Walking to Jerusalem: Blisters, hope and other facts on the ground

Walking to Jerusalem: Blisters, hope and other facts on the ground
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published Date: November 2019
ISBN-13: ISBN9781473673717

'What's so impressive about Justin Butcher's book is the interweaving of his personal face-to-face experiences in Israel and Palestine against the backdrop of the social and political realities there. This book displays an empathy that is unusual in discussions of that tangled and tragic situation - the kind of empathy that will be essential in arriving at any decent solution to it.' BRIAN ENO

2017 marked three major anniversaries for the Palestinian people: the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the fiftieth year of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and the tenth year of the blockade of Gaza. To change the record after a century of injustice, a pilgrimage set out to walk from London to Jerusalem – in penance, solidarity, and hope. This was the inspiration of playwright, actor, and musician Justin Butcher, who worked with human rights charity Amos Trust to mount the Just Walk to Jerusalem. Calling for full equal rights for everyone who calls the Holy Land home, more than a hundred walkers took part. Nine walked the whole way.

This is their story: walking journals and travellers’ tales on paths of pilgrimage and conquest, from monasteries and mountain, passes to Bedouin camps and desert wadis across Europe and the Middle East. Down Roman roads and refugee routes, Justin Butcher traces the pull of Jerusalem on the European imagination – the many strands of legend, fable, and iconography radiating from the Holy Land and its three faiths.

Between these paths and themes of Balfour and Zionism, Weizmann and cordite, desert spirituality and Jerusalem Syndrome, he charts a chronicle of serendipity: happenstances hilarious, infuriating and occasionally numinous – or, as pilgrims might say, encounters with the Divine.

'This is a gripping and intelligent book that everybody should read.' PATRICK COCKBURN, Middle East correspondent, The Independent

Author(s):

Winners of the Palestine Book Awards

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  • I Sing From the Window of Exile
  • Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity
  • Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948
  • Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir
  • Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza
  • Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial
  • Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes : Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body
  • Psychoanalysis under occupation: practicing resistance in Palestine
  • Power born of dreams: my story is palestine
  • Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization
  • Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies
  • Places of Mind: A life of Edward Said
  • Except for Palestine: The limits of progressive politics
  • A history of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Faith, awareness, and revolution in the middle east
  • Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands
  • Against the Loveless World
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
  • Life in a Country Album
  •  There Where You Are Not