Ben Granby and the Long Road Home from Bethlehem
By James Norton

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Ben Granby, the author of "Welcome to the Bethlehem Star Hotel," has a track record of provoking outrage that dates back to his college years.

While attending UW-Madison, Granby led a slate of student government candidates called the Ten Fat Tigers; the group distinguished itself, among other things, by erecting a 15-foot-tall paper mache penis called "The Golden Shaft Award" in the middle of campus.

	FLAK INTERACTIVE To view photos from Granby's travels through Palestine, click here.

His student activism was a perfect platform for a high-spirited but ultimately unsucessful run as the Republican nominee for the office of Dane County coroner (a race he contested on an anti-zombification platform).

His years of political theater earned him a reputation as a political satirist with a zest for risk. But just as he lingered on the cusp of attaining some manner of local anti-celebrity, he vanished overseas, visiting Lebanon and Syria.

A string of other trips followed — all self-financed by a burgeoning credit card debt that would approach $60,000 by the end of his world tour. He turned up amongst Macedonian rebels in 2001. In 2002, he appeared in Gaza. He visited Iraq just before the war. He met activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003, shortly before her death. That same year, in what caustic observers might describe as a desire to commit suicide by travel, Granby waltzed through Colombia, visiting a town that had been the scene of conflict between right-wing paramilitaries and the ELN. In 2004, he was back in Iraq, visiting Fallujah and Ramadi and spending a week with US troops in Balad. In 2005, he studied Arabic in Syria, visited Gaza during the disengagment of Israeli forces and did academic research in Lebanon.

And he's off to Uganda next week, doing academic work for a master's in international development studies from George Washington University.

His trips have always been punctuated by dispatches to the outside world, sometimes accompanied by photos of Granby, looking out-of-place but pleased with himself, surrounded by bearded men with guns or standing amidst burned rubble.

Granby's half-decade of conflict tourism has now borne fruit in the form of "Welcome to the Bethlehem Star Hotel," an edited collection of dispatches focusing on Granby's 2002 travels in the Gaza Strip and West Bank during Israel's largest offensive since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The book, a highly sympathetic and partisan account of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, is likely to be no less controversial than any of its author's earlier exploits.

The book's full title is "Welcome to the Bethlehem Star Hotel: An Account of Life in Palestine with Descriptions of People, Places and Incidents," and what you see is pretty much what you get. Granby's account is sometimes painstakingly focused on immediate details: a particular town in ruins after an Israeli raid, a conversation with a frustrated ambulance driver, a cynical interaction between soldiers and journalists.

"It was originally written for people with knowledge of the [Middle East] situation, and deliberately written as a travelogue," says Granby, explaining the lack of political or historical context that sometimes gives his account a dizzyingly in media res feel.

The wail of a missile broke the silence. Where will it land? A flash of light. Another frightening crash. I cringed. Too exposed. I noticed that once I saw the flash of light, it was clearly pointless to react to the noise — if I were to be hit, it would be in the explosion, not the sound waves generated. I knew this, but it didn't change my reactions.

Throughout the book, shades of classic Granby — a dark sense of humor, a burning irritation with injustice, a willingness to side with unpopular and sometimes downright unpleasant protaganists on the losing side of a hard struggle — shine through.

The book is unapologetically on the side of the mostly secular Palestinians and international aid workers with whom Granby spent most of his time. He chronicles the travails of Palestinians at checkpoints, during Israeli assaults, and as their houses are demolished; accounts of the horrors of suicide bombings and other anti-Israeli terror attacks are notably absent.

"That was effectively my experience there and the book's a reflection of that," Granby says. "I don't claim for it to be in any way objective. I've had many experiences with Israelis, and even while I was there I was in contact through the Internet with many Israelis. The reason I think [the one-sidedness] is excusable is because as Americans and through our media we almost never hear the Palestinian side of the story."

Granby, like many who have visited and reported from the Middle East, is fascinated by the way stories of the region's basic realities get distorted as they make their way from on-the-scene reporter, to desk editor, to news executive, to news consumer.

"I've seen direct results [of pressure on US media to favor Israelis] — if you watch CNN international, and compare their coverage of events to what they'll broadcast on regular CNN, the stories are very different." He described a report by Christiane Amanpour that aired internationally with a detailed account of Israeli troops using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and noted that the anecdote was shorn from the CNN domestic version of the story.

He added that many of the shortcomings of conventional journalistic coverage of Middle East news comes down to a failure to show the circumstances of day-to-day life for Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories.

"Palestinians experience this violence on a day-to-day level that has dramatic impacts on their views and opinions but never comes across on the nightly news," says Granby, referencing the roadblocks, surprise searches and house demolitions that hover just under the level that constitutes "newsworthy" in the mainstream media.

What journalists can — and Granby does — accomplish is bringing the eyes of the world (and the eyes of Americans in particular) into unfamiliar circumstances. In one of the most engaging accounting within "Welcome to the Bethlehem Star Hotel," Granby documents the way the ongoing fight had affected the children of Bethlehem:

As Terra and I headed out to buy some food, we found two children dragging the broken metal frame of a cart across St. Paul IV Street. They arranged it next to a pile of plastic milk crates and some other small pieces of garbage and stone debris. They were giddy about their endeavor, attempting to make systematic rows of obstructions across the street to Manger Square. I paused to watch this futile gesture. It was truly a saddening sight. These children were building a roadblock for tanks.

One of the consequences of that one-sided coverage, Granby says, is an unswerving American support for hardline Israeli policies that have played into the extremists on both sides of the conflict. He expresses shock at the recent success of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority elections.

"Pretty much all of my Palestinan friends were either socialists or staunch Fatah supporters," he says. "They truly hate Hamas, mainly for its social fascism. They fear what Hamas might do. Gaza is already pretty much under Hamas' cultural policty. I mention in the book how they shut down the theaters, separated men and women where they could — some fear it will happen in the West Bank. There could be a big social transformation for the worse.

Those hoping to come away from "Welcome to the Bethlehem Star Hotel" with a new sense of hope for the Middle East will be disappointed.

"It's not the sort of inspirational story where one person can stumble into something and prove that they can make a difference," Granby says. "The best message it can convey is: 'Make an effort to go beyond the threshold of the American experience.' It never hurts to take a risk to plunge yourself into someone else's culture that you don't understand or is even villified — it helps you to be critical of everything around you and to give yourself a new perspective."

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.