FROM SULEIMAN'S WALL
On a warm spring day at the start of the third millennium, I am leaning against a shaded niche on the parapet of the Wall that Suleiman the Magnificent built five centuries previously to enclose the Holy City. My most recent travels in Israel and Jordan, the land where Abraham, Jesus, and probably Mohammed walked, are nearly at an end. I am thinking of the millions who have come before me, pilgrims of three faiths and of no faith at all, drawn like iron to the magnet of Jerusalem, this ancient city at the crossroads of civilizations.

I try to recall bits and pieces of the long history of empires and armies that in the past four thousand years have struggled for control of the Fertile Crescent passageway at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea: the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Philistines, the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Seljuk Turks, the Ottoman Turks, and the British. Below me, interspersed among the crowd thronging every passageway in the Old City, I can see Israeli soldiers, Uzis slung over their shoulders, guarding intersections. They remind me that most of the Holy Land is now under control of a new and continually wary power-the modern state of Israel-committed to guarding and protecting all pilgrims who come to its land, of whatever faith.

I am thinking, too, of the peoples of the past who were caught in the continual upheavals as superior forces invaded their territories: the Canaanites and Hebrews in the central highlands, the Philistines and the Phoenicians on the coast, and the peoples of Moab and Edom on the plateau rising starkly east of the Jordan River. Currently, the most tragic are the stateless Palestinian Arabs who lost their homes as Jewish refugees from the Holocaust flooded into the Palestine Mandate after World War II and into the new state of Israel after 1948. One human tragedy begets another.

How to address the grievances of the displaced Palestinians is no closer to a solution today than it was in 1948. As the Jews keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, so the Palestinians cry out that they too are the victims of injustice. The Palestinian issue has pitted Israel against the Arab nations. It has involved the United States time and again as broker in the peace process. And, as I write, it is still confounding the efforts of good people on all sides to bring about peace. Only now, the urgency is all the greater, for nuclear weapons are positioned in the region.

On this day, however, there is peace in Jerusalem. Pope John Paul II worshipped the day before at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and he is shortly to conclude his own intense and difficult pilgrimage to Holy Land sites. Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, and Egyptians have spared no security efforts, and the visit has been without incident.

Armed Israeli soldiers stand guard to protect the thousands of pilgrims who have come for the millennial year. They protect Pope John Paul II as he prays at the places holy to his faith, and they protect the pilgrims loyal to other Christian traditions. They protect the Jews who come to the Western Wall to bewail the fate of their twice-destroyed Temple; they protect Muslim pilgrims who come to the Haram al-Sharif to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where the outer courtyard of the Temple once stood; and they protect visitors like me. I doubt that I need protection, for the tightly packed crowds here today are peaceful. But the city is volatile, no less today than in the past, and the Israelis are determined that the shrines of this Holy City shall be kept open to all who wish to visit.

The story of the Holy Land that follows is not intended to answer the question posed in the title of this book. Rather, by shedding light in dark corners, it attempts to bring understanding. The story is in three parts: The first details the present Israeli/Palestinian conflict and puts it into modern context. The second surveys the roots of conflict in the Holy Land, traveling four thousand years into the past to unravel the tangled web of religion, conquest, and politics that has made the land unique and its future consequential far beyond its borders. The third takes a broader worldview, examining how and why the conflict has been co-opted, and why there is no alternative to negotiation. In all three parts, I use the present tense to give an immediacy to all that has happened, for in truth, the past is always present in the Holy Land.