War Wounds, War Songs

Available for over a year

Jeremy Bowen has been in Gaza and reflects on why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still one which people outside the Middle East care most about, despite the turmoil, disorder and civil war now raging all across the region. He also traces the historical, demographic and economic reasons why this is a part of the world that's "on fire" - in some places literally, everywhere politically. On the streets of Nashville, Tennessee, Humphrey Hawksley has been trying to find the modern heirs to those guitar-hero singer-songwriters who wrote so many anti-war anthems in the 1960s. Lyrics once tackled the trauma of the Vietnam generation - but does America today have any appetite for ballads about war in Iraq or Afghanistan? (Photo: Palestinian Civil Defence workers search the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli air strike, in Gaza City, on July 21, 2014. Credit: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)