I’m standing in his back garden with Sari Nusseibeh, Yasser Arafat’s former representative for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Jerusalem. Does religion drive conflict, I have been asking him. Without it, would there be a greater chance of peace? Overnight there has been another outbreak of violence around Jerusalem. But Nusseibeh doesn’t buy it; religion doesn’t cause violence, he argues: it gets instrumentalised to amplify it. The causes are external.

As I’m leaving I pass a small grass-covered mound of earth with a headstone on it. “It’s the grave of a Jordanian ...

 

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