Finding perfect drop in heaven

MOST outside assessments of pretty much anything to do with Israel/Palestine should be taken with a large shovel of salt.

It is fair to say that unless you have lived in the Holy Land and experienced both sides of the situation — and felt the weight of history — you should err towards silence rather than speech, towards listening rather than judgement.

A simple example will serve us well. I was with a study group of mostly clergy on a visit to Jerusalem in 2015. A bus tour took us through the separation wall to Bethlehem to see the churches there.

We were hosted by some Palestinian Christians who showed us around one or two sites and then took us for lunch at a restaurant owned by one of their number.

The food was fairly standard Middle Eastern fare — pitta, olives, salad, feta, in a mezze-type spread. They asked us what we would like to drink and added, coyly: “Would you like a beer?” They proudly brought out half a case of chilled bottled ale and, to our amazement we found that this was a golden ale, brewed in the West Bank, just outside Ramallah.

“Palestinian beer?” we asked, once we’d got off the floor. “How is this possible?”

Our hosts explained that some Christian Arab families had opened a microbrewery and were now exporting across the world.

“But what about the Muslims?” we asked. “They love it,” our hosts replied with a grin. The bottle openers came out and the golden nectar was shared around. In the dry heat, the chilled touch of a locally brewed beer was divine.

Today, a decade later, the situation for the Taybeh brewery is harder. Pressure from Israel, which controls much of the water supply into the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza, which has banned all alcohol sales there, even to Christians, means that a nascent local industry with proven demand has not grown as much as it ought.

There is a ready export market, for example, but in the current paralysis it is hard to move beer across borders in the region.

But there is such a thing as Palestinian beer. I have tasted it and it is good. The memory of it reminds me that the Holy Land is a place where beer is possible and that any narrative there is far more complex than a simple polarity between those who don’t want it made and those who don’t want it drunk.