Palestine

The Palestinian territories are two separate pieces of land, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The West Bank climbs from the Jordan Valley and the shores of the Dead Sea, the lowest land on earth, to limestone hills around Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron, terraced with olive groves. The Gaza Strip is a narrow, flat stretch of Mediterranean coast. Winter rain falls on the hills, and summer is dry.

Jericho is among the oldest continuously inhabited towns anywhere. Canaanites, Israelites, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines ruled this land in turn, followed by Arab caliphs, Crusaders, Mamluks and four centuries of Ottoman government. Britain administered Palestine from 1920 to 1948. In the war of 1948 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes, an event remembered as the Nakba; the West Bank then came under Jordanian rule and Gaza under Egyptian administration. Israel took control of both in 1967, and the Oslo Accords of the 1990s created the Palestinian Authority.

Families gather for the olive harvest each autumn, and olive oil, za’atar and the soap of Nablus are old trades. Tatreez, cross-stitch embroidery whose patterns once showed which village a woman came from, is recognised as intangible heritage by UNESCO, and Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry is recited across the Arab world. Musakhan, chicken roasted with onions and sumac on taboon bread, is the dish of the harvest season, and Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity draws Christian pilgrims.