Christian pilgrims have returned to the Holy Land, but have faced torrents of abuse from Israelis - you'd think they'd welcome the tourism! Right, so you can always tell when Israel’s spin machine is wobbling, because something leaks out through a source that normally acts like a government loudhailer. And that’s exactly what’s happened here: Christian tourists finally start trickling back into Jerusalem after a year of war and a ninety-per-cent tourism collapse, and what do they find? Not welcome, not safety, not the “shared civilisation” nonsense Western governments like to parrot — they find ultra-Orthodox men spitting at them, boys kicking them off bicycles, crosses being hidden because the police can’t be relied on. And when even a right-wing paper admits it, you know the problem isn’t isolated, it’s structural. Because this isn’t about one incident on the Via Dolorosa. It’s about what happens when a state that plays the eternal victim starts behaving like the unchallenged landlord of everyone else’s holy sites. Right, so you can always tell when a state is losing control of its own story, because the mask slips in a place where it never meant to. That’s what’s just happened in Jerusalem. Christian tourists, the very people Israel claims as cultural allies, the very people Western governments tell themselves they are protecting when they defend Israel on the world stage, are being spat on, kicked, threatened and harassed as they return to the Old City.