Because of my load of books for Balata’s Yaffa Centre, Sari had recruited a friend to meet me at Ben-Gurion airport with his taxi; Salim’s vehicle enjoyed a special permit, allowing it to be used on both sides of the Apartheid Barrier. We sped through the harsh brightness of nocturnal Israel, then, beyond Rosh Ha’ayin, approached the hills on a less well-maintained ‘Palestinian’ road. Salim spoke adequate English but didn’t want to talk about Gaza. A few weeks later, when I had taken the West Bank’s political temperature, I linked this puzzling silence to his vehicle’s special permit. Injudicious remarks could endanger it.

Huwwara was almost deserted as Salim escorted me through the walkway and heaved the books into a serveece; his permit did not cover Area A. My immediate destination was the al-Yasmeen hotel in Nablus; I had booked in for two nights while Ismail prepared my Balata squat, just vacated by relatives visiting from Abu Dhabi. The 30-room al-Yasmeen, semi-attached to the Kasbah, is a hotel with a personality, imaginatively adapted from a fifteenth-century ruin. It opened in 2000, was hard hit by the second Intifada, then became the NGO workers’ favourite rendezvous. There were then 74 foreigners resident in Nablus, the majority involved with university-run projects or international NGOs.

In midwinter, enchanting Ottoman relics were needed to warm the public rooms. These waist-high, mobile metal boxes – deep, long, narrow, full of glowing charcoal – stood on spindly legs beside occupied tables in the restaurant. Solitary customers were provided with a few embers placed on a little pewter tray near their feet. Let’s hope central heating never replaces a system that seems so right in a region settled by Canaanites 6,000 years ago.

In the L-shaped foyer-cum-cafeteria, with seating for scores, a giant TV showed al-Jazeera’s bloodily detailed Gaza pictures – hour after hour, day after day. On my first evening the dozen or so viewers watched in silence with set faces and angry eyes. This was to be the pattern for the next dreadful fortnight. Al-Jazeera kept the public informed, all over Nablus and Balata, but in my presence few commented openly.

In 70AD a well-known developer named Titus chose a site at the foot of Mount Jarzim for his ‘new city’, Flavia Neapolis, so called to celebrate his father the Emperor Flavius Vespasian. Recently the Palestinians renamed Nablus ‘the Mountain of Fire’ to celebrate its role as the West Bank’s centre of resistance to the Occupation.

Before breakfast next morning I strolled through the Kasbah, quiet at dawn though soon to be crowded. Between 3 and 21 April 2002, after a months-long siege, the IDF invaded this precious place, using tanks, bulldozers, helicopters and F-16 fighter jets to destroy or deface many structures of immense historic and aesthetic value. These included the tomb of Sheikh Badr ed-Din, the St Demitrios Greek Orthodox church, the esh-Shifa Hammam, the Mamluk al-Khdra mosque – its façade vandalised by a bulldozer – and two thirteenth-century soap factories which had been in production to the day of their bombing. (In the twelfth century Nablus soap was already prized by rich Europeans.) It made my heart ache to gaze upon those shattered structures revered by so many generations – now deliberately smashed, within moments, by our era’s military technology. This pulverised Kasbah exposes the Zionists’ vindictive hatred for a past that ill accords with their own claims on Samaria.

Extra bombs fell on the labyrinthine alleys where ‘terrorists’ might be lurking in inaccessible first-century cellars. Scores died and hundreds of wounded were denied access to hospitals. More than 500 buildings were struck – 60 obliterated, 221 left too unsafe to enter – and the infamous curfew prevented salvage work. From 1 April to mid-October this curfew – a punishment imposed on the entire population – was lifted for precisely 79 hours. Thus it was hoped ‘to make the Palestinians understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people’.

My exit from the Kasbah took me onto Martyrs’ Square, dominated by an inexcusable multi-storey shopping centre. Here, on a raised circular bandstand, Cast Lead had generated a token ‘protest tent’ where small crowds gathered daily at noon to make impassioned speeches, sing defiant songs, march around the square, display harrowing photographs of the most recent atrocities and hang supportive handwritten messages on nearby railings. During the coming fortnight I was to learn a lot in the environs of Martyrs’ Square.

After breakfast I set off on foot for Balata, a brisk 30-minute walk. Nablus fills an east-to-west gorge, perhaps half-a-mile wide, between the long ridges of Mount Jarzim (about 2,600 feet) and Mount Ebal (about 2,800 feet). In 2009 the locals could assume their foreigner visitors to be actively pro-Palestinian and I appreciated the big friendly smiles, vigorous handshakes and shouts of ‘Welcome!’ from across a street or within a shop. Within half-an-hour I had been invited to a village (‘Come for tasting our nice food!’) and to a wedding on 21 January. But Nablus’s dire poverty soon diminished my exhilaration. Since 2000, seven army checkpoints had been controlling the movements of 134,000 Nablusis. All Palestinian centres of population were economically handicapped by closures but none suffered as much as Nablus. Then there was the bomb damage, visible on both sides of the dual carriageway linking the city centre to Balata. Previously this wasteland was an area of light industry and administrative offices. At each road junction quartets of dour PA police stood by their vehicles nursing Uzis and observing Nablus’s trickle (by urban standards) of traffic. Wordlessly they checked my ID, eyeing me uneasily. Foreigners – especially aged females – don’t walk … They never again asked to see my passport and in time I overcame my distaste for what they represent and occasionally made them even more uneasy by attempting a conversation.

I was to meet Hasan’s cousin Karim outside the Greek Orthodox (Jacob’s Well) church and so close was the family resemblance I could have recognised him in a crowd. As an UNRWA school teacher he might be considered prosperous, yet when we had become friends, he admitted to feeling envious of Hasan’s Irish opportunity.

As usual, I wanted to be alone on my first Balata walkabout but Karim insisted on a conducted tour. Balata is not Nablus, foreigners qua foreigners are suspect. He tried to explain the psychological framework within which people live when for 60 years their community has been thinking of itself as entitled to return to comparatively nearby homes. All OPT refugee camps are essentially artificial, not only because the residents are really ‘displaced persons’ but also because of the time factor. However tragic the circumstances of their dispossession, genuine refugees usually manage to reroot themselves within a couple of generations. In the Palestinians’ case, a fourth generation is being born into an environment in which the majority must grow up without hope of ever rerooting and leading a ‘normal’ life. True, all over the Poor World millions are being born into equally hopeless urban slums and are materially even worse off, without UNRWA support. But these Palestinians are painfully aware of being the victims of an anachronistic Zionist colonialism sustained by the ‘international community’. Therefore they have a hard-edged motive for hating their ever-present oppressors. The younger generations hear their grandparents and great-grandparents recalling a time when they lived in villages or towns where survival may not have been easy but where self-respect could flourish because hard work had its traditional rewards. To have been driven into camps that became slums, and to have an awareness of that defeat kept fresh in the collective memory, is surely a disadvantage peculiar to Palestinian ‘refugees’.

One square kilometre, 25,000 people – need I say more?

A 1950 photograph of Balata shows neat rows of small white tents against a background of low mountains; in the foreground a caravan of loaded camels heads towards Nablus. UNRWA then calculated that a square kilometre would be space enough – just – for 5 to 6,000 displaced persons. By 1960 there were more than 9,000 and structures had replaced tents: one 3 x 3m cement block room per family. In the 1970s a sewage system was provided, and running water, and each family got a bathroom. In the 1980s electricity arrived. Meanwhile families were growing and the occupying power forbade building beyond the one square kilometre – so the Balatans built up. And up and up, on foundations that were dodgy to begin with, using the cheapest possible materials.

As Karim led me down one of the main streets – a rough track, car-wide – swarming children stared at us; a few seemed hostile, several were predatory, seizing my forearm and demanding, ‘Shekel, shekel, give shekel!’ Karim delivered stern reprimands, describing me as ‘a friend of Yaffa’. I asked him to make it very plain that I had no shekels, and never would have, so hassling me could achieve nothing. It seemed prudent at once to clarify that fundamental point: 70% of Balatans are children.

We spent half-an-hour strolling between four-storey houses through narrow lanes and even narrower alleys where anyone broader than I am would have to walk sideways. Vitamin D deficiency is a big problem, remarked Karim: sunlight cannot reach most of Balata. He pointed to evidence of regular military incursions and we paused respectfully beside elaborate shrines to ‘martyrs’ – some murderers (suicide bombers), others murdered (IDF victims). Twice Karim shouted outside a house and a woman’s face appeared at an upper window. Thus was I introduced to Noha and Th’aer, English-speakers who soon became pivotal to my Balata social scene.

Karim told me that as the population increased, UNRWA’s funding dwindled and once-regular rations had become sporadic and meagre. Since the second intifada most of the 60% of men employed in Israel or on settlement building sites had been punished by extra closures, curfews and ever harsher permit restrictions. Only 5% had permits and unemployment was reckoned to be at least 70%. What little cash circulated came from skilled workers in the Gulf States (Ismail’s father among them) and from relatives and friends settled in Jordan where the majority population is Palestinian. Nablus offered few job opportunities; in 2008 its own unemployment rate was 50%.

Karim’s paternal grandfather (murdered by the Haganah in 1947) owned a large restaurant and three flats overlooking the sea in Haifa. But for Zionism, his family would be rich – or at least, not poor … As for the Arab states, ‘They treat us like something you sweep up and throw away. Never we had anyone to help, our own leaders care most for themselves. Oslo gave us our first chance to run things and we made big mistakes. Like South Africa’s blacks, after Affirmative Action put them in management jobs. The Israelis use the Fatah–Hamas fighting, and all the PA corruption, to divide and separate Gaza from us. That, with the settlements, makes two states impossible. Israel never wanted two states. So why do those Quartet people and the Yanks keep on pretending it’s the solution?’

‘Possibly,’ said I, ‘they haven’t time to study the details. Or it could be they’re happy to play the Zionist game. Blair leads the Quartet and recently accepted a prize from Tel Aviv University for “exceptional intelligence, foresight and demonstrated moral courage and leadership”. That prize was one million US dollars. People play games for less.’

In the early afternoon we parted. At the Yaffa Centre Ismail said firmly, ‘You can’t see your room today. It’s not nice before it’s clean.’

A serveece took me back to Martyrs’ Square to join the vigil around the tent: a few score Nablusis. Since morning a bigger display board had been erected to take enlarged photographs of ‘Yesterday in Gaza’. The new messages on the railings included a few in English. ‘Free Gaza!’ ‘Baby killers Go Home!’ ‘Thank You Shaveez!’ ‘Hoo wil hep us?’ ‘Fuck Boms!’ ‘We need Food Water Medicine Peace!’ A young woman teacher, bareheaded and intense, urged me to support the next day’s demo, being organised by the Union of Palestinian Teachers. I promised to be there before noon.

Every vigil had uninvolved spectators, jobless males of all ages sitting on benches or lounging against the railings. Two peripatetic coffee-sellers competed, their tiny polystyrene mugs of hot liquid (only remotely related to coffee) in great demand as the cold penetrated threadbare garments. One was a jolly old man whose quips made his customers smile; he would never accept money from me. The other was a stunted eleven-year-old – equally jolly – who reckoned going to school was a waste of time. Those mugs contributed significantly to the West Bank’s litter problems; for lack of bins, mine were pocketed – to everyone’s puzzled amusement.

Next morning a message came from Ismail. My room wasn’t yet ready, I must postpone moving in. A neighbour had accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning his gun and funeral rituals would take up the rest of Ismail’s day.

If possible, Muslims are buried before sunset on the day of death: I knew that. There was however a faint aura of implausibility about this story. But I asked no questions; in Balata one doesn’t expect formalities like inquests or gun licences. Weeks later, when I was on gossiping terms with my new friends, it was suggested that that ‘accident’ may have been the execution of a collaborator. Balata gossip can be too spicy for comfort.

The teachers’ demo flopped, attracting not many more than the daily vigil, plus a small contingent from the surrounding area. Central Nablus is thronged at noon and Union officials appealed to the passing crowds – ‘Join us! Show your feelings!’ In vain: most Nablusis were choosing to keep their feelings to themselves. That evening, in the privacy of my hotel room I benefited from a long conversation with the intense young woman; she had identified me as a kindred spirit, in the Palestinian context.

Leila, who had come home from England to help, was not as young as she looked. She asked, ‘Do you understand we’re in a civil war?’ This wasn’t a rhetorical question; she wanted an answer. Readily I revealed my confusion. How could an outsider make sense of the odd ambience of Nablus’s tent and the West Bank’s generally ambiguous reaction to Gaza’s tragedy?

Leila said, ‘People are afraid. Over the past week 23 teachers lost their jobs for sympathising with Gaza when the attack started. If the Education Minister in Ramallah could hear me now I’d be fired. Before Cast Lead, more than 400 Hamas supporters were arrested on the West Bank. Arrested for supporting the party that won a democratic election three years ago! Here in Nablus in the past five days more than 200 were arrested, mostly university students. Our own journalists and cameramen are being beaten up in Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem by our own police – for reporting anti-IDF protests! Not pro-Hamas, anti-IDF! Other journalists are being threatened every day, one told he’d have broken arms and legs if he reported pro-Hamas demos. Yesterday a Bethlehem journalist had his nose broken and his camera confiscated. And you can imagine the much worse happenings in prisons. The PA’s Preventive Security Force and General Intelligence Service, while working with the IDF and Shin Bet, are supervised by US security experts. They must report to Fayyad – an unelected Prime Minister, the US prop – not to President Abbas. In Area C, around villages, the IDF has arrested dozens suspected of being pro-Hamas. Abbas has banned pro-Hamas placards, flags, slogans, banners – and demos can’t move towards checkpoints or settlements. He got public praise from the Israelis for “using an iron fist”! We’re angry with Israel for all the slaughtering but even angrier with Abbas for blaming it on Hamas. Last Friday, for the first time, Palestinians used tear gas against Palestinians. Isn’t all that civil war?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘Or you could call it another stage in the colonisation of Palestine. Now with the assistance of native troops and a pliant Maharaja.’

Suddenly Leila was weeping, her face in her hands. A moment later she apologised. ‘I’m being not sensible, it’s the frustration, we feel so much and we can do nothing! You’re right, it is more colonisation. That’s why if we don’t resist the Occupation we’ll no longer exist as Palestinians. Fatah have become the native troops, only Hamas still resists. You can see at least four Hamases if you look hard. The one the West Bank mostly supports is our resistance movement – until with the Gaza attack on, we support them all. Why are Americans so hysterical about Islam? For them Hamas is only an Islamic threat. They don’t see it’s firstly and mostly our liberation movement. They want a secular, free-market colony – Fayyad admits this. He offers low-paid jobs for Palestinians glad to get any job. That’s good for Americans and Israelis – they’ve been scheming for years to divide us. United, we could kill their colony plan. We’re not stupid. We watch what goes on. We know why they’re making a civil war here, now – same as in Gaza in ’07.’

Leila was referring to a heinous US crime. Soon after Hamas’s election win, George Bush warned Abbas that were he to hold unity talks with the ‘terrorists’, Fatah would lose all its US funding. Saudi Arabia then intervened and in March 2007, in Mecca, King Abdullah witnessed the Fatah and Hamas leaders agreeing to form a coalition government. As Mark Perry, Director of the Conflicts Forum has recorded, Bush then ‘directed’ the CIA to remove coalition-inclined Hamas leaders from Gaza. Millions were spent on arming and training Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to attack Hamas throughout the Strip. Observing manoeuvrings, Hamas moved first. This ‘Hamas coup’ was widely used, as Leila bitterly recalled, to ‘prove’ that extremist Islamists had overthrown moderate Fatah to gain total control of the Strip.

‘Never mind,’ said Leila, standing up to go. ‘The truth is known all over the Arab world. Obama won’t ever be able to undo the damage Bush did.’

Much had changed since January 2005 when Mahmoud Abbas, then running for President after Yasser Arafat’s death, vowed ‘never to take up arms’ against militants whose elimination was then being demanded by President Bush’s infamous ‘Road Map to Peace’. Mr Abbas asserted, ‘They are freedom fighters and should live a dignified and safe life.’ During the same election campaign Jibril Rajoub, a Fatah security official, said, ‘This election will be a turning point in Palestinian political life, and the minority must accept the choice of the majority.’ He didn’t repeat that when Hamas won the parliamentary election a year later after a contest universally acknowledged, even by the Israelis, to have been ‘free and fair’.

In November one of my hostel friends had told me that his Balata cousin Taher Hiraz (an unknown cousin, without a permit to visit Jerusalem) had just been captured by ‘special forces’ – code for a joint IDF–Shin Bet operation. Hiraz, a senior Hamas official, was accused of involvement in several ‘terrorist’ attacks which may or may not have deserved that adjective. Hearing of my Balata plan, my friend asked me to enquire about his cousin’s fate. ‘What evidence? Which prison?’ Innocently I obliged and thus began my Balata learning curve. One does not casually ask such a question in a community where informers abound and trust is in correspondingly short supply.

Next morning Ismail led me to his home along a deeply rutted lane, past a terrace of tall houses (no two alike) ingeniously built against the sheer cliff-face marking the camp’s western border. This was Balata’s most salubrious district yet its squalor surpassed that of any other area in which I have lived. (I make a distinction between ‘squalid’ and ‘primitive’ or ‘impoverished’.) Below my room was the original dwelling (no longer usable) to which Ismail’s grandparents had moved from the tented camp. Eventually his engineer father – helped by relatives settled in Jordan – found a secure job in a Gulf state. The house then gradually grew upwards and, from outside my squat’s entrance, unsteady stairs led to three upper storeys. At the head of this stairway, a hall door opened directly onto the main road to Huwwara. From ‘my’ hall door, broken concrete steps led down to a patch of weedy rubble (handy for clothes drying). From there the way to the lane was through a wooden door, never locked, in a six-foot breeze block wall. Turning right, one was in an alley between sheds and lean-tos where men – assisted by platoons of small boys – did post-mortems on abandoned cars hauled in, by hand, from Allah knows where. Above this alley rose another cliff-clinging house with unstable-looking balconies on which, when I appeared, small girls gathered to practise their English. (Goodbye! What is your name? Thank you! Are you well? Where is your house? This is my house!)

Ismail seemed surprised by my first reaction to the accommodation on offer – a strong twinge of guilt. In Balata eight or ten people commonly share two small rooms yet I was being allocated a salon 25 x 10 feet with two big security-barred windows facing an enormous new girls’ primary school recently built by UNRWA. Beyond and slightly below lay the ‘real’ Balata, sunless and sullen, while I could look out at a wide sky. Behind a partition were the loo, a mini-hand basin and what might one day be a shower; that depended on Nablus municipality’s water supply and other mysterious variables. A second partitioned corner held a plywood cupboard and a large earthenware sink but no cooking appliance. This bothered Ismail but I assured him it didn’t matter as I never cook for myself when living alone. Furniture comprised a camp bed, one warm blanket, a small table and chair below a wall socket. There was also a central ceiling bulb but one had to remember never to touch its loose switch with wet fingers. Apart from being accessible to sunlight, these cliff-face Balata houses enjoy an important advantage over the rest; two entrances make it less difficult (though never easy) to elude invading IDF troops.

Left alone in my new home, I made a shopping list. One reading lamp, one electric kettle, one double plug, two mugs, one bowl, one spoon, one knife, one plate. The expensive items had to be bought in Nablus, the rest were available in one of Balata’s front-room shops, most of their shelves empty. ‘Were they ever full?’ I was to ask Noha. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘before the first Gulf War.’ In 1990, following Arafat’s loudly voiced support for Saddam Hussein, 350,000 Palestinian workers – many of them Balatans – were expelled from Kuwait.

In Nablus it took time to find a kettle and even longer to find a lamp and nobody stocked double plugs: I should try Ramallah. Al-Jazeera was on in every shop and office and many passers-by paused at doorways or windows to view the Gazan carnage. Pairs of PA police stood at most street corners, within earshot of the TV commentary, and I wondered about their private reactions to what Uri Avnery has described as Ehud Barak’s ‘moral insanity, a sociopathic disorder’. They were now being ordered by Abbas to prevent anti-IDF demos while the IDF were massacring their own kith and kin.

I raised this question with Moussa. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘it’s hard for such men to be Yankee stooges. But what to do? They need jobs to feed families.’ We were sitting on a bench near the Protest Tent in Martyrs’ Square, daily looking more bedraggled and futile. Moussa had spent exactly one-third of his forty-five years in Israeli prisons. He had also graduated from Birzeit University and had recently been appointed to a lectureship at Nablus’s An-Najah University, a job now at risk. ‘They think I’ve Hamas sympathies! Truth is, I’m anti-Fatah rather than pro-Hamas, like many who voted Hamas.’ Moussa had stayed well away from the occasionally lethal whirlpool of university politics, about which Nawaf had warned me on the bus from Ramallah. But (shifting metaphors) An-Najah prefers its staff and students to be off the fence, standing upright on Fatah’s side.

To Moussa’s amusement I sought his advice about my mobile problem in which he found it hard to believe – ‘Even the pygmies in the Congo can cope with cell phones!’ I didn’t dispute this disturbing fact but pointed out that my simple social life allows me to ignore the gadget. However, for my West Bank residency – given the lack of land lines – I had spent £14 in London on the cheapest possible model with the fewest complications. Then one unavoidable complication arose, called a SIM card, incorporating powers that not long ago would have been condemned as demonic. (When I was middle-aged a Congo cell-phone operator might well have been burned as a witch.) My new complication was an Israeli SIM’s refusal to function on the West Bank. Moussa nodded. ‘It’s another trick to hamper our communications. Have you been warned not to use Nablus post office? Give letters to Internationals on their way home.’

In a cubby-hole shop an appropriate SIM was inserted by a charming old man who moved sinuously around his overcrowded premises and had sea-green eyes and a white goatee beard. He volunteered to weld a new plug onto mine, British plugs and West Bank sockets being incompatible. (‘This I do as my gift to you.’) Moussa instructed me to change cards before returning to Israel and to hide the West Bank SIM lest it be of interest to Shin Bet.

My friends apprehensively foretold a big demo after Friday prayers on 9 January. That was a cold morning, after a night of heavy rain, with clouds lingering along the mountain crests as I walked in from Balata. Most shops were shut; a little later the Kasbah merchants would display their goods, in preparation for brisk post-prayers trading. Already the PA police presence was formidable throughout central Nablus and by 10.00 a.m. hundreds had been deployed around the main mosque and Martyrs’ Square. Some of my friends condemned this provocative show of force.

As I sat under the ragged awning, breathing on numb fingers, a trio of scruffy youths – the sort you see on TV stoning soldiers – insisted on buying me coffees. Then Jamal arrived (he whose wedding I was to attend) and spread his good news: a family row had been settled. His spirited fiancée refused to move into her in-laws’ home, where she could never uncover her head in the presence of father-in-law and two brothers-in-law. Crisis! The family budget did not allow for Jamal’s paying rent. Threats were shouted, tears were shed, tension rose daily – until a widowed aunt intervened, offering the couple rent-free accommodation. Her sons had left home (two to work in an Emirate, one to languish in ‘administrative detention’) and she would appreciate young company. ‘We all now are happy!’ beamed Jamal.

This demo’s leaders were an elderly rotund man, wearing a long old-fashioned trench coat and a black-and-white keffiyeh, and a Western-dressed middle-aged woman – the most eloquent of the half-dozen speakers. Between speeches new Gaza-related lyrics came blaring out of an antique amplifier, its decibels painfully high. By now many faces in the regular vigil group were familiar to me but around noon several newcomers appeared, Internationals from An-Najah University. Then someone produced felt pens: please would we all send messages to Gaza on strips of cardboard hanging from the railings. I wrote: ‘In Ireland We Are Sad With You’ while wondering if that were true. Probably not. The Irish were then feeling obsessively sad about the death of the Celtic Tiger, a creature which should never have been born.

Beside me sat an unusually outspoken fortyish couple, the husband a hospital lab technician. ‘I’m secular, don’t want any Sharia law. Today we’re here to resist the IDF murders in Gaza. It’s bad so few come. On al-Jazeera we see millions protesting – in Jordan, Malaya, Oslo, all over – showing more anger than anyone here.’

His wife said quietly, ‘We’ve used up all our anger. Now we’re left with grief.’

‘And hate,’ said a junior doctor who had joined us. ‘Every day we watch – can’t act – feel hate swelling like a tumour.’

By 12.50 prayers were over. As the mosque emptied into the square Leila divined, ‘It’s OK, there won’t be trouble.’ Many men at once hurried away and among those who stood nearby, listening, several held placards depicting Abbas. The speakers addressed this oddly passive assembly at some length, their denunciations of the IDF drawing little response. It was all decidedly anticlimactic, the police outnumbering civilians. It was also undemocratic, as Moussa observed when we had retired to al-Yasmeen for coffee.

A certain sort of Nablusi (addicted to ‘free speech’) felt more at ease in this hotel – where everyone seemed to know everyone else – than in city-centre or kasbah coffee-houses, where any stranger might be an informer. Israel’s ‘security system’, so dependent on informing, spreads virulent mistrust throughout society – another threat, said Moussa, to any future Palestinian state. The machinery of democratic government needs the oil of mutual trust.

When I commented on the prevailing public mood Moussa sat silent for a moment before replying, ‘We haven’t recovered yet from five years of punishment. Some would hit me for admitting that but it’s true. We’ll recover, always we do. Now most of us are still worn out. Emotionally and physically. Especially the curfew did so much damage, parents under stress for not trying to find food for crying children, knowing if seen outside they’d be shot dead. Do people like you understand about IDF conscripts being conditioned to enjoy killing “Arabs”? At the start of our punishment [Lieutenant-General] Moshe Ya’alan told soldiers he didn’t care if the army “looked like lunatics” – a straight translation from his Hebrew! At public meetings he said all members of Islamic organisations should be killed en masse. Israel doesn’t train a normal army. In ’03 the D9 tank driver who’d attacked Jenin [refugee camp] said, “The moment I drove into the camp, something switched in my head. I went mad, I wanted to destroy everything.” Why didn’t people round the world hear about our punishment and try to help us? Or did they hear and not care?’

I said, ‘We heard much more about the suicide bombings. Such as 99 civilians being blown to bits in the month of March ’02. Those murders stick in the mind, well-crafted headlines convey the horror of it. We can easily imagine ourselves the victims – sitting in our commuter bus, eating our evening meal, dancing in a disco. That’s real terrorism, unnerving a population through criminal attacks on defenceless civilians. And we were told 74% on the West Bank supported the bombers. And Israel said the closures and curfews were to stop them. We know collective punishments are also criminal attacks on defenceless civilians but they’re much harder to describe. We can’t easily imagine whole populations being confined to their homes month after month on pain of death. Always hungry, family incomes cut off, insomnia rampant, electricity failing, illness and injuries untreated, nerves at snapping point, no schooling, children traumatised – it’s hard for headlines or sound-bites to convey all that. Or to explain why, in the OPT, killing Israeli soldiers is legitimate.’

Moussa asked, ‘Who told you so much about our punishments?’

I explained, ‘A new friend, a woman doctor met last month on the way to Ramallah. Yesterday afternoon she gave me a graphic account of life under curfew for a family of seven, including grandparents.’

Moussa fetched more coffee, then said, ‘Be careful where you talk about killing soldiers. Israelis and Yanks say Oslo changed things, Arafat signed away our right to resist.’

I demanded, ‘And who gave him the right to sign the Accords on behalf of you all?’

Moussa knew the answer, plainly stated in Mazin Qumsiyeh’s Sharing the Land of Canaan:

During the demo, Moussa had pointed to one senior police officer and identified him as a former commander of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a Fatah resistance movement founded in Balata. Now he said, ‘After Hamas won the ’06 election and the Yanks banned them, you wouldn’t want to live in Nablus and you wouldn’t dare to live in Balata. We had real civil war, robbery, kidnapping, torture, killing. Al-Aqsa were supposed to fight the Occupation but then some militants were paid to hate Hamas more. You could stop a bullet on your way to the Kasbah to buy rice. And if you got to buy it your bag could be stolen on the way home. That’s why people accept all those police. Even if we despise them they’ve made ordinary life safer.’

Among al-Yasmeen’s quirky features is a wide, glass-walled ‘bridge’ connecting foyer and bedrooms; it gives a fine view of Mount Ebal, overlooks a corner of the Kasbah far below and is furnished with café tables for two. Moussa described it as a favourite spot among Nablusis wishing to exchange confidences. And there, that afternoon he talked freely about himself.

‘I like reading quiet books about where life is always ordinary. We don’t know how that must be – your own government, no army, no factions … Even my student time was scary when I followed Husam Khader, a Fatah activist. He represented Nablus when we had a Palestinian parliament and hated Fatah corruption as much as Islamic fanaticism. Before Hamas started in ’87, the Islamist Movement tried to intimidate PLO students and take over their Councils. We were mostly secular, hating being bullied by “principles of the Koran”. But Israel backed them in those days and jailed me for fighting them. They suited Israel’s plan, to get rid of Arafat and have “Arab” conflicts blocking any united nationalism. In ’91 the Yanks got the PLO “peace talking” with Israel in Madrid – while the Oslo plotting went on in secret. Hamas called people to continue the armed struggle, said the talks were “a heresy that will lead to the surrender of Muslim lands to Jews”. Now we know they were right. Then, I wanted the peaceful way. In jail it upset me hearing about the Hamas anti-Madrid rally in Nablus being bigger than the Fatah pro-Madrid rally in Ramallah. All over Nablus gangs fought in the streets, some using guns. A Fatah man was killed, starting a general strike with more killed and many wounded. In the prisons we fought too – until Fatah recognised Hamas as a genuine political party, not only a religious militia making trouble. You can have this story for your book. I was a teenage Fatah atheist wanting to stop the religious ranters. Now I’m a middle-aged Hamas atheist wanting the ranters to save me from the Occupation. No one else is even trying … That’s how the Palestinian pendulum can swing – not reliably!’

At sunset, as Moussa escorted me to the serveece rank near the Abdul Hamid bell-tower, we noticed an agitated group of men beside a mobile kebab stand. When one of them called my name and beckoned I recognised Jamal – half-crying, shaking with rage and fear. News had just come of his brother’s arrest at a construction site in East Jerusalem. A month previously, this eighteen-year-old had paid NIS100 to be smuggled out of the West Bank. Israeli foremen on building sites favour ‘illegals’ who can be paid even less than Filipinos with temporary work permits. Said Jamal, ‘The same law, employers break it – why only us to prison?’

Once more, frustration: nothing to be done, no legal safeguards for the accused, no reliable line of communication between family and security forces. Another measure of Israeli contempt for Palestinian rights.

The touchingly dogged vigils continued during the following week losing what little momentum they ever had as Gaza’s death toll rose. A ‘Women’s Protest Against Killing Children’ was to start at noon on Saturday but only a few hundred of us straggled around two blocks, brandishing placards depicting small corpses. Our rather timid chanting had an obvious theme – ‘Stop Bombing!’ The passers-by ignored us.

Monday was ‘Children’s Day’ and that morning Leila looked haggard. For days she had been striving to enlist junior musicians and activate her fellow-teachers: to no avail. This was the dampest squib of all. Photographs of children killed or maimed festooned the Tent but few pupils appeared. A pipe and drum band from one co-ed primary school played martial airs whilst a hundred or so children trotted once around the square – and then went home.

Among the spectators was Shahdi, whose grandson had led the drummers. He introduced himself to me: ‘I’m Moussa’s friend, he told me about you.’ In al-Yasmeen we drank coffee and Shahdi smoked a narghile. He blamed the demos’ lack of fire and enthusiasm on organisational in-fighting behind the scenes. ‘Individuals waste energy competing for publicity. Like Palestine itself, we’ve no focused leadership.’

Shahdi decried demos in general – ‘stirring emotionalism that can do harm, rousing feelings when there’s no constructive outlet’. He conceded their safety-valve utility in certain circumstances and perhaps the international demos being seen daily on al-Jazeera might boost Palestinian morale. ‘But is that good? Or a false comfort? We know those crowds can’t help us – or push their governments into helping.’

Shahdi, a retired teacher, ran a one-man humanitarian enterprise ‘to help the poorest women and children who suffer most from Occupation. We talk too much about martyrs and heroes, not enough about survivors. It can be bad luck to survive if desperately damaged in body and mind and with no one left to care for you.’

Anonymous (to the general public) individual donors in the Gulf funded Shahdi. ‘I’m told I should expand, raise more dollars, get an office, hire staff, buy an SUV! That way I could help more, they say. But extra dollars might be spent on becoming an NGO! I feel better staying myself …’

Good news had come that morning from Ramallah. Mustafa Barghouti, then leader of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees and independent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, had persuaded the Council to condemn the PA for using Palestinians to repress popular demos. All the Council’s diverse factions, including Fatah, had signed the statement which also urged national unity in relation to Gaza. ‘This is very, very important,’ pronounced Shahdi. ‘Next Friday you won’t see many police. That statement is a loaded gun pointed at Salaam Fayyid’s head.’

Sure enough, on 16 January the few visible police were tactfully tucked away in corners, their weapons inconspicuous. Fewer men turned toward the Tent after prayers and all the speakers sounded wary. Two Christian dignitaries were welcomed politely but not enthusiastically by the organisers. They sat stiffly under the awning for a token twenty minutes, side by side but ignoring each other with traditional clerical Christian charity. The Roman Catholic may have been a bishop; his scarf concealed the colour of his buttons. The Greek Orthodox was an archimandrite attached to the Jacob’s Well church. His wide grey beard was absurdly long, his hat absurdly high and he kept the skirt of his black robe gathered in his left hand out of dust’s way. Both clerics looked as though they would much prefer to be elsewhere but Leila judged their presence a good omen. ‘By next Friday,’ she accurately predicted, ‘the attack will have stopped – before Obama’s inauguration.’

Meanwhile a controversy had been simmering around Joshua Rifkin’s visit to Nablus planned a few months previously when he was invited to conduct three concerts in Israel. As one of the US’s most illustrious pro-Palestinians, it was unsurprising that he wished to give a piano recital in Nablus and encourage the city’s most musically talented youngsters. However, many now thought his visit inappropriate. Its organiser, Sami Hammad, wrote to him explaining that his audience-to-be felt they couldn’t enjoy a concert while nearby hundreds were being killed, thousands maimed and the Strip’s infrastructure destroyed. Mr Rifkin was asked to reconsider his visit ‘in solidarity with Gaza and so that it will not be interpreted as support for Israel’. Sami Hammad, a jobless engineer and founder of Nablus’s music school, is a thoughtful man of great integrity. When Joshua Rifkin insisted on coming – though there would be no recital, only a meeting with young musicians – his reluctant host received him courteously (on the eve of the ceasefire) and explained his stance in more detail.

Although low key, this controversy inevitably bred factions. Leila traced its roots to Sami’s rift with Daniel Barenboim who in 1999 – inspired by Edward Said – created the now famous Diwan orchestra in which young Palestinians and Israelis play together. Barenboim sponsors musical education throughout the West Bank and for a time his project’s teachers visited Nablus – though not often enough or regularly enough for the steady advancement of scores of gifted pupils studying a variety of instruments. Barenboim, wishing to recruit Nablus’s most outstanding youngsters for the Diwan, was stricken when Sami refused to co-operate. Thus ended their partnership. At the time of Joshua Rifkin’s visit, Nablus’s music school had been closed for two months; Sami couldn’t find a new partner and there was no money to pay teachers.

In 2004 Avi Shlaim wrote about the Diwan orchestra:

Leila listened attentively as I paraphrased this; then she had a lot to say, her hands tightly clenched on her lap. ‘Sami disagrees with all that. He says the orchestra only gives “an illusion of harmony” – his own words. Its fame on the world stage blurs the main problem, our lack of every sort of freedom. If you invite me to a concert in Jerusalem I can’t go – no permit! If my brother needs a spare part from Kefar Sava for his electric drill he can’t fetch it – no permit! If my father wants to sell his vegetables in Natanya he can’t – no permit! If any of us wants to swim in the sea we can’t – no permits! If my niece falls in love with a Nazareth man she can’t live in his home. If my mother needs urgent medical care she may die at a checkpoint. We’re prisoners and the Diwan orchestra doesn’t have a key. Since Shlaim wrote that, how many more kilometres of Apartheid roads have been built over our best land? How many more kilometres added to the Wall? How many more of our wells poisoned by settlers’ toxic waste? Having 0.1% of brilliant youngsters playing nicely with their Israeli friends doesn’t even begin to help the rest of us! It’s fine for individuals and their families who get privileges but it’s not a step forward, not “a beacon of hope”. From where we are, we can’t see that light. Sami founded our music school with a strong ideal. Not focusing on a few who can excel but giving all our talented kids equally good tuition.’

This debate, coming to my attention in Ireland, would have made me feel uneasy. True, Israelis do deploy such phenomena as the Diwan orchestra to ‘prove’ that ‘Arabs’ get a fair deal. But I would also have judged Sami too inflexible – even monomaniacal in his sacrificing of talented youngsters’ chances to uphold his own ‘strong ideal’. In Balata I felt less decisive. For a fortnight I had been witnessing, every day, a community’s normal activities being paralysed by lack of freedom. This had alerted me to the feebleness of statistics. My head was full of percentages to do with Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, yet pre-Balata the implications of those figures were only half-realised. Now, while continuing to feel grateful for the Barenboim/Said innovation, I did wonder if it could have any positive political relevance. Didn’t the Sami/Leila hard-line make sense?

I said, ‘Isn’t it too soon to measure the Diwan effect? Think twenty years ahead – some of those playing together today may be able to influence things in ways we can’t imagine. Because of this experiment.’

Leila shook her head. ‘That’s sentimental! Legal reform is our first and greatest need – not beautiful music! If you want to change how most people behave, you don’t play them Beethoven quartets. You legislate for every citizen to be treated equally and for all laws to be enforced. Should we wait twenty years, suffering multiple injustices, while Barenboim’s kids are gaining influence? As the Yanks say, get real!’

We arranged then to walk together to Jamal’s wedding. Unlike most Palestinian women, Leila enjoyed hiking.

The Yaffa Cultural Centre (YCC), a non-profit-making NGO, was formed in 1996 by the Committee for the Defence of Palestinian Refugee Rights. Mahmoud, its Director, is among the most memorable people I met on the West Bank. Born in the Balata ‘prison’, his remarkable talents allowed him to escape and benefit from a sponsored education in the US where he could have continued to dwell in a profitable ivory tower. Instead, he returned to use his talents for Balata’s benefit – as Leila had returned from England. A heartening number of Palestinians do this: escape, prosper, reject prosperity and come home to help.

The YCC’s three-storey Centre, built in 2004, is of incalculable value to the minority who can participate in its programme. Its atmosphere is cheerful and busy in a purposeful way that starkly emphasises the lethargic hopelessness too common beyond its walls. Mahmoud achieves much with limited resources. Unlike the average Western ‘humanitarian’ NGO, YCC is a model of frugality and creative recycling. But Balata needs at least one hundred YCCs.

I should have written ‘almost always’ cheerful. The adults, throughout Cast Lead, showed their grief and anger – though here, too, comments were muted. Meanwhile the teenagers and children hurried from one absorbing project to the next, ignoring the ghastliness being transmitted by al-Jazeera. When three little boys crossed the hallway wearing violin cases Mahmoud exclaimed, ‘That’s what we want to achieve! Those kids used to spend all day playing with toy weapons and dreaming about real ones. Then we coaxed them into a music class. Then they started saving cash gifts from relatives in the Gulf – to buy violins! Sometimes we feel we’re winning. A delusion – but we need those to keep us going.’

Mahmoud found it hard to talk about Operation Defensive Shield. That military over-reaction in 2002 to the indiscriminate suicide bombing of the second Intifada had driven so many Oslo-disappointed, despairing young Palestinians to promote and glorify violence. The whole of the West Bank, and the refugee camps in particular, continue to suffer from the fall-out. ‘You can’t compare infernos,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Ours and Gaza’s – equal but different …’

In a student restaurant opposite the new university campus, on the eve of Jamal’s wedding day, Leila met me looking tight-lipped and red-eyed. Jamal had been arrested hours before, charged with hoisting a green Hamas flag at the Huwwara checkpoint to celebrate the Gaza ceasefire. He and four friends were now in an IDF prison.

When we visited Jamal’s village a few days later (Leila my interpreter) his mother didn’t doubt her son’s ‘guilt’ but couldn’t blame him for defying the ban on Hamas emblems. ‘We’re democratic,’ she said. ‘Three years ago most of us voted for Hamas – why not fly their flag?’ She admitted that some elders, including herself, condoned certain forms of defiance as a safety-valve for an anger that might inspire suicide bombing if too repressed. ‘Now he’s detained,’ she said, ‘and maybe being tortured. But he’s still alive …’

On the walk home I marvelled at the extraordinary stoicism (if that’s what it is) of mothers like Jamal’s. She now had two sons in custody and a marriage had had to be indefinitely postponed hours before the ceremony. Her eighteen-year-old would certainly get a jail sentence and Jamal’s ‘administrative detention’ could be renewed every six months – yet she remained calm while I, an outsider, was tense with rage.

‘I know how you feel,’ said Leila. ‘Coming home from England I felt the same. It all seemed so unjust, so cruel, I couldn’t accept doing nothing. But when the oppressor is so powerful you’ve got to adapt. As a child I knew that, in England I forgot it. Now I’ve learned it again. Mothers like Jamal’s must accept having no power. She has younger kids who need her staying calm.’

Since 1967 more than 700,000 Palestinians have been detained, which puts them among the world’s most imprisoned peoples. Such detentions in Israel are illegal, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention: ‘Protected persons accused of offences shall be detained in the occupied country, and if convicted they shall serve their sentences therein.’ In cases of administrative detention, Military Order 1229 decrees that neither the detainees nor their lawyers may see the evidence against them or know the reason for their detention. In IDF courts, children as young as 12 are charged and may be sentenced to six months in an adult prison. There are no juvenile courts or prisons. Over the age of 14, children are tried as adults. Between September 2000 and August 2008, approximately 6,700 children were detained. B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights group, reports that 86% of Palestinian detainees are tortured.

Military Orders – which ban, among other things, ‘political expression’ – partly explain these shocking statistics from which the ‘international community’ keeps its eyes averted at all times. On the West Bank some 1,500 such orders are in force and specific Orders may be issued for particular districts but not publicised. Therefore many are detained for breaking rules they’d never heard of until finding themselves handcuffed and blindfolded on the floor of a vehicle. Military Order 938 defines as ‘a hostile action’ supporting ‘a hostile organisation by holding a flag or listening to a nationalist song’.

At Huwwara that evening several Israeli flags flew high above the queuing Palestinians. As I went to and fro (to Ramallah, Bethlehem, Qalqiya) my Irish passport prompted different reactions. Occasionally a soldier disputed my visa and I cringed as those behind me were delayed while a radio check established that indeed Irish citizens need only three-month tourist visas. A few conscripts were interested in a friendly way – why on earth should this old woman be living in hard-line Nablus? (They didn’t have to know I was based in even harder-line Balata.) Probably the amiable ones, future refuseniks, would have preferred not to be part of a hated occupying force.