The other side

Nothing's wrong

Canadian teenager with gun, Tel Aviv, taking part in a Birthright Israel tour

Jericho. Mount of Temptation. Forty days for Jesus on these rocks. Today, I'm riding the cable car. Me and Khaled, Jamilah and Abdullah, our guide. Last sun shreds the black sky as we descend. Jamilah and Khaled steal a kiss.

Rockets are falling. Jamilah's mother calls. She is crying. Come home, come home.

We stop at the checkpoint outside Jericho, going into Israel. Khaled is driving, I'm with Abdullah in the back. A soldier looms into the window. Khaled winds it down and hands over his blue ID. The soldier takes it, looking slowly into the car. 'Where are you all from?'

'Yafo - she's English.' Abudullah takes my passport and gives it to the soldier, who pages through.

Silence. We sit there. Jamilah straightens her hair.

'Get out of the car.' The soldier points to a lay-by. 'Over there.'

Everyone gets out except me. I can't move the seat forwards. I'm trying to get out and another soldier with dark brown eyes, about 19, looks in. 'Where are you from?'

'London.' I'm still trying to move the seat. 

'Do it.' The soldier indicates to Abdullah.

I get out. We stand. Soldiers pace around the car and look inside. There are five of them, armed.

'What's in there? Open the back,' one of them says to Khaled, as if to a dog. He's nervous, Khaled, I can tell from the way he's trying to open the boot, small by the soldier's bulked-up green. It opens, then falls back shut - Khaled fetches a stick to make it stay. 'What - you've come to hit me?' the soldier sneers. 

Abdullah is pacing. His chest expands as if about to explode. 

'Look relaxed,' Jamilah says. 

'Come this way,' a tall blond soldier tells me. Shit. I go.

'What are you doing here?' he says in English.

'I'm doing a photography project in Jaffa and she - I motion to Jamilah - is my student.'

'She's your student?'

'Yes.'

The blond is translating for the brown-eyed soldier, who seems to be his superior. 'She's the teacher. They're doing a project in Yafo,' he says.

'Yes,' I hurry on, 'photography - we're doing a project.' 

'And everything's OK? You're all right?'

'Fine, fine.'

The soldier looks at me for a moment, then over at the others by the car.

'Nothing's wrong? Are you sure?'

'I'm fine.'

'OK. You can go.' He hands me my passport. 'Sorry... Sorry for the questions,' he says.

Why didn't you tell me you're an Arab?

Amir is not his real name, although that’s what’s written on his business card: Taxi Amir. I never find out what his real name is. Amir’s a Muslim from Palestine but his mum was born in Jerusalem and eight years ago he got Israeli ID.

We’re driving back from Bethlehem. Amir’s ID allows him to cross the Palestine-Israel divide in the hills by Beit Jala and Walada. Amir moved recently to Jerusalem where he worked on the buses, cleaning, picked up Hebrew, and started driving a taxi round the city and beyond.

‘I saw I had to learn Hebrew very good and very fast,’ he says. ‘So I listened and asked questions and then I learned to read. I took anything with Hebrew on it and at first I couldn’t understand – I just looked at the words – but I learned bit by bit. Now I read a Hebrew paper every day.’

It’s not that easy for Amir, getting fares. The other day a woman of about 50 jumped into his cab and they were driving along and a couple of lights in he puts the radio on – just softly. It’s Arabic, though, the music that’s coming out.

‘Oh my God!’ says his passenger, throwing open the door. ‘You’re an Arab! Why didn’t you tell me you're an Arab?’ And she’s gone without even paying the fare.

A lot of people assume Amir’s Jewish. His Hebrew’s perfect, but it’s more than just the words you use – it’s the confident way you say them that makes the difference. We stop at a checkpoint on the road from Walada to Jerusalem. Amir winds down the window and addresses the soldier: ‘Ma hamatzav achi–what’s up brother?’ It’s pouring with rain and the soldier glances briefly at me in the back. ‘Tayeret’ says Amir – she’s a tourist. The soldier waves us through.

‘You have to speak to them first,’ Amir says. ‘Then they relax. If I’m just sitting here silent the soldiers get scared and take the whole car apart. I’ve been through here with four people in my car and they let us pass. Another time, I was alone and they opened everything – it was 20 minutes before they let me go.’

Then there was the couple in their 30s. Amir was cabbing one day in Jerusalem, downtown. His Arab cabbie mate was up ahead – there was a queue and Amir told the couple his mate was first. ‘We don’t want him, he’s an Arab,’ they said. ‘We’ll take you – we want a Jew.’

It’s not easy to tell what Amir is. There are no special identifying signs. His taxi has yellow Israeli plates, and its only adornment is an air-freshener, swinging the colours of the US flag. Amir himself is dark, semitic, but not too dark. He’s 26. His mother wants him married soon – his younger brother’s a father already, at only 23. It’s just not easy finding her – the right one. But girls like Amir, they really do.

There was this woman, only 22, who took the the cab especially for him. There was a line of cabs all calling her – Taxi! Taxi! Monit! She’s strolling along and they’re all calling to her and she ignores them, every one, until Amir. This fine-looking woman spots him, stops and saunters back, bending into the window as he winds it down.

‘How much to L–’ she says.

He tells her 50 shekels. Much too much. Wants to make sure she’s getting in for him.

‘That’s cool.’ She jumps into the front seat. And they’re just sitting there talking and she’s all, how old are you, what do you like doing, where do you go? Are you married? Do you have any kids?

After a while, she says, ‘So where are your family from? Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m an Arab, they’re from Palestine.’

She just sits there, frozen, arms clamped rigid to her sides: ‘Oh my God! I would have started something with you right now. I thought you were a Jew.’

Most of them don't have bullets

Bethlehem, Christmas Eve. I’m at the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square with Tariq, trying to get into midnight mass. We’re pushing and being pushed. Tariq has a big film camera and a Barbie-pink press card he got from God knows where. All evening we’ve driven round the town, a simple route made circuitous by roadblocks, and he’s flashed the press card, and mostly the soldiers have let us through.

I have never seen so much hardware in my life – feel like I should be packing myself. There are vans of soldiers in camouflage, police on every corner, some in blue, others in green with black woollen headgear, pulled down to their eyes and up over their mouths, keeping out the cold.

At the entrance to the church nervous men in suits talk into their jackets and have curly white wires coming out of the back of their heads. Then there’s us, and about a million awestruck tourists from all over the world.

People from Bethlehem don’t really come here for midnight mass, says Tariq, although they’d like to. You need a ticket to get in, and those are hard to get – unless you’re a visitor or a politician, like the Palestinian president Abu Mazen, who’s coming here tonight. But Tariq got tickets earlier today, and he pushes me ahead of him, waving them at officials who are holding back the crowd.

In the church lobby it’s kind of frenzied, with a step-through metal detector, like an airport check-in speeded up with guns. ‘No photos,’ a security man says, and Tariq has to hand his camera in. He gets into an argument with one of the guards, and I stand there trying to look relaxed, thinking, Christ, just one bullet and there’d be a Rambo-style shootout in this place.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Tariq, looking at me. ‘Most of them don’t have any – how do you call them?’

‘Bullets?’

‘Yeah – most of them don’t have any bullets. It’s not like you think.’ He goes back to arguing with the guard.

I look down and see a little guy with a moustache sitting in a chair. He’s one of a cluster of officials, just kind of hanging around. He has on a navy flying jacket and holds a metal detector in his hand, which he keeps running over his arm-pocket zip and giggling as he sets it off. He tries it out on the buttons, and it goes off again. I catch his eye and giggle. His superior barks out something stern, but stifles a smile as he turns his head away.

The service is packed so we stand in the corridor, which is lined with bodyguards sweating into their suits. Tall men in dark overcoats pace about. Each politician or important person has his own security detail, Tariq says, and there are some here to protect the priests.

A wave of people pushes forwards. ‘Back! Back! Get back! Do you understand English? Get back!’ shouts one of the overcoated men, pushing us up against the wall, and a troop of black berets marches someone down the corridor, hurrying him through a side-door, which is then slammed shut. This happens several times. Each time a different man and a different style of uniform.

Abu Mazen arrives. He's feet away, walking smartly, with snow-white hair. His men rush him into the room and slam the door. Minutes later it opens again and the Palestinian president is hustled past us, into the service at the heart of the church.

You have no rights

I am walking in the park in London, just arrived. Blue fingertips, crescent moon, a different light.

On the plane back, I sat next to a Muslim woman whom Israel had refused entry. The air hostess came at the start of the flight and took the woman's passport away. She entered the plane from a separate door, driven straight across the tarmac from her prison cell – two days’ incarceration with, as her interrogator told her, ‘no rights’.

You have no rights, is what he said, upon the woman’s suggestion that he tell her – indeed that she was entitled to know – what would happen next.

The woman, J, had intended to travel via Israel to the West Bank. It was not her first visit but this time she arrived on the same plane as a Muslim man who frightened security. They said that he and J were together in a plot. He was being deported too and sat on my other side, ranting throughout the flight about Yahud, and the gun his son was building to take them out.

‘That is the definition of bad luck,’ says J. Meaning that because by chance she and the man had shared a flight, the West Bank is closed to her now.

J lowers her voice to barely audible when she says ‘West Bank’ or names a town in Palestine. She drops her head to say it too. I can hardly hear her at one point. And she checks to see that no one’s listening while we speak.

There were three others in her cell. One, from the Philippines, cried all night. A Russian woman never said anything, only rocked back and forth and moaned. She spoke neither English nor Hebrew and no one knew what she thought.

The prison graffitti was shocking. It said I hate the Jews. Over and over. I hate the Jews. Not the Israelis but the Jews.

‘Israel has made people everywhere dislike Jews,’ says J.

‘Why can’t they distinguish between Israelis and the Jews?’ I ask.

‘Because Israel is the country that’s meant to look after the Jews. If you’re Jewish you can go there and get everything you need – a home, money. There was a Christian woman in the jail who’d been servant to an Israeli Jewish woman. They were from the same place in Russia. The Jewish woman got everything and the Christian woman was cleaning up after her.

‘When the Jewish woman died, the Christian woman had to leave Israel. Four years’ work – she paid for the visa, did Hebrew courses first – but the woman is not allowed to stay.’

The jailors, when they wanted something, shouted your nationality: You! Philippino! Come here! Or Russian! But they didn’t know how to refer to the British J. They called her nothing. Not even by her name. ‘I can understand it, why they don’t like someone who looks like me,’ J motions to her hijab. 'I mean, I am the other. I represent everything they fear.’

But why? Why did that security guy, the Israeli who had been so kind and talked about his Arab friends, why did he remain silent when the interrogator shouted in J’s face? Told her she had blood in her eyes. Said that the reason she was tired was because she was a liar, and lying takes hard work. How could someone be so kind one minute, so callous the next?

J shifts under her black jilbab, which has small pink roses sewn in a line all the way down the front.

'The joint non-violent struggle is our victory'

Palestinians and Israelis celebrate together after the Israeli Supreme Court rules that the separation fence should be moved, recovering 100 hectares of land for the villagers of Bilin.

Ramallah

On the bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah. Two countries at war, but you can take a bus to the other side. It's the number 18, everything is in Arabic and the colour is green. There are two nuns with thick glasses, several men, women with hijab, and without.

My friend Fadi will meet me when I get to the bus station in Ramallah. We are travelling through East Jerusalem. It's all white bricks, broken-ness, half-built. New developments; Jewish homes. I think that to do this journey, to travel this land, is to begin to understand.

We cross. I am on the other side of the wall. Here are boulders and dust; clouds rise white from the street. I am outside the fortress where once I felt so safe. The first time, returning from Tulkarem, I breathed a sign of relief as I stepped onto the Israeli side. Now it is the other way.

There is graffiti - English, gidon levi, Arabic, change your politic. A dead dog lying in the middle of the road.

They tell us not to come here, we are so scared. I call Fadi like 50 times this morning, every step of the way. I'm coming alone, is it ok? I'm getting the bus now, is it ok? Will you meet me? Is it ok? Is it ok?

'It's ok,' he says, every time. 'No problem, fine, even with a blue ID.'

You just take the bus to Ramallah from Jerusalem. From West to East. The sheitels give way to hijab, the shades to suntanned, wrinkled skin, and you are stripped, alone.

FADI is waiting as we pull into the bus station. It was only a half-hour drive, through the checkpoint without a stop. Getting into Israel is the part that's hard - no one cares if you leave. Adam, a friend from the States, is waiting too. We kiss both cheeks in the boiling sun and walk through central Ramallah to the Star and Bucks cafe.

Adam has already been here for two days. It's not his first trip. A while back he spent three months learning Arabic at Birzeit. Now, he's staying with Nabil, a Birzeit friend. Adam is Jewish. He admitted this to his Palestinian friends only towards the end of Birzeit - they laughed and said they'd guessed. But this time things have changed. Nabil was two months in an Israeli jail, and there's a fracture to their fragile trust. 'You brought Israel to our house,' is what Nabil said.

As we ascend to the coffee shop, Adam tells me to go first. This is in case someone, on the narrow crowded stairs, tries to grope me. 'It happens a lot,' he says. That's strange because so far I've noticed only quiet respect.

Nabil's wife is from Canada. She is Palestinian, and Israel won't let any Palestinians return so every three months she goes to Israel to renew her tourist visa, which last time they refused. This is married life.

It's sweltering outside and the light seems unbearably bright. People wander in and out of cars, travelling at a snail's pace, all over the road. It's a free for all, no horns. And everywhere, on the pavements in clusters, are groups of young men. They hold hands and touch each other to make a point. We pass too close and Fadi brushes his palm along the shoulders of an unknown man. No one bats an eye.

We sit in a shwarma place - the family area upstairs. There is air-conditioning. We rest. A man and his wife sit opposite. His hand creeps between the buttons of her jilbab. She has white skin, white hijab, big pale eyes. Eats shwarma like us. The man sees me see, does it again. I try hard not to look.

 

 

WE GO on a walkabout. Fadi returns to his office at the Ministry of Social Affairs. Adam wants to show me something. It's a monument to a Palestinian man killed here last week by the Israeli army. It's hard to know what happened, exactly, but I try to understand. 'The army comes in whenever they like. The Palestinians try to resist,' says Adam, 'but they don'€™t have the weaponry and if they shoot, the army just kills them. That's what happened to this guy, I think.' Fadi's version, later, is that the man was 'wanted' and the army executed him.

A man was shot dead last week on this street on this spot. And here are plants, his photograph and a small handwritten sign.

Opposite, is a women's clothing store. The owner and two friends are sitting outside on stools. We have a bit of a chat, then the owner wants a picture taken with me. He saves it to his phone wallpaper. 'Don't show that to your wife,' says Adam. 'It's okay,' says one of the friends. He's not married. Got some issues.' The men all laugh.

IT'S TWO O'CLOCK - time to meet Fadi at his work. We take a taxi to the Ministry of Social Affairs, passing the Muqataa, the Palestinian government buildings, a huge white compound heavily guarded, on the way. Out of the centre, there are wide and peaceful streets, fewer people and lots of space. Everything is sun-bleached green and white.

I see a Jewish star etched onto a wall. No one has covered it. Then another, spray-painted black onto a green bin. 'Soldiers leave them as they go past,' says Adam. I can't believe they've just been left there and no one's painted them out.

The Ministry is empty - most people finish work by two. Fadi, who's in public relations, meets us with his deputy. We drink coffee with lots of sugar from little white cups. They'd introduce us to social affairs minister Saleh Zidan, only he's in Gaza right now, so we go to the roof and look at Ramallah, the whole of it, baking in the sun beneath. I take pictures, one of which Fadi makes me delete, because in it, as he gestures to the settlements in the distance, he is smiling.

This is where social programmes are organised - widows, orphans, a shelter for women beaten by their men. No one's been paid for quite a while (the Hamas embargo, and Israel's withheld tax). Well, sometimes something comes through -€“ maybe 750 shekels a month.

BACK TO THE CENTRE in a taxi, the news comes on - and just like in Israel the volume goes up. Except here, the word you hear is Isra-eel, over and over again, instead of the Phlistin-eem that they repeat on the news in Tel Aviv.

On the corners, we hang out. We chat. We meet people. Friends know friends. Everyone is saying hello. We stop for tea and a chocolate eclair at the Urobian, talk to Jihad, the owner, and Bassam, an employee. I think about Tel Aviv. There are so many beautiful women; here are so many -€“ their skin, I notice, is very white, despite the scorching sun. Light and hungry eyes, diamond blue and green. They walk. Tight tops, jeans, sexy mane of hair. No one bothers them. 'They're Christians,' says Adam. So? 'Well, the Muslim women are supposed to be more pure. The Christians are known as loose.'

Salam and Nabil are standing on a corner. Adam's friends. Salam wears a brown suit and tie, even in this heat, with combed-back hair. He is a journalist. We talk about Alan Johnston. 'He was kidnapped, but he was a friend,' Salam says. Back in the Star and Bucks Adam smokes nargila and we talk. 'Could you have a friendship with another woman, not your wife?' Adam asks the men.

'Well, it's okay for me to sit and have a coffee with my colleagues,' says Salam. 'But more than that is not allowed. Once you have signed the marriage contract you can't be intimate with any woman but your wife. In the villages, though, if you even talked with another woman, it would be bad. You can say good morning, but nothing more than that.'

AS I SIT on the bus to Al-Quds I see a kite, a ragged kite flying in the dusk-blue sky. One, then two kite-tails, then hundreds sailing over the mounds of rubble under a huge pale setting sun.

I'm on the number 18. It stops at Qalandia and the Palestinians get out. The rest of us stay put. A soldier gets on, throws a quick look around, descends. We drive through and wait for the Palestinians on the other side. I see the flag of Israel flying above huge enclosures covered with barbed wire, and lanes, and traffic in lanes, and soldiers, Jewish soldiers in green with guns.

Up ahead is the wall. We build. The wall we build to keep them out; the watchtowers, cameras and speakers to keep us in. And the same pale setting sun the other side.

Street art, Palestine

Last week I went to Ramallah. Here is some art from the city centre:

 

'We shall write poetry to pass the time. In the glory of the tyrant shall we play'

'I shall not cry, for sadness I shall no longer embrace'

'God is great'    (the Iraqi flag)

'When will people see Handala's face? When Arab dignity is no longer threatened, and when the Arab individual regains his freedom and humanity.'

 

More on Ramallah soon. Thanks to Nizo for translation from the Arabic.

Incursion

Last night I was walking home from Florentine with my friend Sharon and we found a young boy lying unconscious, sprawled across the pavement at the bottom of some steps. A man on a bicycle was talking to the ambulance on his phone.

‘I can’t do that. That’s not for me,’ he said.

‘What’s not for you?’ said Sharon. She put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He lay on his side, skinny belly bare to the air, a smudge of filth across his T-shirt, dark brown skin.

‘Yeled,’ she said.

He was alive – we saw the beating of his heart.

He was vomiting. It looked like drink – but he was only a child, 11 or 12. He had nothing on him, no possessions, pockets empty and flat. We were on Salame, the part where a few scruffy houses sit between workshops and the waste. The steps led to a ‘collaborator’s’ house – an Arab family from the West Bank transferred by Israel to keep them safe. Everyone in Jaffa knew.

A black-haired man approached, bent and shook the boy, whose eyes slurred open. They spoke in Arabic.

‘He’s from the Territories,’ said the man. ‘No ID.’

The boy staggered to his feet veering towards the oncoming cars. We ran after, got him, and the ambulance came. Black-hair went away.

The medic pulled on purple gloves and leant over the boy, who had collapsed onto a grassy verge the other side of the street. Purple gloves prodded and shook, saying a few time how old are you? There was no reply, except mumbled Arabic, so the medic got on the phone.

‘What are you doing?’ said Sharon.

'Do you want me to tell you every detail of how I do my job?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘He doesn’t want treatment. I’m calling the police.'

The boy half-rose, and staggered off. We found him sitting on a step around the corner, in tears. So I called S, a man I’d only just met – a community leader from Jaffa. Midnight, a quarter after in fact. We gave S to the boy, who pressed the phone to the side of his face.

‘Someone gave him something to drink and it made him very sick,’ said S, back on the phone to me. ‘Isn’t the ambulance still there?’  But the ambulance had gone.

Two young men arrived, pulled the boy to standing and began to walk him away. Sharon followed.

‘Do you think it’s safe to let him go?’ said S, still on the end of the phone.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They say they’re his family but I don’t know.’

One of the men came over and tried to take the phone.

‘Give it to me.’ His right hand tightened to a fist. I’d already been robbed of one phone this week and I wasn’t losing two, so I said no.

Sharon by this time was shouting. I heard the word Shabak. Who are you? Shabak? Then: Give me the phone again, right in my face.

‘He thinks you’re calling the police,’ said Sharon. ‘The boy's illegal here.’

So S and the young man talked. They talked in Arabic and I don’t know what they said, but afterwards things calmed down. The man reached his arms round me and Sharon: ‘We’re going to take care of him. Aravim beyachad – we'll look after him. Don’t worry’

‘You’ll give him food – a bed?’ said Sharon.

'We'll take care of him,' the young man said.

Israeli in Bethlehem

‘It’s complicated – where I’m from depends on who I’m talking to. If it’s an Israeli, then I say I’m from Israel and I live in Jerusalem; if I’m talking to a Palestinian then I say I’m a Palestinian, I live in Bethlehem, but I have a blue ID.’

Alex is explaining his identity to me. We’re driving in his pick-up towards the alternative Bethlehem checkpoint, where I might have to show ID – and strictly speaking, I’m not allowed in. That’s because I’m Israeli, and according to Israeli law, I can’t enter areas under Palestinian Authority control. It’s to keep us safe, they say.

We pass a red sign in Hebrew saying Israeli citizens not allowed beyond this point. Alex checks my blue ID – my Israeli identity card. He wants to make sure I don’t have an army number. I didn’t do the army, and I didn’t have any idea that a number on my ID would show it – but Alex does. ‘If you’re ex-army, then it’s really dangerous to come here,’ he says. ‘For Palestinians, you could be a spy.’

At the main checkpoint everyone shows ID. But not here. This one lies on a road connecting Israel to the settlements. Once Israel’s separation wall is finished, no Palestinians will have access to this road, and the checkpoint will be closed. Here, they only check you if they think you’re Arab. We drive right through.

Later, but only later, Alex tells me that none of his Jewish friends from the Hebrew University would ever come and visit him in Bethlehem, in his four years there. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Too scared,’ he says. ‘Kidnapping. To some people out there, an Israeli is the ultimate prize. Did you see what happened to those two Israelis who got lost in Ramallah?’ He doesn’t have to fill me in. I’ve seen it – the footage of Palestinians waving bloody hands to the crowd after tearing the two Israeli reservists apart.

But that’s later. For now, he just says: ‘If anyone asks you, you’re only British, you have a visa. Show your British passport. Hide your Israeli ID. Don’t tell anyone here that you have any connection with Israel.’

I honestly think he’s exaggerating. But he lives here, and he knows.

At Alex’s house, we eat special Easter cookies, called ma’amul. The family has lived here always. They have a family tree going back 500 years. But Alex was born in Jerusalem – hence the Israeli ID. He’s allowed access to Bethlehem because he has family and property there. It is two days before Good Friday. His grandmother explains that the cookies are meant to remind us of the sponge the Romans gave Jesus on the Cross, to slake his thirst. The sponge was – what is the word? – we try to translate it from Arabic – saturated. Saturated with vinegar to stop the torture of his thirst.

The cookies are filled with nuts. I remember stories about Jesus from school. Jesus and Easter. It’s also Passover – Pesach. Ido told me the word in Hebrew for Easter – Pascha. Jesus’ Last Supper, I think, was a Passover meal.

‘How does it feel to be here?’ Alex asks.

A million miles from Israel, is how it feels. But I’m not sure I can say this, as his grandmother is sitting at the table, and I’m trying not to show anyone I have any connection with Israel, so I satisfy myself with ‘so different from Jerusalem’.

‘Yes, very peaceful,’ he says.

‘Isolated.’ I bite into the second cookie on my plate.

Outside the Bethlehem Bible College we meet Tariq, friend of a friend in London, who is going to show me around. Alex and Tariq are both Christian Arabs – which matters in this part of the world, where mixing is not especially popular, and it is of acute importance to which community you belong.

Tariq has lived in Bethlehem all his life.

‘What’s it like?’ I ask.

‘It’s the best place in the world.’

He drives around very fast pointing out Herod’s castle, where the shepherds were sitting when the angel came and told them Jesus was going to be born. The wall seems to be everywhere, covered in graffiti. We heart you Palestine. Your anger is a gift. I hate Israel. The graffiti’s mainly in English, a bit in Spanish, French.

‘It’s getting worse every day,’ he says 10 minutes later.

‘Why?’

‘The occupation. People can’t get into Israel – they don’t have permission, and so they can’t get there to work. They lose half their income, and the tourists don’t come any more, since the second intifada – they are afraid.’

Har Homa settlement, a clutch of bright white houses, stares right back at us from a neighbouring hill.

‘That land belonged to people from Beit Jala, Beit Sahor and Bethlehem,’ says Tariq. ‘They took the land – my family had land there. They took most of it, and the rest they will take soon. Well, they don’t just take it – they have a law in Israel, that if you don’t use the land for 15 years then it’s not yours any more. Then they stop you from getting to your land so you can’t use it…’

I ask him if the IDF still come. ‘They come whenever they want. According to the Oslo agreement, they shouldn’t, but they do. No one will stop them.’ He nods at a narrow alley – ‘two days ago it was full of Israeli soldiers…’ What do they do when they’re here? ‘Nothing – just walk around. Whatever they want.’ They also arrest wanted Palestinians, Alex later says.

We stop at the old city and get out of the car. There are pictures of men with guns in front of the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, pasted to the walls. I can’t read them but I know what they say. These are Palestinian men who died fighting Israel. They are called martyrs by the Palestinians. A young boy passing by sees us standing there and shouts shahid – the Arabic word for martyr.

Most of the pictures show blank eyes, posed with the gun before death. We pause in front of each so Tariq can translate: ‘He died in Bethlehem Easter 2006. April 9^th, 2006. He was from the camps in Bethlehem, I knew him.’ As we round a corner I see a picture unlike the others. They are all chilling – looking into the eyes of a man days before his death. But this one has an intimacy different from the rest. Surely a shahid is not supposed to look so sad and gentle? Where did all that toughness go?

The wall is everywhere, jagged diagonal blocks cut every view. ‘All the towns are surrounded,’ says Tariq. ‘Hebron, Ramallah… but in Bethlehem you see it.’

The oppressive atmosphere lifts as we enter the Nativity Church – the place where Jesus was born. Two Palestinian policemen hunch outside with the huge guns – no one does security in the Middle East without a big, fuck-off gun. Don’t the small ones kill just as well? Tariq says they’ll ask me where I’m from and ask to see ID. I prepare myself, but they don’t say a thing.

The church is nearly 2,000 years old. Orthodox chanting fills the air – a service is in progress under hundreds of gold lamps and coloured lights. Only 15 per cent of Bethlehem is Christian now – it used to be nearly 80 per cent, but the Christians are leaving to find a better life abroad. Bethlehem is mainly Muslim now.

Downstairs in the basement was where Jesus was born. An Irish woman with a plastic baby shows me where the manger was. She cradles the doll in her arms and kisses it. It has been blessed. You must kiss it, she says, holding it out. I kiss it. ‘Are you married?’ she asks. I tell her no. ‘God bless you,’ she says.

‘Ok lady, that’s enough,’ says a priest with a knitted woollen hat.

‘Thank you father,’ says the woman, handing him back the doll. He puts it away in a cardboard box.

Tariq’s family came here from Syria, 600 years ago. His grandfather’s grandfather is buried here in Bethlehem and he can visit the grave. ‘Usually, because we don’t have so much room, they move the bones. But my great great grandfathers were all, most of them, priests, so they’ll never move the bones.’

Outside, Tariq points out the entrance to the church – it used to be much bigger. From a wide arch it’s been bricked up to a stoop-down five-foot hatch. ‘Because the Muslims came,’ he says. ‘I don’t know when – 700? With their horses, to ride inside the church, to conquer the Christians.’

We eat falafel, for which Tariq pays with shekels bearing the words for the redemption of Zion, under the eye of Har Homa, whose white roofs hang between the church and the trees.

Tariq can not leave Bethlehem. He has Palestinian ID. Alex has Israeli ID and he can go where he likes but Tariq is trapped. When the roads are open, he can travel to Ramallah, Hebron, Jenin… Nablus. But they were closed for the first two years of the second intifada, and open to private cars only since Christmas. It didn’t used to be that way – they could travel to Tiberias, Jerusalem, Haifa – well inside Israel. Tariq remembers going with his father. But the second intifada changed it all.

Tariq will never be allowed into Israel. He’s blacklisted after time in an Israeli jail. He was 18 days inside, 11 in solitary in a six by eight-foot cell. They did not beat him. Someone he knew was selling weapons. After questioning, they released him without charge.

He does not complain, just tells me the facts. He doesn’t need to spell it out. Sadness saturates this air. Frustration, longing and loss saturate this place.

At the checkpoint on the way out, Alex throws a breezy erev tov at the soldiers, and we sail right through. As we head to Jerusalem on the darkening road, Alex tells me: ‘My father says the best time was under the Israelis, where there was no Palestinian authority. At least then we could move about and do what we wanted, go where we wanted. Yes, it was occupation, but things were orderly. Now it’s just a mess.’

This is when he comes out with all the kidnapping stuff, and about the Israeli soldiers that got torn apart. When I get back to Israel, I go to my neighbour Eyal. I tell him that I was in Bethlehem. Assaf and his fiancée are sitting there. ‘You’re brave,’ they say.

Each side is the other’s mirror: terror and the terrified. I remember Tariq’s final words, before we said goodbye: ‘They are there, the Israelis. They will never leave. They can do whatever they want and no one can stop them. And they do not want us here.’

Hebron

It’s a bus-full, maybe 30 of us, leaving from a parking lot in Jerusalem, out into the whitewashed hills. We are travelling Road 60, which crosses the West Bank, cutting Israel into two, on the way to Hebron. Michael and Yehuda from Breaking the Silence, a group of soldiers who served in the Palestinian territories, are here to give us ‘a much-needed perspective on the West Bank’.

Passing a Palestinian refugee camp on our left, we arrive at the settlement of Kiryat Arba. The Israeli flag flaps above a sentry post and a sign in Hebrew advertises new-build homes. This town is home to 6,500 people – mostly new immigrants from the former Soviet Union. A subsidised, bulletproof bus takes 50 minutes from here to Jerusalem, and they get discounts on their taxes too.

We wait at the entrance while the Kiryat Arba security forces (‘a militia’, says Yehuda) decide whether to let us in. Briefly, I wonder why we are not travelling in a bulletproof bus. ‘It’s the same story every time,’ says Yehuda, who runs these trips to Hebron fortnightly. ‘They already know us but they make us wait for the police. They don’t have the legal right, but we don’t want to cause a fuss, so we wait.’

After about ten minutes we are allowed in, and follow a dinky-toy police van to the centre of town. We pass Palestinian neighbourhoods and an army base. Religious Jews are languid under the boulevard shades. It’s quiet and clean. A bus with blacked-out windows passes us and I catch a glimpse of shadow Hassidim sitting rigid, like dolls. Meir Kahane Park is on our right. Inside, says Yehuda, is a shrine to Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians, before being beaten to death, in Hebron in 1994. On the shrine someone has written: Here Baruch Goldstein was killed, pure of heart.

Before 1948, Michael explains, Jews and Arabs co-existed in Hebron – co-existed, that is, until 67 Jews died in a massacre in 1929. After that, there were almost no Jews in Hebron until Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, and the families who had left after the massacre asked to return. Prime Minister Ben Gurion said no, but a year later, settlers got permission to visit Hebron for Passover and after the holiday refused to leave. Eventually, the Israeli army let them stay.

We're in Hebron now. Since 1997, the city has been split between Israeli and Palestinian Authority control. It is home to 150,000 Palestinians and 650 Jewish settlers, with 500 Israeli soldiers protecting the Jews. We follow an Israeli-only highway towards our destination –  Israeli-controlled central zone, H2. A clean brown road bisects the view: it’s for Jews to reach the Tomb of the Patriarchs, burial site of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There is no one on this road.

Groups of Palestinian men walk the street, pointing; a little girl stands and stares; a donkey, a cart, and a boy who mimes throwing something at us, then sticks out his tongue. There is graffiti in Russian and a camouflaged house – Arab, but the upper floor occupied by Israeli army, its inhabitants forced down to the ground. There is not a sound.

Army policy is to avoid conflict between Jews and Arabs by creation of ‘sterile zones’. This means that areas are cleared for Jews, and Arabs must make their way through the city by alternative routes. In 80 per cent of central Hebron, Palestinians are not allowed to drive: they travel by foot. Arab stores posing a security risk to settlers are closed. Other parts of H2 are entirely off-limits to Arabs, even to those who still live within the Israeli-controlled zone.

As we drive, I see no civilian, neither Arab nor Jew, just groups of border police in sunglasses and sage uniforms, hanging out in the shade. A woman in white hijab ducks into the side of a house, and then I spot a Jew, pale with a bright orange kippa, kneeling to tie up his shoe.

We have arrived, and descend the bus to stand in a town square. Behind an orange plastic waist-high barrier, Palestinian women pass. There is a mini-road block at the barrier’s end, but the barrier itself divides the road we stand on into two: we are walking the same road as the Palestinians – just that they are on the other side.

Eight soldiers armed with Uzis guard us as we walk. They are there to protect us from Palestinian snipers firing from the surrounding hills: two lead, two bring up the rear, and the others fan out to the sides. There is also a policeman, in blue.

We stand on a ‘sterilised’ road. Palestinians cannot pass from one side of H2, across this road, to the other, Yehuda explains. The call to prayer drowns his next words out, and, looking up, I see two young Arab men watching us from the balcony of a house on the other side of the orange barrier. The ground is made of dirt.

Mini-road-blocks, sandbagged with tight-stretched camouflage, box us in. Shut-up shops with rusting Arabic signs line the street and everywhere, on every door, are graffiti Stars of David in black, some with the word ‘occupied’ scrawled in Hebrew beneath.

‘An Arab family lived here,’ says Yehuda, pointing to a house on a patch of open ground. ‘After a Palestinian sniper murdered an 11-month-old baby, the settlers made the family’s life hell. The Israeli army tried to protect them – they tried to build an iron wall around their house, but the settlers broke all the equipment. Finally, they built a six-metre concrete wall around the house – but does the family live in their house today? No – because the only entrance is through a locked gate in the old city, to which the army holds the key.’

We are standing on the front line, where Arabs and Jews battle to hold their ground. Jewish children play: tiny girls in floor-length skirts, boys lounging in the sun. A street away, Muslim toddlers walk in hijab to the ground.

A jeep zooms past, soldiers hanging from its open back door.

Tacked to the side of a building, is a sign: ‘These houses were built on land stolen by Arabs after the massacre of the Jewish community in 1929. We demand our property back – the Jewish community of Hebron.’

‘Settlers see themselves as a continuation of the pre-1948 community,’ says Yehuda. ‘But the original community were not Zionist. The deeds to this house belong to a Jew who has said he doesn't want it to be occupied by a settler family at the expense of Palestinians who live here now.’

Yehuda and Michael have warned us we might get trouble from the settlers, who hate these tours, and sometimes throw abuse, or rocks. But so far no one’s approached. The settlers are just hanging out, or driving along slowly in pick-up trucks, whilst kids with pinched-up faces run about. But, I wonder, which one of them wrote Arabs are sand niggers on the shuttered-up shop in this sterilised street, next to the brand new Beit Midrash, squatting behind its barbed-wire fence.

We climb a hill to the Palestinian part of town. Children smile and say shalom, and the soldiers seem more relaxed: they kick back a little, chatting to the kids with the Arabic words they’ve learned. We visit a Palestinian home, and the owner tells us that settlers throw rubbish into his garden, and stones at the windows, so now he’s put up bars. His daughter is escorted to school, otherwise the Jewish children attack her with stones.

We sit in silence for a while. Then one of the soldiers asks me if I’m Jewish. ‘You have a Magen David,’ he says, pointing to the Star of David around my neck.

‘Yes, I am a Jew.'

I ask them how it is in Hebron.

‘Easy, easy,’ they say.

Yehuda reads us testimony from Israeli soldiers who have served in Hebron. ‘Occupation destroys the moral fabric of those who enforce it,’ he says. ‘Israeli men fragment their identity so they can be good fathers and sons at home, and brutal soldiers in the West Bank.’

‘Listen to that bullshit,’ says a young soldier with dark eyes.

As we leave through a pink sunset, another soldier, Yonatan, walks by my side: ‘Are you the only Jew?’ he asks.

‘No – my friend Dov is too.’ I nod to the front of the group.

‘Well, I’ll protect you and I’ll protect him,’ says Yonatan.

A hundred muezzins echo the call to prayer – not just one like in my Jaffa home.

We've reached our final stop – Tomb of the Patriarchs in the central square. Last to descend the bus, I see Yehuda in the midst of a fracas, surrounded by Jewish settlers, who are shouting: ‘Anti-Semite! You are worse than Hitler!’ Head bowed, Yehuda tries to dodge them, but every way he turns they confront him again. Police rush in and surround him. He is hustled away. The last thing I see his the black kippa on the top of his head.

Before I can move, there is a man in my face: ‘Anti-Semite! Go back home!’

It’s a second before I react: ‘What did you say?’

‘Anti-Semite – go back where you came from!’

‘Nazi!’ – this is from an older man, whose beard is long and white.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I say.

A group of Jewish men has gathered. Their women are nowhere to be seen.

‘Arab-lover!’

A policeman places himself between me and them, arms out wide, but I am so angry I cannot walk away.

‘You’re a disgrace!’ I shout, my face screwed up in fury.

‘Bitch!’ says a voice from the back of the crowd.

I step forward, part of me calculating if they’ll turn violent, part too livid to care. Raising one arm, I point a finger into the face of the nearest man: ‘You disgust me,’ I say. Then I step away.

Breaking the silence

False Dichotomies in Hebron