After all, as one walks around the Old City, ducking from one quarter to the next, its residents appear knee-deep in compromise even as they assure you that no compromise is possible. But then you see two groups of boys, one Jewish and one Arab, spitting obscenities at each other outside the Damascus Gate. An Arab man tells you to get out of the Islamic Quarter until you tell him that you're an Australian Gentile? -- ?probably best not to say an Australian atheist? -- ?at which point he invites you in for tea. You read about an Arab man whose death at the hands of Jews is described by the Israeli police as a "lynching". An Israeli man tells you that his country will retain its Jewish majority at any cost and despite the demographic data to the contrary and an Arab man tells you that it's only a matter of time until there aren't any Jews left in Palestine at all. And what you slowly come to realise is that Michael J. Totten's observation on the Israel-Lebanese border holds true here, too: calm is not peace, no matter how long a period of it a city is enjoying. For all the popular phantasms this city adheres to, the image of an ancient ethnic melting pot is not one of them. Indeed, the phantasms it does adhere to are more recent, and the most dominant of these remains the line that once cleaved this city in two. The Green