An English writer's heartfelt guide through a myth-crowded neighbourhood

Once a philosophy postgraduate, Blincoe draws on Derrida to press his case that fundamentalists of every stripe – from Greeks, Crusaders and Saracens to the often anti-Semitic Victorian “Christian Zionists” who, perversely, did so much to mould right-wing Israeli and US opinion today – have interpreted the many-stranded past of the place in a literal rather than figurative way. You might say that what Blincoe wants for Bethlehem, and this land as a whole, is poetic justice – the sort of justice that admits the ambiguity of metaphor, and mingled identities, and so leads towards an ideal of peace now thwarted by scriptural literalism in every camp. As he drily notes, the doctrine that “the Bible ought to be taken literally is surely one of history’s strangest ideas”. 

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Blincoe is a partisan, but not a propagandist. However, in the contested field of ancient history and archaeology, he can select his sources to bolster his case. Thus he cites the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s polemic The Invention of the Jewish People without alluding to the fierce controversy it caused. Sand’s critics have argued that his total deconstruction of a unified Jewish identity – to leave, in effect, nothing more than a multi-cultural patchwork of communities who ended up worshipping the same eastern-Mediterranean god – inverts but mirrors the ethnic essentialism of his foes. As Blincoe knows and elsewhere urges, shared principles of law and justice will – if it ever comes – bring peace to the town and region, not scholarly wrangles over Bronze Age genetics. If you reject international law and regard the settlements that strangle Bethlehem as legal, or dispute the statement that the Palestinian claim to rights in this land “is as ancient and deep as any connection to any homeland, by any people, anywhere”, this book will politely seek to correct you. But it’s always genial, never strident, and mostly employs the historical and archaeological record to puncture cherished myths on every side with a notably even hand. 

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