However, there are many benefits to living in a country where the Jewish and Muslim calendars predominate. Right now, for example, I’m reaping one of those benefits, wishing my Jewish pals a “shana tova,” or happy New Year, while outside the weather is balmy to bloody hot.

The Jewish New Year is a time, as a friend of mine mentioned yesterday, for praying. It’s followed a few days later by Yom Kippur, which is a time for asking God not to kill you in the forthcoming year. It’s not a time for getting wasted, trying to random kiss women in the street, vomiting in Trafalgar Square, or punching some bloke because he looked at you the wrong way.

Those, of course, are the traditions of December 31, and I never much enjoyed them. It’s very pleasant to wish someone Happy New Year without slurring your speech – an experience I never had before the age of 27. It’s also great that the Jewish New Year starts at sundown, rather than at midnight. I’ve got a seven-week-old baby. Why should I stay up until midnight to watch people get drunk and sing the nonsensical words of an old Scottish ballad?

The last time I “celebrated” the New Year’s holiday with which most of you are probably familiar, it was 1993 and it was New York. I had an eventful night. I was jostled by a police horse in Times Square, shortly after which the horse appeared to have a seizure and collapsed right next to me. I swallowed so many Jell-o shots I couldn’t stand up. When I made it to my feet, I hailed a taxi and got out without paying underneath the Williamsburg Bridge, thinking it was where I lived. (I lived 90 blocks away.) I got very cold and slept in a dumpster. I woke up early, went to my girlfriend’s house for a day we had planned to spend together, and shivered in bed until the afternoon, retching every quarter of an hour. (She’s married to a Wall Street bond trader. Which means she must be retching every fifteen minutes now.)

Happy New Year, eh?

By contrast, I’m not compelled by peer pressure to celebrate the Jewish New Year. On Yom Kippur, I’ll take a walk with my family through Jerusalem’s streets, which are entirely free of traffic on that day.

My friends here will be going through the torment of family holidays. Of three straight days filled with the proscriptions of the Sabbath. Mothers all over the country will suffer nervous breakdowns as they strive to provide meals for the whole holiday period without actually cooking once the holiday starts. And then they have to run around apologizing to anyone they might have affronted in the last year, for fear God might not sign them into the book of life for the next year. For them, it’s pure craziness.

But for me it’s a great holiday. And I can completely ignore December 31! Happy New Year.

It got me thinking about all the guff that tourists have to swallow. How often do visitors stream to must-see attractions which are actually unattractive – and which are only worth seeing so you can tell other people you’ve been there. I decided to apply this theory to Jerusalem, a city that’s a major tourist attraction and where I’ve lived 15 years. Here’s the Honest Tours guide to a selection of sites all of which are listed in most guides as delightful spots for tourists:

The Israel Museum: Just completed a $100 million renovation. Ho-hum. Makes you wonder what at least $90 million of the budget went on. But the donations included a major one from the Marc Rich Foundation, so perhaps the whole thing was just a money-laundering scheme. Though the museum has some interesting archeological bits and pieces, give the art galleries a miss unless you thinks a pile of old school desks nailed together in a white room ought to be called contemporary art.

The Old City: I felt deep sympathy for businessmen who suffered during the economic deprivations of the second Palestinian intifada during the last decade. Except for the nasty traders of the Old City. They’ve been fleecing tourists in a particularly mean manner for years and it was time they got a dose of karma. If you like bad hummus and surly service, try the couple of hummus restaurants listed in all the guides as “the best hummus in Jerusalem.”

The Western/Wailing Wall: Prepare to have your mystical communion with the ancient stones interrupted by a guy who looks like he stepped out of Vilna circa 1822. He’ll shove his hand in your face and ask for charity. Not for nothing does Yiddish (which many of these guys speak) have the best word for “sponger” in any language (“schnorrer”). The place is a Mecca for them.

Yad Vashem: Who doesn’t want to relive the Holocaust when they’re on vacation? A relatively new addition to the site of Israel’s “Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority” has made it at least an interesting museum. But unless you’re determined to shed tears the eternal flame and the older elements aren’t worth schlepping out to Mount Herzl.

Dome of the Rock: Now this is a genuinely unmissable experience. Too bad you’ll have to miss it, unless you’re a Muslim. At the start of the intifada in 2000, the Muslim authorities closed the Temple Mount to all non-Muslims. A big yah-boo to the whole world, which they thought was ganging up on them, like a bawling kid taking his ball home to spoil everyone’s game. Some years later they opened the platform of the Temple Mount during certain hours. But non-Muslims can no longer enter the Aqsa Mosque or the golden Dome of the Rock. Of course, you can hang out at the doors to catch a glimpse inside and be told (often rudely, as if your intention was to burst inside and desecrate the place) that you mustn’t enter.

Mea Shearim: Talking of rude, Jerusalem’s main ultra-Orthodox neighborhood has become increasingly a law unto itself. One Israeli newspaper reported that yeshiva students have been chasing the police out, thus making it a no-go district patrolled by gangs of weedy little men in black hats who think that spitting on a woman because they can see her shoulders is a good way to protect the Torah.

Jerusalem Forest: If the Norwegians knew that the hardy Norwegian pine would one day spread across the hills of Jerusalem and destroy all the natural undergrowth, they’d surely have chopped down every last one. Don’t worry, though: Yad Vashem is expanding its “campus” and eating into the forest, and there’s a housing/land shortage in Jerusalem, so this particular “attraction” won’t be around much longer.

If you have suggestions for the Honest Tours Guide to World Travel, drop me a note. I’d like to formulate a post featuring all the top worthless or disappointing sites in the world. I think it’d be a very popular feature. Let me know.

I met a group of just over a dozen 15-year-olds (some of them may have been older than that, so I hope they aren’t offended when they read this, but when you get as old as me even a 25-year-old is a kid), half of them from a Palestinian school just outside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City and the other half from an Israeli school on the campus of the Hebrew University. They’ve been coming together for some years at infrequent intervals to discuss books they read in English. This time, they read my Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

I was happy to be the first author who’d come along to meet the group, and was doubly pleased with the intelligence and perception they showed.

That’s not only because they all seemed to have really liked my book. Though that, of course, does show great perception. Their group aims to go beyond the politics of the region, to find common ground in literature. Even as journalists exult at the political mobilization of the Arab world, they ought to remember that all this political activity is intended to lead not to some goal that can be summed up in a simple nut-graph (which is what journalists call the “here’s what the story’s all about paragraph,” usually the third one in the story). It’s heading toward the personal fulfillment of every Arab in myriad ambitions and desires – something that’s probably beyond the stereotypical charactertizations and analyses of journalism to contend with.

One of the most impressive elements of the long discussion I had with the kids in a restaurant overlooking the walls of the Old City was that politics was entirely absent. It demonstrates, for me, that if Israelis and Palestinians have some other basis on which to meet – rather than the mutual claims of victimization on which their politicians thrive – they find a great deal in common.

Of course, what I’ve aimed for with my four Palestinian crime novels is an approach that transcends the political clichés of the region where I find myself. So I was pleased that the kids picked up on that, too.

One of them won my heart by telling me that when my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef and other characters spoke she felt she was listening to real Palestinians speak. It’s quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me about my books, because I’ve tried to capture the rhythms and formalities of Arab speech in the novels.

Our discussion turned to the events across the region. I pointed out that Omar Yussef was ahead of the game when, in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, he chided the Arab nations and the US for failing to back Arab democracy.

That was as close to politics as we got. Unlike my meetings with journalists who often want to discuss present Middle Eastern diplomacy with me, rather than my novels, the kids asked fascinating questions about the actual writing of a book, the plotting and characterization. Clearly more than a few of them, Israeli and Palestinian, are budding writers, so I made them pose for this photo with the hard-edged expressions of crime writers on book jackets. I look forward to seeing their work on the shelves. (Well, they’re young, so maybe I’ll see them on a Kindle…)

Some people see the Middle East only through a political prism filled with simplistic slogans and obstructive literalism. My books defy that. They’re meant to be instructive, but entertaining — they’re crime novels, after all. These kids showed that they — like the characters in my books – don’t want to be defined and stereotyped by their often-devastating politics. They want to be real, too. And they’re smart enough to understand that fiction, strangely, can help lead them there.

Dudi Cohen, Israel’s police commissioner, told a conference earlier this month that “murder for ideological reasons … could occur in Israel” and that it was “one of the most disturbing topics of these times.”

Cohen added that more than 100 public figures in Israel require police protection, but that courts don’t hand down significant punishments against those who make threats, on average giving only a quarter of the maximum sentence for such crimes.

As if to highlight the danger, Cohen’s warning came on the same day Yona Avrushmi was released from prison. Yona Avrushmi threw a hand grenade at a Peace Now demonstration in 1983, killing a marcher. Though he later expressed regret for the incident, prosecutors maintained a constant battle against calls for clemency by activists on the right.

According to one Israeli commentator, Avrushmi would’ve been released long ago had he been associated with one of the country’s right-wing blocs, such as the settlement movement. Those blocs exercise political power and their rhetoric causes the atmosphere in which such men act, said Yossi Sarid, a former leader of the leftist Meretz Party. It’s wrong to suggest that Avrushmi or the right-wing assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Amir, truly acted alone, he said.

Read the rest of my article on Global Post.

Barak’s stated logic is this: He wants to stay in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist coalition because he believes a stable coalition forces the Palestinians to consider its peace offer. With several Labor Party ministers constantly complaining about leaving the government, Barak believes the Palestinians were waiting around until the coalition fell apart. So by jettisoning the reluctant Laborites, he makes the coalition secure and forces the Palestinians to take steps toward peace.

It’s hard to argue with his perspective — so long as you have no idea who Ehud Barak is.

If you’ve followed the former commando and chief of Israel’s military during his political career, however, you’ll recognize that he sacrificed both party and principle to strike a deal with a government which — nominally, at least — represents everything he was elected to oppose.

Some in the Labor Party think Barak betrayed the party’s traditional pro-peace stance by remaining in a government replete with right-wing nationalists. Barak maintained he was able to exert a moderating influence on Netanyahu, though recent reports in Israeli newspapers suggested U.S. diplomats have lost faith in his power in the cabinet.

Barak and Netanyahu “would do anything to survive,” said Nitzan Horowitz, a legislator from the leftist Meretz Party.

The 68-year-old Barak announced his new faction, Independence, at a press conference Monday. He was backed by four legislators who split from Labor. Each was rewarded Tuesday with a new ministerial or legislative position in the government, nabbing promotions to agriculture minister, industry minister and parliamentary committee head, among other goodies.

Barak said his faction would be “centrist, Zionist.” His alternative, it had become clear, was to be kicked out of the Labor leadership at the party convention in March by a membership increasingly embarrassed to be part of a government whoe right-wing elements, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, are treated with polite disdain at best by most Western diplomats. That would have meant no more defense ministry for him, and power is what motivates this former prime minister above all else.

That might seem unsurprising. What politician isn’t obsessed with power? Nonetheless, most are expected to have a tenuous hold on principle. Barak compared himself to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and to two previous prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon, each of whom split their party to create new factions. The difference is that these forebears aimed at new directions for Israeli politics. Barak just wants to keep his job a little longer.

Israeli leftists and many centrists spoke of disgust that Barak’s maneuver — the leading newspaper Ha’aretz called it “filthy” — would bolster Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Here’s the math: The coalition used to have 74 of the 120 Knesset, or parliament, seats, but the possibility that the 13 Labor legislators might leave gave the impression of fragility; now with 66 solid coalition seats, Netanyahu is more secure.

That’s why the prime minister was so smug after Barak’s announcement. He had feared that Labor would quit the government in March, after forcing Barak out of the leadership. That would’ve made his coalition untenable — with a majority of only one — and would’ve robbed him of a defense minister whose leadership of a supposedly leftist party was a valuable international fig leaf for his diplomatic stonewalling.

The deal to form Independence was made at Netanyahu’s villa in Caesarea, a Mediterranean beachfront town, over the last week. Other Labor leaders, however, were in the dark until Barak called them just before his press conference.

“This government will be here for the coming years, and it is with this government that [the Palestinians] will have to conduct the peace process,” Netanyahu said.

The Labor Party, which was descended from the founding movement of Zionism, appeared to be on its last legs, after a couple of decades of steep decline. It paid the price for the failure of its Oslo Peace Accords, which were destroyed by the Palestinian intifada early in the last decade, and for a perceived arrogance and obsession with government jobs, of which Barak was a prime example.

On Tuesday, four of the remaining eight Labor legislators in the Knesset mulled whether to split to form their own faction. Those trying to hold the party together argue that it can rebuild in opposition and reluctantly these four said they agreed. But it’s just as likely that Barak’s “centrist, Zionist” faction has put the final nail in the coffin of the movement that first propounded Zionism as a political cause.

Says Yohanan Plessner, a member of the opposition Kadima Party, “The political culture in Israel [has] reached a new low of filth and loathing.”

I posted this on Global Post.

The committee, which was an initiative of legislators from several parties in the governing coalition, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, will have limited powers. But human rights groups argue it will create an atmosphere of hatred against the groups and their workers.

Opposition legislator Dov Khenin said the committee would play on the same fears and hatreds as did Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.

“It’s a carbon copy of the anti-democratic model that is remembered in infamy as a dark chapter in American history,” Khenin said.

The committee’s proponents claim Israeli rights groups supply information to foreign organizations. That information, they say, has in some cases helped spark international boycotts of the country.

Fania Kirshenbaum, one of the backers of the bill from the right-wing Israel Our Home Party, told the Knesset that such groups gave information to the Goldstone Commission, a U.N. investigation that found fault with Israel’s conduct of its war against Hamas in Gaza two years ago. A right-wing group published a report six months ago that alleged the U.N. received information from an Israeli rights group whose funding came from the U.S.-based New Israel Fund, which supports a wide range of Israeli organizations.

Kirshenbaum also said Israeli groups provide ammunition to opponents of Israel in Europe and elsewhere who have filed indictments of Israeli leaders and soldiers in foreign courts for war crimes.

The committee will focus on the funding of Israeli human rights groups. That’ll provide little information that isn’t already available in the records of the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations. But it will make for some conspiracy theories that are likely to stoke fear.

“It won’t surprise you if I tell you that some of the money comes from Arab countries,” Kirshenbaum told the Knesset.

Danny Danon, a Likud legislator, said the committee would have a rather broad purview. He said in parliament that “terrorist groups that try to purchase state land or act in other interests” would come under scrutiny from the committee, which would try to prevent “illegitimate funding.”

Opponents say that the implication of such comments is that groups such as B’Tselem, a human rights organization focused on the rights of Palestinians, the Association for Human Rights in Israel, Peace Now and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, are all outside plants whose work is intended — by its shadowy money men — to undermine Israel.

In response, B’Tselem said that if Israel is undermined, it’s only by the violation of human rights and, once again, by a law that seeks to deflect Israel’s responsibility for violations carried out in its name.

“The motive behind the investigation is to hinder our work through smears and incitement,” a B’Tselem official said.

It’s hardly unusual that any Israeli operation might receive overseas funding. Everything here — from the fighter jets patrolling the skies to hospital MRIs and the forests of pine trees — is paid for with donations from overseas, not always from Jewish organizations, either.

Conservative parties, however, have reacted with rage in recent years to human rights investigations of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories — linking any person or group that fails to accept the policy of the government to Israel’s enemies.

Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg said this week that human rights groups should boycott the committee, as should left wing legislators who oppose it.

“It’s nothing more than noise, trying to undermine the foundations of democracy,” Burg said.

The New Israel Fund’s Chief Executive Daniel Sokatch criticized the establishment of the committee.

“A healthy democracy respects and protects human rights,” he said. “It doesn’t attempt to put out of business human rights organizations.”

Now it has been proven that they picked the wrong man.

Far from being an angel, Katsav stands convicted of two counts of rape and of other counts of sexual harassment and obstruction of justice. Tel Aviv District Court judges said Thursday that Katsav had “excelled in manipulation and withholding information” during his trial.

Katsav was found guilty of twice raping a woman who worked for him when he was tourism minister a decade and a half ago. He was also convicted of sexually abusing and harassing two women who worked for him at the president’s residence.

Beyond the ugliness of his crimes, the hubris of Katsav’s case is immense. It was Katsav who first drew public attention to his sexual misdeeds — to which other politicians had long turned a blind eye — by complaining five years ago to the attorney general that he was being blackmailed by one of the women he now turns out to have abused.

Subsequently, he was offered a controversially lenient plea bargain, according to which he would have escaped prison and accepted conviction on lesser charges than rape. Just as the deal was due to be signed, Katsav rejected it, claiming he would prove his innocence in court. It now appears he had been seduced by his own lies.

When the accusations were first leveled at him, Katsav ranted at length against the media in a rage-filled press conference at the presidential residence. He railed that he was the “victim of a lynching” by the media and the judiciary, because he was an upstart from a poor town whose origins lay in the Muslim world, not among the typical Israeli elite descended from European Jews. This was in spite of the fact that the attorney general who indicted Katsav was born in Tunisia.

The Tel Aviv judges noted the 65-year-old former president’s tactical error, when they highlighted the new evidence that had arisen since the rejection of the plea bargain — evidence which made his conviction all the more certain. Had Katsav accepted the plea deal, he would by now have been a candidate for prime minister. Instead, he could face up to 16 years in jail.

Katsav’s lawyers say he’ll appeal and, in the manner of the long court case so far, unnamed friends have appeared in the Israeli press to say how depressed he is that the court didn’t accept his explanation of events. Some described him as too upset to leave his house for his local synagogue on Friday.

Outside the court, where his father had been required to surrender his passport, Katsav’s son Boaz rejected the verdict: “We will continue to walk with our heads high, so all the nation throughout its generations, with God’s help, will know that father, the eighth president of the State of Israel, is innocent.”

Israeli commentators didn’t have their heads held quite as high as the Katsav family. Most contrasted Katsav with previous generations of Israeli leaders, suggesting that he symbolized the declining mores of leadership in the society as a whole.

“The rapist president, Moshe Katsav, is a symbol for the depths to which the national leadership of the State of Israel has sunk,” wrote Ari Shavit in an opinion piece in Ha’aretz, a leading Israeli newspaper. “This is something that we never even dreamed of.”

Israelis have grown accustomed to graft and corruption among senior ministers and officials. A former finance minister is currently serving a term for stealing from a union fund, the ex-health minister is doing four years for taking bribes, and the last prime minister awaits trial on numerous counts of bribery and corruption.

Still, a conviction of rape represents a new nadir for the country’s representatives, even if some commentators suggested that Israelis should be proud that their judicial system prosecuted such a prominent figure, rather than covering it up. That was also the argument of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he called it “a sad day for the State of Israel and its citizens.”

“Today the court conveyed two clear-cut messages,” Netanyahu said. “That all are equal before the law and that every woman has exclusive right to her body.”

The Center for the Art of Seduction, a Tel Aviv business which runs courses to help men succeed with women (“Do you want to get every girl that you want?”), posted a video earlier this month in which one of its instructors advises men how to make the Jewish holiday a time of fun and frolics with the ladies.

“Ask her, ‘Have you tasted the new donuts this year?’” suggests Tal Lifshitz, posing beside a plate of the jelly donuts traditionally consumed on the holiday and a menorah with its candles burning. “‘What’s your favorite flavor of donuts?’”

This is the kind of approach which, according to the center’s website, will enable you “to have a lot of sex while you’re looking for your special one.”

It also might get you into trouble and, this being Israel, bring out the protesters.

A group of about 150 angry demonstrators descended on the center’s Tel Aviv office Thursday night, accusing the center of training men to coerce women into sex. The protesters carried signs saying, “It could happen to anyone” — “It” being rape.

The protest came after three female students at the University of Haifa filed a complaint with the police against the center and one of its graduates. The women allege rape, incitement to violence and solicitation, although none of them has been a direct victim.

The charges relate to a 4-year-old post on the center’s website by a man who claimed to have had sex with a Czech medical student against her will. On the site, the accusers say, one of the center’s organizers used an alias to commend the tactics.

That case has been making the rounds on Israeli internet forums for months, leading to the charges against the center.

The center is the Israeli outcropping of a men’s seduction subculture that has flourished on the internet since its first appearance in chat rooms during the mid-1990s. It was popularized in 2005 with the publication of Neil Strauss’ bestselling expose, “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists.”

Strauss detailed many of the techniques of the so-called “PUAs,” or pick-up artists, which are based around the idea that “supplication” — buying dinner, saying nice things — gets men nowhere with women. Rather, a man should employ a subtle put-down, for example.

A search for so-called “Lairs,” online sites for local PUAs to converse and swap information, reveals numerous locations where such groups operate from Salt Lake City to Singapore.

Officials at the Tel Aviv center maintain that their techniques are intended to promote romantic relations and to enable men who otherwise wouldn’t be able to form relationships with women to find happiness.

The donut-recommending Lifshitz, for example, describes himself on the center’s website as enjoying “incredible success with women,” though he might be described as something of a schlub, with the kind of goatee worn by men attempting to disguise the pudginess of their face.

The center opened six years ago and has run courses for 8,000 men. One of its graduates, a 35-year-old named Gal, recounted that an instructor told him the center was “going to make a revolution in Israel so that men will behave like men and women will learn to respect men.”

The center’s website, meanwhile, includes a cartoon of a woman displaying her cleavage and sucking suggestively on a strawberry. The protesters, no doubt, would argue that respect has to go both ways.

As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned, the priests may as well have been speaking, well, Greek. Because the road was built by Israel over land the Palestinians consider their own, officials in Ramallah condemned the priests’ participation in the road’s inauguration ceremony.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “expressed surprise” that the Orthodox priests joined the director-general of the Israeli Tourism Ministry Tuesday at the monastery, which clings to a cliff side over Wadi Qelt, a deep canyon running down to the Jordan Valley. Another Palestinian minister said the monks’ presence “gave a deceiving impression” about the status of the land around St. George’s.

Like other stretches on the rocky road that still clings to the misnomer “peace process,” the Palestinian protest will fade like a mirage in the desert surrounding St. George’s. More important in the end is the (literally) concrete path laid out for pilgrims to visit one of the most important and most beguilingly beautiful sacred sites in the Holy Land.

Archbishop Aristarchos, the secretary of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem and the leader of the brief prayer service, was diplomatic in his comments, when asked about Palestinian complaints over the road.

“This is a monastery of prayer for peace in our region, for peace in the Holy Land,” Aristarchos said. “The road brings full access for pilgrims who are messengers of peace to the Holy Land.”

The $500,000 road cuts over from the main Jerusalem-Jericho highway in front of the entrance to an Israeli settlement. It snakes around dusty dunes and dry wadis. To the east, the view is hazy down over the Jordan Valley to the mountains rising in the Hashemite Kingdom. After a 10-minute drive, visitors arrive at a parking lot.

The ride used to take over an hour in a four-by-four vehicle or considerably longer for hikers.

Tourism in Israel is at record levels, according to the Tourism Ministry, mainly fueled by pilgrimages. This year 3.1 million visitors came to Israel, which is higher than the bumper year of 2000, when the visit of Pope John Paul II brought a boost. After the papal visit, the violence of the intifada made for a six-year tourism nightmare in which most people were too scared to come to sites in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem.

About two years ago, I noticed an increase in the number of tour buses pulling up at the tiny Greek Orthodox monastery on my street. Hunched Greek ladies wearing black shuffled toward it, cooing at my son as I took him to play in the park next door. Presumably these friendly old crones were in no physical condition to make it through the desert tracks to the monasteries in the Judean Desert.

That’s a shame, because the desert outposts are very important to the history of Christianity in the Holy Land and it’s why Archbishop Aristarchos will surely not sweat the Palestinian protests about the new road too much.

St. George’s stands on the place where Christians believe the Prophet Elijah secluded himself. A bird brought him food. It’s also where Joachim wept with joy when he heard the news that his wife would give birth to Mary, later to be the mother of Jesus.

Built in the fifth century, St. George’s was destroyed by Persian invaders in the seventh century and not fully reconstructed until 1901. The monastery is made of the same khaki limestone as the cliffs on which it nestles. The only splash of color is the turquoise dome of its chapel.

St. George’s is home to some gory relics. In its chapel, visitors can view the bones and skulls of priests killed by the Persians, kept in silver boxes. In a side-chapel, a Romanian monk who died in 1960 has been preserved. His brown, mummified face leers with a full set of teeth through his glass casket.

After the prayer service, nuns brought out baklava, juice and fruit for the guests. Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, a senior official in the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, tucked into a sandwich on brown bread.

“It’s very important for pilgrims to come to make us local Christians feel supported,” he said. “We’re the living stones of the Church in the Holy Land.”

The people who travel the new road are more important than the authority that built it.

(I posted this first on Global Post.)