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| Tel Aviv today (Pro-Palestinian students at Columbia, Yale, MIT, NYU yell, "Hamas we love you! Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!") |
The famous author Mark Twain managed to hitch a ride on a steam ship to the Holy Land in 1867. The young man joined a group of pilgrims he sarcastically named "the Innocents."
The ship was called Quaker City, a former Civil War ship. A budding writer, Twain's passage was paid for by a Californian newspaper. He wrote about the Holy Land in his novel Innocents Abroad, and unlike other writers of the day who Romanticized the place, Twain drew blood in his usual acerbic style -
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
