SO, SOMEWHERE on the road, halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a Bedouin tribesman offered me 20 camels for my new wife. I never considered it for a minute... where could I keep 20 camels?

Some people thought Israel was a strange destination for a honeymoon – and there was more than a whiff of danger in the area, with armed police, soldiers bristling with machine guns, and checkpoints aplenty.

And every day we were there, there was a random stabbing leading to a fatal shooting.

And always the sounds of sirens, the flash of blue lights, the taxi drivers who wouldn’t take you to certain parts of the city, and the thought of what next?

Yet, in spite of all of that, and not just because I was young and in love, Israel remained a place of intriguing beauty, soaked in history, shot through with beauty and full of pain and possibility.

The story of the Jews and the story of the Bible, these have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

And there was a particular sense of touching against something familiar when you walked by the Sea of Galilea, or sat quietly in the Garden of Gethsemane and felt the story from the book become even more the story in the heart.

And a visit to the Yad Veshen Memorial to the Holocaust was more than enough to make you wonder at the resilience and determination to survive of the Jewish people, and the thought that haunts them still, that there are people out there who want to kill them.

Jerusalem, Israel, Palestine… memorable and humbling – and giving many reasons to think hard about the human condition, and why we are the people we are, who do the things we do!