I hope there's no time limit for this topic! My experience of culture-shock in Palestine dates back to 1965 when my travelling companion (now wife) and I made a backpackers' pilgrimage to the Christian Holy Land. As I wrote in the short blog I wrote about it a few years ago (link below), it's difficult for me to say now which sites are today still in Palestine (insofar as it exists) and which in Israel. Back then, Jerusalem and Bethlehem were in the former, and we visited them; as for Jerash and Jericho - I'm not sure which country they're in now.
barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2012/02/tombs-of-christ.html
The culture shock lay in how civilised and culturally advanced Palestine was compared with Iraq, where we'd just come from. The refugee camps weren't civilised or advanced, of course; refugee camps never are, and the residents had lived in them for almost twenty years by the time we got there. Our cheapo hotel overlooked the barbed wire that divided the two sections of Jerusalem, but otherwise we didn't encounter any of the hostility that divides native Arabs and European Jews today. It would be one heck of a culture shock for us to go back there now!
