I WOULDN’T go to Israel today. I don’t even buy Israeli oranges. 

No, I’m not the slightest bit anti-semitic, but despite what the mighty Israeli lobby tries to tell us, liking and supporting Jews isn’t the same thing as supporting all the awful things the zionist Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians who share the country. 

Things were different way back in the 1980s. Cheap flights and package holidays were making exotic travel available. 

So when my wife Ann and I spotted an unbelievably cheap package tour for a week in the Holy Land, we booked straight away.

What we found when we got to first Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem was a part of the world just oozing history, but also a nervous and divided place. 

We found an authoritarian state beginning to develop its own type of apartheid with distinct differences between the way Palestinians and Israelis — always designated Israelis and Arabs — were treated.

Many years later those strict racist divisions and the tensions and violence they have generated have got stronger and crueller. 

I wouldn’t go to Israel as a tourist today and would not encourage anyone else to do so. 

But as it’s Christmas and the Morning Star is dedicating this issue to Palestine, I thought I might dig out a few memories of what I have always called our pilgrimage to the Holy Land.      

Despite our adopted atheist beliefs, Ann had been educated by Sisters of Mercy — Roman Catholic nuns. 

My education was in a normal council school but one linked to the Church of England and a very high Anglican church nearby that still conducted sung Latin masses — in working-class Harlesden — almost a miracle. 

By the age of 10 I was a thurifer — the altar boy who gently swings his thurible to keep the charcoal alight and the incense smoking as he wafts its perfume over the congregation. Smells and bells indeed.   

So when we arrived in the Holy Land the maps and road signs had many names we both recognised — Babel with its famous tower, Bethlehem, Calvary, Cannan, Eden (sounds like it might be a nice place), Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Gomorrah and Sodom (or should that be the other way round), Jericho and Jerusalem, the list just went on and on.  

High on our list had to be Bethlehem but the Tel Aviv hotel concierge looked askance when we enquired how we get there by public transport. 

“The only busses that go there are Arab busses and you wouldn’t want to use one of them.” 

All he could offer an expensive all-day tour that had just a short stopover in Bethlehem. We declined.

At the bus station we found a bus to Bethlehem. It would take just over an hour. And we learnt just what an Arab bus was. It turned out to be a large flatbed truck with hard wooden benches bolted to the floor. 

As we queued to get up the steep steps, an old lady welcomed our offer of help to load her half a dozen tiny live kid goats aboard. 

Darting here and there, determined to escape, those babies would keep everybody on the bus busy until we reached Bethlehem. 

We had managed to time our visit during a local election and we were amazed to see the whole of Bethlehem plastered with Vote Communist posters. 

We learnt from locals that Bethlehem had elected its first communist MP in 1956 and had long been known as a communist town. 

It wasn’t really what I had expected from the place of Jesus’s birth.

The stable cave and even the crib itself proved a bit of a let-down. Nowhere as pretty or as interesting as all the hundreds of models I had seen in shop windows, church porches and on a thousand Christmas cards.  

Since 1995 — long after our visit — Bethlehem has been administratively in Palestine and today the town elects four MPs.  

Khaled Tafesh MP, a member of Hamas, is actually in prison detained by the Israeli government. 

His comrade Mahmud al-Khatib is the other Hamas MP for Bethlehem. So far he hasn’t been locked up. 

Two other representatives, Fu’ad Kakali and Fayiz Saqqa, are both members of Fatah. 

Apart from a small area around what had been the stable, more a cave really, and the associated tourist shops, churches and monasteries, the town turned out to be really quite industrial. 

In the streets of the town people were fabricating and welding metal gates and fences, agricultural trailers, all kinds of heavy metal workings. 

Even today, despite attempts by the Israeli government to shut this and other local industries down, there are 73 blacksmiths’ shops, as well as carpentry and aluminium works.

Bethlehem today is also home to important textile, stone and concrete factories as well as being a centre for eastern handicrafts like mother-of-pearl, and olive-wood carving.

Israeli public transport was interesting in other ways. On another day out I climbed on a fairly full bus — a normal modern coach this one — where a young girl in Israeli army uniform was struggling getting her luggage into an overhead rack. 

When I asked if I could help she said: “Can you just hold this a minute?” 

Into my hands she put her (undoubtedly loaded) Uzi submachine gun. Life is made of new experiences. 

Towards the end of our short holiday, we took a long and tiring trip to the Sea of Galilee. 

It proved to be hard exhausting day. I nodded off to sleep on the journey home and Ann continued chatting to a Israeli woman who, like us, had been born and raised in north-west London. 

On the way home she turned to Ann and asked: “Do you know where we are?” Ann didn’t.  

“The next crossroads are fairly well known,” she said. “You can tell your husband he slept all the way through Armageddon!”  

Happy Christmas from Ann and Peter Frost.