
beginning of every siege. From the
British to the Crusaders, before them Pompey and Josephus told us that Titus axed
every remaining tree within ten miles of Jerusalem. And if any survived the armies, there were
the locusts to denude them and goats that climbed into the topmost branches to
crop their leaves.
Until you see the region, Charles
told me, you cannot truly understand the many passages of the Scripture, Old
and New, in which the commonness and troublesomeness of stones are drawn upon
for metaphor. And the Arabs, too, have a
legend that explains the stones, Charles continued. “When Allah made the world, he put all the
stones that were to be used across the entire earth into two bags and gave them
to an angel to distribute over the land.
While the angel was flying over this region, one bag broke.”
Arabs, Lebanese, Djebel Druses,
Syrians, Kurds and Armenians, native-born Jews and European settlers, Turks,
Persians and Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Palestianians, a thousand Bedouin
tribes, and Colonial interests, all of these, and more, wanted something that
usually involved taking land from someone else.
The sad fact is that each war
begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and
reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a brave new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next
war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken
than before. Always someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest
those black seeds. The rationales warp,
twist and shift. The closer war comes,
the simpler the choices. Are you a warrior
or a coward? Are you with us or against
us? I thought that we had learned some
enduring lessons from the stupendous carnage of war. I honestly believed we had finally learned to
value peace and progress and prosperity.
I wish I could argue that, but already
the twenty-first century does not provide much evidence to deploy. You can see why God must weep; how sad to
grant free will and see it used so poorly.
Observing human history has turned out to be a terrible exercise in
monotony.
