Since early childhood, graveyards have attracted me; where others might hasten towards the local beauty spot, I hasten towards the cemetery. (There must be a name – probably Greek – for this condition.) Balata’s cemetery, two minutes’ walk from my room, is by now as crowded and unlovely as the ‘camp’. From its few raggedy palm trees hang colourful ‘martyrs’ memorials’, large wooden boards depicting one or more young men. Their expressions vary (determined, sad, scared, defiant, sulky); several bear arms, one wears academic robes – tragic role models for Balata’s children.

The cemetery was rarely visited but one morning I met Nasr beside his maternal grandmother’s grave. He had come for her funeral from his home village near Ramallah where he worked as a freelance journalist and stringer. At once he identified me as possible raw material and didn’t share the Balatans’ inhibition about visiting my room.

As I made tea, Nasr explained his fluent English, learned from an extraordinary great-uncle. This man, as a ten-year-old, had taken a bullet in the spine while his village was being ‘cleansed’. His devastated parents, who had lost everything (house, land, animals) looked at their paralysed son and advised him to use his brain since he could no longer use his body. That advice would have been hard to follow but for the intervention of an orthopaedic surgeon, a 1930s immigrant from Germany. Anton Goldstein was so appalled by the Nakba that he unofficially adopted several of his Palestinian patients, subsidising their education. Eight years later Nasr’s great-uncle was translating for a Jordanian businessman based in East Jerusalem; his mother pushed his wheelchair to and from the office. Then came ’67 … Again this family, like thousands of others, was displaced, driven out of the shack they had contrived to build in Silwan. Happily, great-uncle’s employer stood by him and soon he and his younger brother (Nasr’s grandfather) were working in Ramallah, their wages minimal but their jobs secure.

‘There are many good Jews,’ said Nasr, ‘but their government never hears them.’ He told me then about the novel he was writing, based on ‘the worst experience of my life’.

It happened the day Nasr overslept, was late for an important appointment, tried to avoid a checkpoint delay and was arrested. The handcuffs went on but no blindfold. ‘Later I wished I’d been blindfolded.’ As the soldiers locked him in a sentry-box-type cell beside the gate he noticed that one of them was a newcomer; later it transpired that this was the youngster’s very first day on checkpoint duty. His three mates were well known to the locals.

Soon, through his cell’s tiny window, Nasr could see a friend approaching: twenty-seven-year-old Ali, accompanied as usual by his seven-year-old son, on their way to the family fields. Ali had passed through the gate, exchanging polite greetings with the soldiers, when one shouted a request for ‘a light’. In response Ali turned, fumbling in a pocket – whereupon the newcomer panicked and shot him in the stomach. As he fell his son fled towards home, screaming. Nasr could see and hear the shooter becoming hysterical, as he realised his mistake, and being hugged and comforted by his mates. A helicopter would soon have arrived to rescue a wounded soldier but Ali lay unattended for four hours. On this side road no vehicle passed for the first hour. When a crowded taxi did appear, the soldiers dragged Ali onto the verge, opened the gate and ordered the driver not to stop. Now Nasr could see that his friend, only a few yards away, was still alive. ‘I saw his chest rising and falling. I shouted again and again for an ambulance. They wouldn’t listen, they wanted him to die first. When he stopped breathing they called the ambulance and it came in twenty minutes.’

Subsequently, a doctor noted Ali’s body’s sinister yellow hue; this was a corpse drained of blood and the wound need not have been fatal. An inquiry heard evidence that Ali was about to attack, was carrying a long, sharp knife. ‘True,’ said Nasr, ‘he carried that knife to cut cauliflowers to sell in Ramallah.’ Nasr’s evidence was not required and he spent the next six months in ‘administrative detention’ (Israel-speak for imprisonment without trial). The inquiry concluded that Ali’s death was accidental. Nasr was given to understand that if he disputed this verdict he would spend much longer in detention.

Three years later Nasr’s nightmares persisted. ‘What stays most in my head is the boy’s screams. He’s ten now and he’ll soon be an activist.’ (I didn’t ask what form his activism might take.) ‘Asleep or awake I remember the blood running into the ground and me shouting and they didn’t care – he’s only an Arab, I’m only an Arab.’

I asked why the villagers hadn’t come to Ali’s aid and Nasr replied bluntly, ‘We’re always afraid of the army. If soldiers say Ali was a terrorist, people helping him would have their homes demolished. That’s how Israeli terrorism works.’

This was my second eyewitness account of an IDF victim being deliberately left to bleed to death. The first was even more distressing because a group of settlers from Homesh stood with the soldiers, at Tapuah West junction, watching it happen.

Nasr opposed my plan to visit Homesh on foot, pretending to be a keen tourist hiker. When my morning walks took me up Mount Ebal, this illegal outpost was visible, within easy distance. ‘No!’ exclaimed Nasr. ‘They are very mad! They could kill you!’

I tried then to explain my increasing personal frustration, my resentment of the restrictive, ominous tensions generated by the proximity of so many aggressive settlements. Farmers afraid to weed their fields, shepherds afraid to graze their flocks, wives afraid to fetch water, children afraid to collect kindling or play on the hillsides …

Nasr – hitherto so quiet-spoken – suddenly clenched his fists, struck his knees and yelled, ‘I would kill them!’ Then abruptly he stood up. ‘My aunt waits for me. Don’t, please, go near Homesh!’

Next day I consulted Moussa who echoed Nasr’s warning; a mine, rather than a settler, might kill me. The IDF had recently laid anti-settler mines which were not deterring a group who could afford (all those US Zionists’ dollars!) to buy the latest in mine-detectors. Reluctantly I abandoned my plan. There are nicer ways of dying …

In 2005 Ariel Sharon’s cunning disengagement manoeuvre (withdrawing settlers and the IDF from Gaza) deceived many outsiders. Homesh was one of the four small West-Bank outposts from which Israelis also withdrew – pro tem. The settlers reacted to the bulldozing of their homes by rebuilding – and they rebuilt again and again. ‘Same as we do when the Caterpillars go,’ said Moussa, half-admiringly. ‘Except we rebuild on our own land and they rebuild on our land! They go wild about Abraham. They reckon he made this sacred land Jewish for ever. The IDF shifts them, they’re back, opening a yeshiva, advertising pilgrimages, threatening to take over Joseph’s Tomb. Every year they get bolder as the army gets more religious. If ordered to uproot their buddies, some battalions might mutiny. That’s all the Holy Land needs – an Israeli civil war!’

A rabble of settler rabbis regularly reminds recruits that ‘The holy Torah prohibits taking part in any act of uprooting Jews from any part of our sacred land’. Another rabble, calling itself ‘SOS Israel’, awards cash prizes of 20,000 shekels (around 4,000 euros) to soldiers who promote this message. Certain brigades’ ceremonies have had to be modified because religious-national soldiers consider it sinful to listen to women singing. According to Amos Harel, such men have come ‘to see themselves as leading the army’. In November 2008, he reported in Ha’aretz that the IDF’s Chief Rabbi, Avichai Rontzski, had been accused by a senior officer of ‘religious brainwashing and, indirectly, also political brainwashing’. Rontzski had been chosen in 2006 to placate increasingly vocal national-religious elements. Three years later the International Crisis Group quoted an unnamed but evidently unhappy General, ‘Today, over a quarter of young officers wear skullcaps. In the combat units, their presence is two or three times their demographic weight. In the Special Forces it’s even higher.’

When the General was young, most IDF officers came from the Ashkenazi secular middle class and a military career conferred status. By now, free-market Israel offers a wide choice of lucrative careers and in elite front-line units Ashkenazis have been replaced by upwardly mobile recent immigrants. Also the religious-national element has been strengthened by government-funded Hesder yeshivas, where for five years young men can combine Torah studies and army service. These academies attract recruits from ultra-Orthodox families previously allergic to military training and the International Crisis Group learned that ‘In a few years, religious soldiers will make up the majority of brigade commanders in all areas’.

In Balata I got to know six ‘human shields’, young men and boys abused by the IDF in a procedure outlawed by Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Two seemed undamaged, or at least were able to conceal any damage by bragging about their ordeals. The others, according to their parents, had reacted variously. A fourteen-year-old, aged eleven when tied to the front of an armoured vehicle for three hours while it patrolled Balata’s periphery, couldn’t concentrate at school and was still having nightmares. Two others, said to be obsessively planning revenge, kept their mothers’ anxiety levels at ‘High’. The sixth, now aged twenty, had become ‘always sad, never talking’, as his father put it. Everyone was indignant because in 2007 a TV crew (Associated Press) filmed a human shield ‘episode’ in Nablus – why hadn’t the cameras focused on Balata where the abuse was much more common? My suggestion that their insurance might not cover Balata caused some gratified amusement.

When the Refusenik movement began some thirty years ago, it was unpopular in Balata. One sixty-year-old woman, responsible for nine orphaned grandchildren, described ‘Soldiers of Conscience’ as ‘selfish kids’. They were ‘the best Israelis’ and should have ‘stayed on our territory to help us. Every year we have worse oppressors, like the ones who killed Zarmina’s baby. They are friends of the settlers, always they let Homesh people go back to build again.’

Even now, recalling the loss of Zarmina’s baby makes me feel queasy with horror and anger. I won’t fill in any details. This is how I recorded it in my journal that evening:

In fact disbelief was my first reaction to the whole story; it seemed impossible that any soldier, however religious-national, could be so depraved. Yet no Palestinian found the tragedy at all surprising: very shocking, but not surprising. Then the post-Cast Lead media debate began and I realised that that young man was not, as one would have hoped, exceptional. Several newspapers, including the London Observer, showed photographs of T-shirts designed for the Givati Brigade to commemorate their achievements in Gaza. These depicted mothers mourning over their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child, dead babies in grotesquely distorted positions, a weeping mother holding a dead toddler, a teddy-bear beside the inscription ‘Better use Durex’ – and a pregnant woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her bulge. The English slogan read ‘1 shot, 2 kills’. That last photograph is in my IDF file, tangible proof that the greatest threat to Israel’s survival comes from within rather than without. The damage done to the Palestinians is obvious. But what of the damage done to the Israelis by the convergence of brutalising militarism and manic Judaism?

In Tel Aviv Ruth had advised me to read Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, which turned out to be the most relevant of all the relevant volumes on my shelves. As its authors note, Israeli fundamentalism is ‘especially significant in regard to the principles of Israeli state policies’.

Israel Shahak, a Bergen-Belsen survivor reared in the Warsaw Ghetto, died in 2001 after a long life dedicated to scholarship in the service of human rights. His US-Jewish friend and co-author wrote of him in a Preface to the new (2004) edition:

Israel’s secular aspect prompts us to underestimate the political importance of Jewish fundamentalism. But the National Religious Party (NRP) alliance is underpinned by the teachings of many way-out quasi-mystical Rabbis like the late ‘Lubavitcher Rebbe’, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He founded the Chabad movement in the US, and in 1965 compiled a book of messages for his followers in the Holy Land, which deeply influenced too many Israelis, including the Hebron mass-murderer, Baruch Goldstein, and Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh who contributed a chapter to a book in praise of Goldstein’s crime. ‘Jewish bodies and non-Jewish bodies’ – he pointed out – ‘only seem to be similar … The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from the satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.’ In a 1996 interview with the Jewish Week (New York), Rabbi Ginsburgh said, ‘If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value.’ Commenting on this, the Professors note:

Rabbi Yehuda Amital proclaimed that the Yom Kippur War (1973) was against all non-Jews, including Gentile citizens of the US – without whose emergency military aid that war would have been lost. Shockingly, Amital was appointed Minister without portfolio in Shimon Peres’s government. Before Israel’s 1982 invasion of the Lebanon, the military rabbinate distributed a new map; Lebanese place names had been changed to Book of Joshua names and the troops were urged to replicate Joshua’s conquests which eliminated all Gentiles.

The two messianic Rabbis Kook (father and son, founders of Gush Emunim) saw the seizure of Palestinian land as an act of sanctification. Their twenty-first-century successors also see themselves as redeeming the land by transferring it from the satanic to the divine sphere. All Gush Emunim members believe their sect is divinely guided, therefore cannot err. (Of whom does that remind you?) This conviction, shared with the NRP, amply justifies the Professors’ apprehension about Jewish fundamentalism substantially affecting Israel’s nuclear policies.

The illusion that Jewish blood is special (‘the blood concept’) has numerous consequences now plain to be seen. The security forces’ freedom to ill-treat and torture ‘the enemy’, and the disappearance of so many Palestinians into indefinite detention, are but two examples. Also collective punishments seem entirely appropriate if non-Jewish blood is comparatively worthless. (Just occasionally the ‘concept’ works in the Palestinians’ favour, as when 1,027 of their prisoners were released in exchange for one IDF captive.) This illusion also conditions the thoughts and deeds of many secular Israelis. Some ‘seculars’ do worry about the incompatibility between fundamentalist-pleasing policies and democracy – as when courts fail to treat alike Palestinians who have killed gentiles and Palestinians who have killed Jews. They recognise that the discrimination practised against Israel’s Palestinian voters would be condemned as ‘racist’ if used by any Western government. Yet – ‘In the voluminous descriptions in English of Israel, this phenomenon, though known in Israel, is almost never mentioned.’ The Professors liken the majority of English-language books on Judaism and Israel to totalitarian state literature which may provide much accurate information while lying by omission – a flaw less often found in Israel’s Hebrew publications.

On the medical stage, fundamentalism plays weird parts. Some rabbis permit Jews to receive non-Jewish organs in life-or-death crises. But non-Jews should never receive Jewish organs and Rabbi Sheinberger emphasises – ‘Obviously it is prohibited under any circumstances to transplant Jewish organs into Arabs, all of whom hate Jews.’ Pious Jews may accept blood transfusions only from other pious Jews – or perhaps from secular Jews (depending on your rabbi), but never from non-Jews. What would be the reaction if Christian leaders forbade their followers to accept Jewish blood? As for mother’s milk – a Talmudic prohibition sees to it that no pious Jewish baby will be allowed anywhere near a contaminated non-Jewish breast.

For many years, the Professors tell us, ‘books in Hebrew detailing instructions for spells and witchcraft recipes have been best sellers in Israel’. So, on the one hand we have advanced technology Israel, amply supplied with nuclear bombs (by courtesy of France), its scientists collaborating with the Pentagon’s in the production of killer-drones which expose their users to no risk. And, on the other hand, we have kabbalistic, quasi-mystical Israel where rival politicians and rabbis conduct interminable feuds with the aid of magic. I mean real, old-fashioned magic, dating back to at least the second century AD and also common in certain districts of Paris, London and New York. Individuals who habitually use magic find it easier to win political contests: or so many believe. According to some serious political analysts, Netanyahu’s 1996 victory over Peres was linked to the exclusive blessings bestowed on him by the cabbalist Rabbi Kaduri and to the boycotting of Peres by most magicians. Today this aspect of Judaism has enormous political and social significance and as the professors note, ‘The misguided attempt to hide this past and present tendency, which is widespread in Israel, has infested the English-language histories of the Jews.’

The religious settlers who so menacingly surround Nablus and Hebron are ‘theologically motivated and a manifestation of fundamentalism’ only loosely connected to the Bible. They look back to Abraham and the Promised Land mainly in media interviews. Otherwise, they are eagerly looking forward. They know the messiah is on the way, the world is already in the messianic age, therefore they need to be rooted in Samaria and Judea. We hear strangely little about this, as a political problem, from our ‘expert’ commentators. Yet when political waters are being muddied by Muslim fundamentalists, their religious motivation is heavily underlined.

Gush Emunim is supported by about 50% of Israel’s Jewish population, plus financially important Diaspora adherents. The Jewish Press, the most widely read US-Jewish weekly paper, vigorously promotes Gush Emunim, regularly gives its spokesmen op-ed space and has praised Yitzhak Rabin’s ‘religious’ murderer, Yigal Amir. Speaking of Rabin’s murder, which delighted millions, the professors emphasise:

For decades, most outside observers have been confused by various ‘Peace Processes’, as have many Palestinians and Israelis. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel reveals why there never was any such thing. It shows us a two-tier structure. The elaborate top tier involves Zionist leaders at home and abroad, AIPAC-controlled/funded US Presidents, Secretaries of State and envoys, permanently frustrated teams of back-room negotiators, the impotent UN, the vile Quartet and occasional myopic EU Observer Missions fostering Free Trade Zone agreements. The lower tier is reality: Israel’s fundamentalists, resolved never to permit ‘peace’ on any terms acceptable to the Palestinians. To what extent is the refusal to recognise that reality a form of culpable ignorance?