Example research essay topic: First World War Holy Land - 784 words

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Whats so holy about the Holy Land? The Body and the Blood: The Holy Lands Christians at the Turn of the New Millennium Charles M Sennott Public Affairs? 18. 99, pp 479 The Last Crusade: The Palestinian Campaign in the First World War Anthony Bruce John Murray? 22. 50, pp 299 On a warm autumn evening 18 months ago, I crouched behind a wall on the Gaza Strip and watched Palestinian teenagers running out into the road in front of me to throw stones and petrol bombs at an Israeli bunker complex. While I was there, six Palestinians were wounded. Two, I later heard, died of their wounds. I will not forget the hours I spent behind the wall, with the smoke and the shouting and the blood and the machine-gun fire. But when I drove past Netzarim Junction six months later, there was nothing left.

The wall I had sheltered behind was gone. The olive groves from which Palestinian gunmen returned Israeli fire over my head had been bulldozed, too. There was nothing left. There was nothing to mark the death and the violence that had been played out over the dusty, rock-strewn Tarmac and sandy red earth. You could, and many do, drive past at 60 mph and have no idea of the significance of the ground you have just swept over. This is what Charles Sennott's The Body and the Blood is about, though he has taken the lives and the history of the Christians, largely Palestinian, who remain in the Holy Land.

Sennott, an engaging and intelligent writer, follows the journeys of Jesus, according to the consensus of biblical scholarship, to give the book structure. But his real interest is archaeological, scraping away at the silt of myth, legend and narrative, public and private, that weigh so heavily on the country where he worked for four years as bureau chief for the Boston Globe. There is not a square inch that does not mean something to someone and Sennott is adept at finding powerful examples to illustrate his theme. So we walk with Ages Zaidan, a Palestinian survivor of the massacre at Deir Yassin where Israeli fighters with the Irgun forces and the Stern gang killed between 100 and 250 villagers in 1948, between the elegant and spacious homes made of beautiful old limestone where he once lived with his family. The homes were built with stone from a nearby quarry and stood on the site of an ancient monastery.

Now they were used as a hospital for the mentally ill by Israelis. The distorted faces peered at him from the arched windows of what was once his family home. A balanced and level commentator, Sennott carefully points out that the massacre was an isolated incident committed by extremists, widely condemned by Jews and avenged bloodily by Palestinians. Other resonances are less contemporary.

Sennott explores modern-day Nazareth, Bethlehem, Galilee and scores of more obscure biblical sites. He himself is a largely lapsed Irish-American Catholic. He is married to a Jew and is healthily sceptical of all fanaticism. There are useful references to the discrimination and violence increasingly directed towards Palestinian Christians by Islamic hardliners within their own community. With a group of 25 nuns, Sennott explores Megiddo, biblical Armageddon and site of a recent suicide bomb.

British forces defeated the Turks here in the First World War and in 1948 Israeli forces stopped attacking Syrian and Iraqi troops. Thus the description in the Book of Revelations (16: 16) of Armageddon as the final battleground between good and evil. The Palestinian Campaign in the First World War, barely remembered now, is described in Anthony Bruce's The Last Crusade. The hard-fought battles in the Middle East, which saw tens of thousands of soldiers manoeuvring around the Sinai, Beersheba or the wadis and beaches where Israeli tanks now patrol seething refugee camps, are almost forgotten. Only General Allenbys triumphant entry into Jerusalem in 1917 or TE Lawrence's sideshow in the Arabian desert get much of a mention.

Another layer of historical silt laid down on the Palestinian dust. This is a shame because the campaign was full of extraordinary characters and events. Indian camel cavalry riding through the night, clashes with Bedouin tribesmen, Lawrence himself. Unfortunately, Bruce's narrative is informative and intelligent but hardly gripping. I most enjoyed the chunks of hitherto unpublished accounts of the campaign by men involved in it. Their fresh voices stripped the decades of their crust of accumulated myth.

The profanities of the British and Australian squad dies as they marched and fought under the searing sun were rarely recorded. Imagining them is a rare relief in a Holy Land sinking under the weight of encrusted, accumulated myth.

Research essay sample on First World War Holy Land