Interesting idea

Usually it's hard work trying to find broad themes in a political dispute that's way too crazy to be easily labeled, but a book Catie gave me about Jerusalem before I left, written by Karen Armstrong, is pretty good at it. It's a really great book, and some of the things she's said, as far as holy ground and people's perception of it, has really stuck with me.

One of the major themes of Jerusalem, according to her, is that every conquering or incoming religion/culture/government/empire in Jerusalem has had to deal with the fact that someone else was there before they were. All the way back to David and the Canaanites. Most of them have dealt with it by trying to erase their predecessors' influence, through the time-honored Jerusalem method: construction. Building new things, new walls, new mosques, new synagogues, new churches, new streets, new homes, whatever it takes to mark the city as yours, and make others forget that it wasn't always yours. Seems silly, but when a place is considered holy to several large and vocal groups of people, a lot rides on the legitimacy of your claim to it, and how legitimate can your claim possibly appear to be if everything around you was built by the people you replaced?

I tend to loosely extend the idea to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. Both Israelis and Palestinians have dealt with the fact that the land was another group's home, not always theirs. I tend to see arguments about whose it was first as kinda pointless.