A small advertisement in The Jerusalem Post said ‘Peace Now invites you to get to know what’s happening behind the headlines! Meet at 9.00 a.m. tomorrow outside the Crown Plaza Hotel’. Clever wording, I thought, likely to lure curious outsiders who had never heard of Peace Now but felt ‘peace’ was a good idea.

The Crown Plaza, almost opposite the central bus station, is among Jerusalem’s tallest buildings and has no nearby rival. But its planners disregarded walkers’ needs and its entrance proved ridiculously difficult to find. Eventually I strayed into an empty car park giving access to a low-rise annex draped with blue and white banners emblazoned ‘G.A.’ The United Jewish Communities were holding their General Assembly – a great occasion, as 2,500 delegates gathered from all over North America. There wasn’t a security guard in sight but no doubt electronic eyes were everywhere.

By 8.50 I was alone on a charmless concrete terrace outside the main entrance. Sitting under a gnarled, pollarded fig tree, I opened my Jerusalem Post and read that the GA meets annually ‘to discuss Israeli-diaspora relations’. In his welcoming address Mayor Barkat had noted: ‘Every Jew in the world is a shareholder of Jerusalem … We must not accept the fact that this is the poorest city in the country. We must work hard to make it rich in industry, culture and jobs.’

I remained alone until 9.15 when two elderly women arrived, heavily made-up and not well-disposed towards gentile tourists – delegates to the GA, I later gathered. Then the coach appeared and gradually filled up with an intriguing mix of limping, American olim, keenly pro-Palestinian Internationals, agency workers (mainly Scandinavian), journalists (German and Australian), a middle-aged Canadian and his young American colleague (both sociologists) and two serious-minded backpackers born in Egypt but carrying British passports. The Canadian, Rafi, sat beside me and didn’t like what he was hearing from Monika, our guide. He was on his first visit to Israel and knew nothing of Peace Now’s origin or ethos.

Monika was small and sinewy, ginger-haired and freckled, intense and humourless. She introduced herself by mentioning that when the Oslo Accords were signed her platoon had to watch the ceremony on TV and ‘As kids we saw hope then – soon gone! After I’d served a bit more at checkpoints it looked like the settlements were bad for Israel. At university I joined Peace Now.’ She was brave, I reckoned, to take on this busload of unknowns whose political predilections and prejudices might not easily coalesce. Carefully she chose her words, using ‘non-Jewish Israeli’ instead of Israeli Arab, avoiding Samaria and Judea and ‘occupied territory’, leaving political parties nameless, identifiable only by their policies and referring to the Apartheid Barrier as ‘our most troublesome security idea’. For the numerous aborted ‘peace processes’ she blamed all leaders equally, which drew some muttered protests. Monika frowned at the mutterers: she had already made it plain that this was not to become a ‘discussion group’. We were there to listen, our tour was an initiation into the mysteries of the settlement project.

The civilian occupation of the West Bank, based on the Allon Plan, began in the hot depths of the Jordan Valley immediately after the Six-Day War in 1967. Yigal Allon, then chairman of the Ministerial Committee on Settlements, had an ambition to strengthen Israel’s defences by redrawing the border to include the Jordan Valley and Judean desert. His strategic plan, though never openly government-approved, determined settlement locations until 1977. Monika sketched its outlines without quoting its central message: ‘Maximum security and maximum territory for Israel, with a minimum number of Arabs’. Allon saw the planting of ‘a Jewish presence’ as the first step towards annexation.

Only Israel-registered vehicles with yellow number plates may use the settlers’ roads and our circular tour showed how effectively the settlements have cut East Jerusalem off from its natural hinterland while almost bisecting the West Bank. We didn’t stop to stare, merely cruised around viewing the green lawns, swimming pools, shade trees, flowering shrubs – all made possible, Monika explained, by the diversion of most of the area’s limited water supply away from Palestinian villages, fields and orchards. We avoided all ‘outposts’ where an unarmoured (‘enemy’) vehicle might well have been stoned or worse. Monika wanted to show us two industrial areas (Mishor Adumin and Binyamin) but we were refused entry at both checkpoints. Many secular/moderate settlers are unnerved by the ever-increasing tension which also reduces the value of their property. Monika believed that such people (her parents among them) would gladly return to Israel if adequately compensated. A generation ago government subsidies induced many non-observant Jews to exchange shabby homes in an overcrowded, under-resourced, dusty city for new houses on an airy, well-watered hilltop. Some well-off urban dwellers bought sites and built for themselves. Some ultra-Orthodox families claimed to have bought sites but the relevant documents proved to be forgeries. That however could not be held against them by the authorities – themselves responsible for the whole illegal project. Peace Now excoriated the government’s complacent admission that it has been consistently contravening its own law, clearly established in a 1979 landmark case in the Israeli High Court of Justice. Monika emphasised that the territories conquered in ’67 were never annexed (apart from East Jerusalem) but left with the ‘spoils of war’ status, a crucial fact easily overlooked. For more than forty years those ‘spoils’ have been ruled, in theory, through the laws of the State of Israel.

Here our guide again repeated that all Peace Now’s information is obtained from the Israel Civil Administration, the government agency responsible for settlements. According to their own data, almost 40% of appropriated land is/was privately owned by Palestinians who collectively own the other 60%.

Monika corrected the current image of settlers as a uniform subculture of surly, racist, trigger-happy religious freaks. Those nurtured by Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of Faithful’, founded in 1974) do indeed blend messianistic maunderings with shrewdly calculated territorial expansionism. This bloc, self-described as a ‘national-religious’ organisation, has leant hard on successive governments to sponsor more and more settlements in the mountains, close to Palestinian cities and villages. Quite different are the seculars living just beyond the pre-’67 border known as the Green Line. Some of those ‘community settlements’ faintly resemble kibbutzim; would-be residents are vetted and their ideological leanings and degree of religious observance (if any) are regularly monitored. But there the resemblance ends. Such hard-working citizens are card-carrying members of the consumer society (often carrying several cards, which has led here as elsewhere to destabilising personal debts). Our tour was planned, said Monika, around these ‘garden suburbs’, designed to serve as dorm-towns for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. (‘Dorm-town’ has to be one of the twentieth century’s dreariest innovations.)

A rough unpaved cul-de-sac led to our only stop, Nabi Samuel, on a barren 2,500-foot hilltop some four miles east of Jerusalem. Here, in the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian built a mini-monastery over the Prophet Samuel’s putative tomb. Within a few centuries this monument was being equally revered by Jews and Muslims – until the Crusader tyrants forbade Jewish pilgrimages and erected a church. Saladin’s regime encouraged the building of a synagogue and in the eighteenth century the church was converted to a mosque. Adjacent synagogues and mosques could cause prolonged petty squabbles, as when Muslims campaigned to have Jerusalem’s very beautiful thirteenth-century Ramban Synagogue closed down because loud praying distracted worshippers in the nextdoor al-Umari Mosque. For decades, in that case, the qadi’s judgement favoured the Jews; but in 1587 the Ramban was permanently sealed, leaving its small congregation to store their scrolls at home and pray privately. Nabi Samuel provoked similar tensions with a different outcome. Although Jewish pilgrims tended to scorn gentile pilgrims, the local qadi always backed the Jews.

From this hilltop the Crusaders first saw Jerusalem and therefore named it ‘Mount of Joy’ before galloping down to slaughter Jerusalemites on an industrial scale. By 1192 the Europeans’ luck had turned, to the great benefit of everybody else. Richard the Lionheart’s Third Crusade waited a long time on the Mount of Joy for essential reinforcements that never turned up. The Crusaders were about to lose their state. As Karen Armstrong writes:

This hilltop’s strategic relationship to Jerusalem made bloodshed inevitable during the First World War and again in ’48 and ’67. The Six-Day War sent most Palestinians fleeing into Jordan from dwellings that for generations had been clustered around the mosque. When the village’s total demolition took place in 1971 those remaining (200 or so) were ‘relocated’ to a hamlet that at first sight seems abandoned. Then I noticed two new houses at the edge and associated them with the IDF’s masts – gigantic constructions, visible from the Old City walls. Until 1986 this isolated community had to buy water from far away; both their springs had been requisitioned for the benefit of Ramot, a nearby settlement. All building is forbidden; Nabi Samuel is not even allowed to maintain its tracks and pathways. Nor may its inhabitants use personal cars; they must walk to the main road, then take a taxi. The Apartheid Barrier now cuts them off from 90% of their land and Monika told us the surrounding area (part of the West Bank) had just been set aside for development as a ‘National Park’ to be run by Israel’s tourist authority.

Our bus parked beside the only other vehicle on the hilltop, a West Jerusalem taxi whose five Haredim passengers, wrapped in prayer-shawls, were ambling towards the tomb, quietly chanting. Despite contemporary animosities, it moved me in a strange way to see them here, linking us to beliefs and rituals predating both Jesus and Mohammad.

Soldiers with fingers on triggers flanked the turnstile through which we slowly shuffled, one by one, being checked by a policewoman with a long equine face and large clumsy hands. As on the Wailing Wall esplanade, I resented the ‘spirit of place’ being obliterated by militarism while slick security devices diminished the dignity of this half-ruined mosque. Within the fence, we loitered on a causeway overlooking recent excavations. In the 1990s, when archaeologists arrived to dig below the razed village, they found a second-century BC Hasmonean public building, a Byzantine winepress, a block of Crusader stables, a Mamluk iron foundry and much else. For reasons Monika wouldn’t disclose, a stroll through these widespread treasures was not possible.

At one end of the ruin, close to Samuel’s large white tomb, the Haredim were vigorously rocking to and fro, intoning fervent prayers. Monika led us away from them, up the minaret’s steep spiral stairway of worn stone. From this height, on a clear day, much of the West Bank is visible, mile after undulating mile of brownish (in November) Occupied territory. Ramallah’s expanding suburbs smudged the horizon and Monika drew our attention to the Apartheid Barrier ‘protecting’ various settlements. The extent to which Palestinian villages are entrapped and deprived of their farmland was so evident that involuntarily my fists clenched. Monika pointed west and south to Har Ha’dar and Giv’at Ze’ev, and to Ramot and Ramat Shlomo just beyond Jerusalem’s municipal border. Much closer – almost within earshot – was the hi-tech industrial estate of Har Hotzvim, offering no jobs to Palestinian manual workers. More than 220,000 settlers now live on this confiscated land.

As I stood by the parapet, scribbling notes, a tall thin man, silver-haired and slightly stooped, paused beside me. He had noticed my passport and spoke with an agreeably soft Boston accent. ‘Irish journalist? Learning a lot today? Hard to believe … We’ve a good mentor, well practised but a bit selective. Better she’d allow questions to liven things up.’

I opined that given a heterogeneous busload and a contentious theme, things could quickly get too lively. Jeff shrugged, then introduced himself as an opponent of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in the States, ‘here to research the nutters’. He peered over the parapet – ‘Like that bunch down there, never raising their eyes to acknowledge other sorts of humans. I figure Israel needs to recalibrate them – has to. And has to have a new government. Can’t go on with a prime minister heading to jail for corruption – or so I hope. You wonder what the GA delegates use to dull their pain … since childhood cheering Israel on, now looking at a country whose President is charged with rape and a lot more besides and whose prime minister has sticky fingers in Diaspora purses …’

I found myself defending Israel. ‘At least dirty linen is washed in public, discussed in the media, maybe even punished in the courts.’

‘Sure, but the traces of democracy are getting fainter. And the courts are reliable like a torn mosquito net.’

At which point Monika summoned us back to the bus.

Our driver was an East Jerusalemite and at the checkpoint below Nabi Samuel an insolent young soldier chose to relieve his boredom at our expense. Slowly and suspiciously he examined the driver’s ID card, before getting into a long argument with Monika who obviously had not wanted our tour to be so true to (Palestinian) life. We were made to pull over for twenty minutes while two adolescents, male and female, came on board to scrutinise everyone’s papers. Meanwhile their officer sat in a hut beside the watchtower, ostensibly establishing the validity of the driver’s blue card. Monika, her anger not quite concealed, tried to keep up an informative flow but was repeatedly interrupted by indignant objections to ‘this stupid delay’. Even more up-scuttling, from her point of view, were pertinent questions from two Swedish Internationals.

‘Why has Hillary Clinton called the PA “the Palestinians’ only legitimate government”? Didn’t Hamas win the democratic election in January ’06?’

‘Why did the Quartet call it “a terrorist organisation” after it won most votes?’

This is the sort of challenge Peace Now finds distasteful. One simply does not discuss Hamas.

Discipline was breaking down. On the way back Jeff questioned Monika about recent violence germane to her theme. In a Jabal al-Mukabber yeshiva, where young men train to become religious settlers, eight had been killed and thirty-five injured by a solo Palestinian gunman. Then ultra-Orthodox settlers attacked Palestinian homes and businesses; next day the police apologised for being ‘unable to get there in time’. A few weeks later, as part-revenge for the yeshiva murders, a fifty-one-year-old father of nine was stabbed in the back on his way to work. Five other fatal stabbings followed. Monika admitted that Israeli police do not rush to protect Palestinians.

When we had left the bus Jeff commented, ‘It’s only amazing there isn’t more killing. But there will be. What does it do to young men to see their homes and lands taken from them week after week, year after year – while they can only stand around, watching …’

I nodded, remembering my clenched fists on the mosque roof.

Next day, drinking beer with my new friend Jeff in the seclusion of the American Colony Hotel’s refreshingly green garden, I learned much about Israel’s US support groups. Best known are the GA, AIPAC, the United Jewish Communities, the Birthright Israel International and the Anti-Defamation League. When the Swiss government did a €20 billion energy deal with Iran the latter could afford a half-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune:

Said Jeff, ‘As we speak, the Israel lobby will be weeding its few opponents out of Obama’s new administration. This year Jews voted Democrat by about four to one and most of the lobbyists are funded by liberal Jews. But on big Israeli issues they’ll always manoeuvre with Republicans. I want people to understand the lobbyists don’t represent most American Jews. It only looks that way, they’re so fast on their feet.’

‘And so rich,’ I said.

Jeff’s face hardened. ‘Annually, 600,000 individuals each donate anything from one hundred to five million dollars. Donors asking how their money’s spent hear it’s not earmarked but helps many needy projects. A big minority would kick against subsidising settlements – especially outposts, banned even by Israel. Gush Emunim defies official US policy so the Jewish Agency must work hard to keep donations tax-free. They’ve gone through a bureaucratic hell to shift their Settlement Department to the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). On paper this looks fine, on the ground the same individuals spend those dollars on the same projects – wearing another uniform!’

Jeff looked at his watch, then had to hurry away to keep an appointment with a Yiddish speaker in Mea She’arim, the ultra-Orthodox district of Jerusalem.

On the hostel roof, where I often talked with Sari’s English-speaking friends, one young man provided a footnote to my Peace Now tour. ‘Did you meet the spies?’ he asked. ‘Mossad’s helpers live at Nabi Samuel, trying to get tourists to hire them for guiding.’

When I looked blank Mustapha explained; those new houses on the hamlet’s edge belong to collaborators who dare not sleep in their homes. At night they move to a flat in Ramot, the nearest settlement. Puzzled, I asked, ‘What’s the point of spies if their job is known?’

Mustapha smiled sourly. ‘It’s a way of intimidation. People knowing someone is always watching have no calm. Israelis are wanting those people gone, trying to make every day so bad they go. For a Nature Park they want to bulldoze Nabi Samuel, al-Qubeibeh and al-Jib. My father’s parents ran from Nabi Samuel in ’67. They came to Jerusalem for medicines my grandmother couldn’t get when the IDF made our village a prison.’

Conversations on the roof could be harrowing, all the more so for people’s sufferings being understated. It bothered me that most men weren’t outwardly angry, but seemed resigned to being bullied for the foreseeable future. Sari had indicated that in general East Jerusalemites chose to distance themselves from the OPT’s resistance fighters. Seemingly the second Intifada – the merciless suicide bombing and Israel’s over-reaction to it – had engendered a below-the-surface despair. In 2008 things were comparatively quiet again; the bombers had realised their murdering of civilians was counterproductive, the tourists were back. Yet the average East Jerusalemite remained exposed to a police-state routine of humiliating, relentless, low-key repression. Inevitably this erodes self-confidence, as it is meant to do. These harsh restrictions also affect OPT residents needing hospital treatment unavailable at home; they cannot visit Jerusalem without hard-to-get permits.

Palestinians born in East Jerusalem, of families rooted there for generations, are in an irrational category, one of many contrived by the Israelis. They are ‘immigrants with permanent residence status’. (Immigrants from where?) Despite annexation, those persons are rendered stateless, denied the rights to citizenship, to a passport, to a vote in national elections. East Jerusalemites who need to work or study abroad lose their blue card if they cannot afford to return annually to renew it. Once lost, it’s irretrievable and that individual can never return to his/her homeland. The government may then seize the ‘absentee’s’ property, left unoccupied by the owner because he/she has not been allowed to return. Yet Zionism’s ‘Law of Return’ gives all Jews from everywhere Israeli citizenship, with few questions asked about how Jewish they are. What percentage of the 1990s Russian influx was genuinely dedicated to either Judaism or Zionism? We do know that a high percentage were uncircumcised – to the vocal horror of various rabbis.

Zionists have nightmares about ‘the demographics’; will Jews be in a minority in Israel by 2020? Hence the 2003 ‘Citizenship and Entry Act’, preventing non-Jewish spouses from entering Israel – where one-fifth of the population is non-Jewish! If an ‘immigrant’ marries an OPT resident the couple must live apart, or the Jerusalemite must move and forfeit his/her blue card – or both must risk severe punishments.

The aptly named Educational Bookshop on Saladin Street is the scene of monthly literary ‘events’ and Arabic film showings. There I first met Shaul, a volunteer worker with B’Tselem, Israel’s foremost human rights organisation. On the telephone he had described himself as ‘skinny and bald’, leading me to expect someone of mature years. In fact he was young and energetic, small and olive-skinned, with a receding hairline. His parents, who made aliyah from Miami before he was born, deplored his activism. After several coffees (Saladin Street is in a ‘dry’ zone), he proposed a tour of East Jerusalem on the morrow, ending in Sheikh Jarrah where friends of his ran a rudimentary medical centre provided in 1993 by the Jerusalem Foundation. This group’s foreign donors usually fund only Jewish projects but Mayor Kollek had persuaded them to spare a little for Arabs – ‘in Israel’s interest’.

We met at the Damascus Gate and on the Nablus Road passed a long queue outside the dreaded Ministry of the Interior. There Palestinians of all ages and states of health must stand for many hours (or sit on the ground) while waiting to obtain residence cards, travel permits (necessary even for the twenty-minute journeys to Ramallah or Bethlehem) and those numerous other documents designed to make their personal and business lives a misery. Shaul hoped the system might soon be changed; a case against the East Jerusalem Ministry of the Interior was being taken to the High Court. This office was open for only four hours from 8.00 a.m., to serve a daily average of 200 people. Some had to queue for days. Shaul didn’t doubt the under-staffing was deliberate.

In Obeida Street we paused to salute the fabled Orient House, the Husseini family’s dignified mansion – now all shuttered and padlocked and drab. Built in 1897, it saw many historic meetings and occasions, starting with an Ottoman tea party for Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898 and including conversion to a ‘palace’ when Haile Selassie held court here in 1936–37 during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. Shaul was momentarily overawed when I recalled standing within ten yards of the minuscule emperor in 1967 (a few weeks before the Six-Day War) as he quelled a student riot in Addis Ababa – not by any display of weaponry but by his physical presence, unguarded, among the angry crowd.

‘You are old!’ exclaimed Shaul. ‘And that’s like a fairy story about some magic spell!’

After the Nakba, Orient House became a hotel run by the Husseinis and then – in Sari Nusseibeh’s words – ‘the powerhouse of Palestinian national politics’. Here the PLO held apparently important talks with foreign delegations and diplomatic missions – talks doomed to wither on the vine. In August 2001, when all Palestinian institutions were closed, Orient House was declared off-limits to East Jerusalemites – ‘and that gate has been padlocked ever since’, said Shaul. ‘My parents cheered as the Arabs lost their recognised base. I was seventeen and that gloating switched me to activism. That was in the middle of the suicide bombings – we were scared to get on a bus or sit in a restaurant. But still I could see how the despair makes extremists.’

Beyond Obeida Street we were overlooking Wadi al-Joz (Walnut Valley, but walnut trees are rare nowadays). Here Jerusalem’s nineteenth-century notables lived in stately homes; a few of the buildings remain, slummified, surrounded by two-man factories, junkyards and motor repair workshops. During the Mandate a prosperous middle-class moved in, built villas, cultivated gardens – then moved out to make way for the displaced thousands arriving and needing every sort of help.

On the valley floor we passed the unremarkable mud-coloured Tomb of Simon the Just, only noticed because several Haredim were praying nearby. Shaul dismissed Simon the Just as a figment of the collective imagination of certain nineteenth-century Mizrahim who acquired the tomb in 1890 and put it about that the bones within belonged to a fourth-century BC High Priest. (Which may be true; hereabouts nothing is impossibly ancient.) Since ’67 throngs have prayed around the tomb every day and this suits ELAD, whose interests have always extended beyond the City of David.

For thirty years or more, this neighbourhood has been under threat of Judaisation. In the late ’80s Ariel Sharon, the settlers’ patron devil, planned to evict all Wadi al-Joz Palestinians but was thwarted by legal constraints. Here Shaul admitted to being a new-fledged lawyer, planning to specialise in land and property for the Palestinians’ benefit. ‘I don’t need to earn,’ he said simply. ‘The Miami grandparents left me enough. In Sheikh Jarrah I’m learning as I go. Most Judaizers favour dodgy land deals, using shell companies on Pacific islands. Or intimidation, including murder. Or bent laws – but that’s time-consuming. Bulldozers come only if the home is flimsy and the site is what counts. ELAD don’t like TV images of women weeping beside bulldozers in action.’

As we walked slowly uphill, taking short-cuts through a smelly shackland between the Mount Scopus and Ambassador hotels, it amused my companion to hear me complaining about the heat. To him, this autumn day felt pleasantly cool.

I asked, ‘Why have the settlers so much power?’

Shaul replied, ‘They only have as much as the government gives them. They couldn’t do what they do without government support, available whichever party is in. Sharon, as Housing Minister in 1990, helped a lot. He ordered all East Jerusalem lands and homes controlled by the Custodian of Absentee Properties to be sold to three settler/development groups. One was ELAD. Then he told the Custodian to lower prices. Next his Ministry gave those groups the purchase price. Some settlers need pay only token rents, like NIS33 per month for a two-storey building on a busy shopping street. That’s about ten dollars. It’s all “Through-the-Looking-glass” stuff. But Zionists like their actions to have a legitimate gloss. Between 1949 and 1990 our Knesset made about thirty statutes transferring privately owned Palestinian land to the State. The Jewish National fund paid to make 95% of Israeli territory “State lands”, to be held forever for the Jewish people. Non-Jews can’t even lease land. Where does that remind you of? Both Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa!’

As a prominent activist Shaul drew warm greetings on Sheikh Jarrah’s streets and was affectionately embraced in the ill-equipped health centre. Its verandah and hallway were so crowded that his friends had no time to talk and we didn’t linger. ‘Let’s visit the Khairiyas,’ said Shaul. ‘They’re needing comfort.’

A littered track followed the hill’s contour and Shaul pointed down to what he called ‘the Frustration Zone’. In the ’60s an urban renewal project, including a bus terminus, had been planned by the landowner, Rawhi Khatib, the last Palestinian mayor of East Jerusalem. But alas! a more profitable usage came up (of no benefit to the locals) and urban renewal was forgotten. Even more frustrating – the Municipality refused to sanction an urgently needed secondary school for 800 girls because the Hyatt Regency Hotel objected that it could become ‘a point of confrontation’. A care centre for 200 handicapped youngsters was also stymied ‘for security reasons’ although backed by a cross-section of well-known Israelis. One member of the Knesset (MK), Yigal Bibi, pointed out, ‘Those youngsters may be handicapped, but that doesn’t mean they’ve no arms to throw stones.’

The Khairiyas lived on a slope officially labelled ‘State land’, not far from the Hebrew University – itself built on land confiscated during the Mandate from a Wadi al-Joz owner. Here four homes were awaiting demolition. The Khairiyas’ crudely constructed three-storey house sheltering seventeen members of an extended family, had been built in 1990 without a permit. Said Shaul, ‘Twenty years ago no permits were being granted to Palestinians – same as now. So what do you do? You have a family to shelter, you can’t get a permit, you can’t move to a location where you can get a permit. Therefore you build where you are, hoping for the best. Then you rear your family in suspense, always fearing the worst …’ And here the worst is about to happen – 200 new housing units for settlers.

At 10.30-ish nine Khairiyas were at home: the sexagenarian grandparents, two sons and their wives, an ailing teenage grandson (flu) and two toddlers. Those absent were either at school or working for a pittance if lucky enough to have found some odd job. The younger generations spoke Hebrew but out of respect for the elders Shaul insisted on practising his Arabic. Its imperfections served a useful purpose: occasional smiles and giggles broke the tension. We sat on blanket rolls in a neat, clean living-room where large photographs of Arafat and Mahmoud Darwish flanked something unexpected. This copy of the 1947 UN Partition map included Beersheba, Acre and Nahariya in the proposed Arab state, with Jaffa as an Arab enclave and Jerusalem as an international zone. As I stood studying it Shaul clicked his fingers and said sharply – ‘Sit down! We all wonder “What if ….” But let’s focus on the future.’

A tin kettle of tea appeared and two plates of shiny pink biscuits – a toddler-magnet but both were restrained until the guests had had their fill. My presence was ignored, not impolitely but because this family’s crisis left them with nothing to spare for conventional social intercourse. Stress showed on all the adult faces. Unlike my hostel friends, the Khairiyas did not repress their anger while showing Shaul the latest round of correspondence with the Municipality. Voices trembled, eyes flashed, arms were waved and feet stamped. Shaul looked increasingly wretched. He couldn’t honestly encourage hope, could only listen – which he did, for more than an hour. Stupidly I asked, ‘When their home is gone, where will they live?’ Impatiently Shaul replied, ‘They’ll separate and go to the already overcrowded homes of relatives and friends.’ Earlier, he had told me that in ’48 both grandparents’ families had fled from a prosperous village near Jaffa.

The goodbyes were prolonged and painful. Then both sons escorted us down to a bus-stop on Wadi al-Joz Street, a major road. For one disordered moment I fancied the fast sleek motor cars of the Occupying population were mocking our companions who couldn’t afford the bus fare to al-Aqsa mosque.

On the bus Shaul said, ‘It’s a relief they can let off steam, too many can’t.’ After a pause he added, ‘As for me, I feel so humiliated! I can’t help and I should be able to. As an Israeli I’m part of the system that’s torturing them. They do know I care about them. But they can’t really understand why I’m not helping. Part of that anger was directed against me – did you notice?’

I had noticed but by now was past making consoling noises. I badly needed a beer. When I asked, ‘How come they have that map?’ Shaul shrugged. ‘Prob’ly it just came their way and was something to put on the wall. They won’t brood over it as you or I might.’

Back at the Damascus Gate I suggested R and R at my Old City local – St George’s café, in the Christian Quarter. Alcohol is not sold or openly drunk in the Muslim Quarter. (The Hamas effect: on the hostel roof my beer wore a Coca-Cola disguise.) Happily St George’s was a mere five-minute walk from the hostel – less if one were very thirsty – and I had established a sound relationship with the proprietor.

We sat close to the wall, out of the tourist flow, and watched tour groups being led to and fro along Muristan Road, the Old City’s widest street. ‘Let’s do a tally,’ I said – and ten minutes later we had identified Italians, Japanese, Russians, Nigerians, Indians, Poles, Brazilians. I wondered, ‘How many would be upset, even outraged, if informed about life in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah? Places they pass in their coaches …’

‘Not many,’ said Shaul. ‘They’ve paid for a nice holiday with much praying to make them feel good. They don’t want to be informed about not nice things. At home, on computers and TV, maybe they see demolitions and settler building and IDF aggression. But we’re just another distant problem – more suffering, and nowhere near as bad as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, famines. Of course to me, an Israeli, it seems worse – so calculated! We’re supposed to be a democracy, the only one in the Middle East we’re told every day. And our government gets full support from the “international community” with just occasional cautious little criticisms. But nothing sustained, no penalties, nothing that hurts. It’s like we’re painted with a magic potion.’

Recently Shaul had met members of an EU Mission reporting on Israel’s East Jerusalem policies. It puzzled him that such high-powered people had been expensively despatched to gather facts and figures known to thousands of Palestine’s supporters on every continent. However, he faintly hoped the Mission’s eyewitness evidence would change the EU’s trading relationship with Israel.

By the time the report came out, in March 2009, I was living among refugees on the West Bank. Friends there teased me about my eagerness to find a copy. Said one, ‘People have been writing reports about us for fifty-seven years – and we’re still here!’

This report, dated 15 December 2008, recognises that Israel is ‘actively pursuing the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem’. It continues:

When I next met Shaul, in April 2009, we gloomed together over the EU’s failure to change its trading relationship with Israel.

‘The magic potion is still working,’ said Shaul.