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

'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