Towards the end of February, by which time I had regained my mobility, I was invited to Jayyous village to stay with Shareef Omar’s family, famous for their ‘STOP THE WALL!’ campaigning.

The contentious plan to divide Israel and the West Bank with a continuous barrier had been a twinkle in Sharon’s eye since the late 1970s. He, then Minister for Agriculture and already resolved to stymie the two-state solution, declared large areas of the West Bank ‘State Lands’, permanently at the disposal of the IDF ‘for security reasons’, therefore available for settlement. New settlers were presented to the world as ‘employees on behalf of the army’, living in military camps. This chicanery was duly ‘legalised’ by Attorney General Aharon Barak; Israelis resident in such camps could be employed by the army ‘in accordance with needs’. In October 1977, after the government’s approval of this arrangement, six army camps were reserved for settlers. Gush Emunim hardliners resented this compromise (‘humiliating’) but soon those camps had become ‘legitimate’ civilian settlements.

By June 2002 the rate of suicide-bombings, within Israel, had made it politically possible at last to implement. In October 2003 Israel’s full cabinet approved the Barrier’s route by a large majority; they had not been consulted sooner because Sharon was awaiting a nod from Washington. This came when the US National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and Sharon’s cabinet chief, Dov Weisglass, had between them determined exactly how much Palestinian land the Barrier would annex. No Palestinian was brought even to the edge of these discussions. As one PA representative acidly pointed out, ‘Again we have a situation where Israelis and Americans are making decisions that Palestinians are going to have to pay for.’

Happily the Barrier is beyond sight of Nablus; it would have unhinged me to live for months in its presence. Sharon disliked the final plan because it left many isolated settlements, on the hilltops around Nablus, ‘unprotected’. Then he realised (as quoted by Aluf Benn) that enclosing Nablus would mean annexing ‘hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who would eventually join up with the Israeli Arabs, and that would become a major problem’. The compulsion to do demographical sums tormented Sharon’s last years.

An incisive Al-Haq publication, The Annexation Wall and its Associated Regime, explains that this construction’s main purpose is to grab more land. About 86% of its length is not on the 1949 Armistice Line (commonly known as the Green Line), the only internationally accepted boundary between Israel and the OPT. In 2002, when suicide bombers were keeping Israelis in a permanent state of terror, the ‘security’ excuse sounded quite convincing. Yet by now every cat on the roof knows of gaps allowing desperate Palestinians to slip through into Israel to earn low pay as illegal workers. Where they can go, so could suicide bombers. Mercifully they don’t, and haven’t for a long time, because the Resistance has come to see suicide-bombing as counterproductive. A former Shin Bet director sees the Barrier as equally counterproductive. On 14 November 2003 The Washington Post reported, ‘Avrham Shalom states that the Wall creates hatred, expropriates land and annexes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the State of Israel. The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended.’

On the edge of Nablus our serveece joined a checkpoint queue where the road to Qalqilya emerges from the valley between Jarzim and Ebal. Here five vegetable-laden donkey-carts were being held up, for no apparent reason, beside a working stone quarry. The young man in the front passenger seat suddenly turned to me and said, ‘See how it happens? Our rulers like to see dust settle on fresh food!’ As we waited, IDs at the ready, Hussein Issa decided to swap seats. He introduced himself as a journalist, grandson of an oil company engineer forced out of Haifa in 1948, son of a Qalqilya-based businessman who had set up a joint enterprise with an Israeli Palestinian – as sometimes happened during the Oslo years. By 1996 Father could afford to buy four acres of land, only to have it seized by the IDF in 2000 ‘for a transmission mast site’.

We now entered Area C, which has always been under full Israeli control: security, planning, commerce, construction, demolition. A lot of demolition: most villagers were denied building permits and almost always the bulldozers dealt with those (usually young couples) who had rashly invested in an ‘unauthorised’ home. Area C (72%) covers the OPT’s most fertile land, supporting, in 2009, about 150,000 Palestinians and 300,000 illegal settlers. By then 40% of the entire West Bank consisted of settlements, outposts, military bases, closed military areas, settlers’ industries including quarries and ersatz ‘nature reserves’, all out of bounds to Palestinians. That morning I found it hard to enjoy the quiet beauty of Samaria in winter: the low, long curving lines of the hills, the sombre hues of boulder-flecked olive groves and shaggy moorland, the occasional strip of green in a deep wadi. All was too still and unpeopled: there should have been mini-tractors and donkeys ploughing, shepherds with their flocks, villagers toing and froing on those faint, winding paths. Checkpoints marked the turn-offs for Sarra, Immatin, Jinsafut, the Israeli flag flying high above the IDF’s concrete cubes or stacks of sandbags. Our serveece was going directly to Qalqilya and Hussein warned me that I’d probably have to walk the four miles from Azzoun to Jayyous. ‘So many road-blocks in that corner, taxis don’t go.’

At one turn-off, for the notorious settlement of Alfe Menashe, a band of ostentatiously armed men stood along the verge awaiting a lift into Israel. ‘It’s same as mandate days,’ said Hussein. ‘Then we tried to stop Zionist immigrants and the British let new settlers run their own militias. From the British, Zionists learned how to keep Arabs down – with executions and demolished houses.’ He paused, then raised his voice to say that recently he had read Mein Kampf in Arabic and ‘I only hate Hitler because he didn’t kill them all.’

It took me an instant to register his meaning. Then I felt breathless, disoriented, as though I’d been kicked in the stomach: moral shock having a physical effect. A moment later we stopped on the edge of Azzoun and I scrambled out, mumbling a general goodbye.

Huge concrete slabs were jumbled on the verge, an off-duty roadblock, to be replaced before the next anti-Barrier demo. I sat on a slab, feeling chilled, and realised that never before had I met undisguised anti-Semitism. It frightened me – and gave me a new understanding of the Israelis’ fear. Despite my never having met another Palestinian who spoke thus, Hussein was certainly not unique. Do I lead an unduly sheltered life? Walking on, I began to feel foolish, to accuse myself of over-reacting. Hussein’s sentiment, however upsetting, shouldn’t have even slightly surprised me. In the Holy Land Zionism has sown and continues to fertilise the seeds of hatred – as so many Israelis, including Shin Bet’s Avrham Shalom, readily admit. But it did alarm me to think of Mein Kampf still being available in Arabic. All my long-repressed authoritarian instincts came swarming to the surface. Surely, in this context, that book should be banned?

I was late for an appointment with Amneh Bassem in Azzoun’s girls’ school, where one of Shareef Omar’s daughters taught English. Near the school I paused beside a new building, two-storeyed and characterless, identified by a bilingual placard.

Within the school’s spacious yard I chuckled over a colourful bilingual mural extending the length of one wall: ‘A fine woman can do without fine clothes’. It was an unexpectedly big school for quite a small town. On the West Bank, two-thirds of pupils attend single-sex schools; only some UNRWA camp schools are co-ed, providing free compulsory education to Grade 10 (age sixteen). After that, ambitious pupils must enrol at a PA or private school. The OPT Palestinians are 99% literate and attach such importance to education that if need be parents will go hungry to pay school fees.

Amneh was a bulky, grey-haired woman who worked at a few local schools as an unpaid psychotherapist. She spoke sadly of the increasing number of pupils with serious behavioural problems and I admired her for sounding sad rather than angry. She was of the generation that did much of its studying in jail. The thousands imprisoned in the ’80s were usually being punished for belonging to specifically non-violent student groups, trades unions and Popular Committees. ‘We were arrested for being anti-terrorist,’ said Amneh with just a hint of bitterness. ‘I got five years for writing, printing and distributing a booklet about running a long-term transport strike. But how can we expect this generation to value non-violence?’ She gestured towards the yard, now a noisy mass of pupils enjoying their mid-morning break.

My mention of BDS brought a deep sigh and a shake of the head. ‘Yes, it’s grown naturally from the first Intifada’s thinking. Problem is, it can’t work without wide, direct, consistent support. From our own leaders, from our Israeli friends who come and stand with us to protest the Wall and demolitions, from foreign friends and NGOs and governments. And that sort of support we won’t get before we reassert ourselves.’

Amneh craved a return to the ’80s spirit of determined unity. In her view, Azzoun’s Information & Communication Technology Center was being steered in the wrong direction by its neo-liberal funders. She laid part of the blame for the Palestinians’ current lack of a coordinated strategy on the ‘international community’. ‘We’re not short of intelligence or energy. Why not leave us alone to do it our way? So many possible sources of funding aren’t helping. Above all we need unity and they divide us into competing groups.’ Amneh spoke for many as she excoriated foreigners’ control of the Palestinians’ destiny.

At the top of the steep main street two taxis were parked under a walnut tree but neither driver had a permit to enter Jayyous. The long walk to the Omar home proved my damaged hip to be serviceable again and so it remained for the next half-year or so.

In this region the Barrier’s ‘Associated Regime’ was then particularly constricting. Al-Haq considers it under four headings:

1) Gates and Checkpoints. The 26 checkpoints are controlled by Israel’s Border Police (the most feared branch of the security forces) and by private security companies. The Barrier incorporates seven types of gates: agricultural, checkpoint, military, road, school, seasonal and settlement. These are placed irregularly and opened erratically; they drastically reduce Palestinian freedom of movement and access to schools, hospitals, mosques, markets, family and friends.

2) Permit Systems. The gates, checkpoints and ad hoc roadblocks are operated through a sadistically restrictive permit system. Al-Haq explains:

The application process to acquire a permit is prohibitively complex and arbitrary. Palestinians must submit an application to the District Coordination Office of the Israeli Civil Administration. (The Civil Administration was established in 1980 by a military order issued by the IDF’s Regional Commanders.) The process for obtaining a permit has never been clarified by Israeli authorities, nor are there definite criteria for examining a request for a permit. Palestinians are further discouraged from applying because an applicant denied on the basis of posing a ‘security threat’ is subsequently placed on a security list. The duration of permit validity varies but, typically, permits are valid for between two weeks and six months. The permit duration is a particular obstacle for farmers whose land now lies suffocated between the Green Line and the Wall. These persons must now apply for a ‘visitor’ permit in order to farm their own land. Essential for obtaining this permit is proof of land ownership coupled with supporting purchase documentation. These documents are difficult to produce for those whose land ownership title dates from the Ottoman, British Mandate or Jordanian periods of rule. A 2007 survey found that less than 20% of those who fall into this category were actually granted a permit … Professor Dugard, the former UN Special Rapporteur, described the permit system as reminiscent of South African Apartheid ‘Pass Laws’.

3) ID cards. From their sixteenth birthday Palestinians must carry ID cards or risk arrest and a fine. East Jerusalem residents hold blue cards, the rest green, and since 2001 family unification has been denied to the latter who are not allowed to live – or even sleep overnight – in Jerusalem. Along the Barrier’s length, this ‘colour code’ shreds the Palestinians’ social fabric and causes immeasurable grief to divided families. To prevent relatives foregathering on festive occasions, or for weddings and funerals, is yet another form of collective punishment.

4) Property Destruction and Confiscation. In some areas – Qalqilya and environs a grim example – this practice has impoverished whole villages whose farmers had prospered for generations on the produce of their land. As Al-Haq puts it, ‘Property appropriation and destruction has been the modus operandi for the Israeli Ministry of Defence to secure sufficient land to build the Wall inside the OPT.’ The confiscation of property by an Occupying Power is prohibited by Article 46 of the Hague Regulations and Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). Already, in 1986, UN General Assembly Resolution 41/63 declared Israel’s numerous breaches of that Geneva Convention to be war crimes and ‘an affront to humanity’. There could be no more apt summing-up of the Barrier and its consequences.

Azzoun, Jayyous and the neighbouring villages seemed like dying communities. Shops were closed or only half-stocked, streets were too quiet, many homes’ exteriors looked neglected and the depleted populations, if visible, lacked vitality. Yet there was some evidence of pre-Occupation prosperity in premises that had been modernised – and much evidence of ancient prosperity in the handsome remains of substantial Ottoman dwellings.

A few of the Oslo years had been kind to these villages. Jayyous’s 120 greenhouses, shared with nearby Falamya, yielded 7 million kilos of fruit and vegetables annually, for sale to traders from Nablus, Qalqilya and Israel. Then – disaster! The second Intifada’s total closure meant isolation from most of the Palestinian and all the Israeli markets. Two years later came the Barrier – why? At first everyone was bewildered; no suicide bomber had ever been traced to this region. Its farmers, though resolute when attempting to defend their land, were not militants of the calibre found in refugee camps and overcrowded cities. As it became obvious that the Barrier would lie almost four miles east of the Green Line, within spitting distance of some village houses, Abu Azzam (as Shareef Omar is universally known) joined with a few others to hire a lawyer. But the Appeals Committee briskly dismissed their case on the grounds of ‘military necessity’. By the end of November 2002 the Caterpillars were at work and 4,000 olive trees had been uprooted.

On the narrow, twisting road from Azzoun to Jayyous I passed only a few youths collecting something unidentifiable from what might have been pastureland before military vehicles and Caterpillars ravaged the surface. Three lengths of weed-enshrouded water-piping caught my eye; these had been lying by the roadside, I later learned, for seven years – awaiting a permit. Abu Azzam recounted other cases of what Robert Fisk calls ‘apartheid-by-permit’. Oxfam were not allowed to build an underground reservoir with 700 metres of piping, nor were they allowed to provide above-ground tanks and a booster pump; they must restrict their giving to rooftop tanks. Soon after, in the village of Zbeidat (believed to belong to Area B), a scandalous complication arose when an EU agency spent £80,000 sterling on installing a sewage system and eighteen waste water shafts. In fact one-third of Zbeidat belongs to Area C and, because the donor had not secured a permit, six of the shafts had to be demolished and some £27,000 of taxpayers’ money sacrificed on the altar of Israel’s ‘Civil Administration’. Incidentally, I never met anybody, Israeli or Palestinian, who could show me the B/C border.

Being above the Western Aquifer makes this region uncommonly fertile. Now Jayyous’s six agricultural wells are beyond the Barrier, accessible only through one gate, opened at the IDF’s whim. Household water must come from a well shared with another village and is also, as Ray Dolphin has explained, affected by Israeli restrictions. ‘At just 23 litres per capita per day, domestic consumption in Jayyous is far below the WHO’s recommended 100 litres, let alone the 350 litres per capita consumption in Israel and the settlements. As a result, Jayyous suffers critical water shortages in the long summer months, necessitating the purchase of expensive tankered water.’

Beyond the permitless pipes rose an odd blackish hillock of what might be described as antique garbage, dumped here by settlers during the 1990s. For years it smouldered away, night and day, causing much local ill-health. Only when its noxious fumes began to affect the settlers themselves did they choose another site. Jayyous tries to be responsible about its own garbage. I met one of the binmen who has an honours degree in physics; the Associated Regime puts more appropriate work out of reach.

Being prominent in the anti-Barrier movement, Jayyous sees many Internationals. As I wandered through its maze of old streets an endearing little boy asked ‘Abu Azzam?’ – then led me to the far side of the village, chattering away in a tantalising English-peppered Arabic. He didn’t like going to school because of having to get up so early. Jayyous had a girls’ secondary school but no primary schools and the Associated Regime could make it very difficult to reach Azzoun’s schools; all depended on IDF moods at checkpoints. Later I heard that USAID had just donated $250,000 for a two-storey primary school. My informant added cryptically, ‘Cui Bono?’ The PA had earned no trust by sometimes despatching its own police to reinforce the IDF at anti-Barrier demos.

As I arrived in the Omars’ new bungalow, high on a steep hillside, three generations were sitting down to lunch (the villagers’ main meal). Abu Azzam and his wife welcomed me like an old friend, as is the Palestinian way, and someone fetched a seventh chair from the verandah. Umm Azzam beamed when I showed appreciation of her musakhan, a mysteriously flavoured chicken casserole on taboun bread. We swopped family details as we ate. Abu Azzam was twenty-four when he married the very beautiful eighteen-year-old sister of a friend. Umm Azzam is still very beautiful, the adored mother of seven university graduates (four girls, three boys) who had already supplied twenty-six grandchildren. As I gradually got to know them, it seemed to me the Omar family were typical Palestinian followers of the Prophet, devout in an easy-going way. For 36 years this couple had saved up to build their seven-room home, its design remembering past eras, its furnishings modern but hand-crafted.

A few years ago, when Abu Azzam was too Barrier-preoccupied to think of anything else, his wife went to the bank, asked ‘How much is in our savings account?’ – then told him, ‘We’ve enough for a new home!’ Abu Azzam laughed at the recollection. ‘That was clever, it eased Barrier tension!’ Later I visited their old village-centre two-storey home – standing in its own shady compound, solid stone, shabby but distinguished and now leased for a token rent to an INGO which monitors IDF behaviour at the Gates.

When we Oldies had retired to the sitting-room to sip thyme tea and nibble baklava I prompted Abu Azzam to wax autobiographical. His activist career began in Jordan where he led a schoolboy protest outside the French Embassy – Algeria the issue. While serving 18 days in an Amman jail a fellow-prisoner asked him to make copies of a Marxist text and ‘I became a convert for some years, as a student.’ Back on the ancestral land in Jayyous, he soon reverted to the benign (more or less) capitalism which seems natural to Palestinians. His Resistance activism dates from 1967. Already, in 1949, Jayyous had lost much of its land; the Armistice Line (‘the Green Line’) lies far from the UN’s original Partition boundary.

In 1988, when 1,350 dunams were confiscated to build Zufin settlement, Abu Azzam led 80 farmers in an appeal to the Israeli high court. At that date his 42 acres, planted with 3,600 mixed fruit trees, made him one of Jayyous’s richest landowners. The legal process was prolonged, perversely complicated and exorbitantly expensive. Over the years twenty farmers dropped out; in 1996 the court ruled the rest could keep their land. Meanwhile, in 1990, the opening of a privately owned Israeli quarry had deprived Jayyous of another 400 dunams.

Then came the Barrier. In December 2002 the IDF and Border Police attacked a non-violent demo of about 100 locals, backed by ISM volunteers. The injuries inflicted did not deter future protesters; scores still rally round at many points along the Barrier. During 2003 the IDF obliterated five of the six roads leading from homes to farmland, completely isolating all Jayyous farmers from their fields and groves. In September 2003 the IDF closed the only agricultural gate, causing 80% of the guava crop to be lost – a fruit needing collection within a day of ripening. In Falamya, 6,000 citrus and fruit trees died.

Also in 2003 a new settlement, North Zufin, was being planned by Lev Leviev, reputedly Israel’s richest man. At that date the use of private contractors left the government feeling free to claim that it was not expanding settlements – something ‘forbidden’ by Bush Jnr’s black joke Road Map. The Barrier greatly excited developers by making new Arab-free building sites available. Moreover, the price of insufficiently watered land falls quite dramatically. Abu Azzam showed me a 2004 report by his hydrologist son-in-law, Abdul-Latif Khaled:

Behind the formal language, one senses Abdul-Latif’s personal grief. His home region has long been admired for its farmers’ industry, skill and enterprise. As another report (United Reformed Church) puts it: ‘The best of Palestinian modern irrigated agriculture could be found in that area. This has been deliberately destroyed, and without it Palestine’s viability is endangered.’

In 2003 Amnesty International declared that Barrier construction ‘must be halted immediately’. In February 2004 the International Committee of the Red Cross condemned it as ‘contrary to international law’. Five months later the Hague’s International Court of Justice delivered its celebrated Advisory Opinion, rejecting Israel’s right to build any part of the Barrier on West Bank land.

Abu Azzam leads the Land Defence Committee for the Qalqilya District and Abdul-Latif is regional director for the nationwide anti-Apartheid Barrier campaign. In 2003 Abu Azzam addressed the Mumbai World Social Forum meeting and gave evidence in The Hague before the International Court of Justice. On his return from Europe the Civil Administration offered him a ‘special’ permit on condition he gave up campaigning. To punish him for declining this offer, he was denied any permit for the next seven months. On another occasion, as punishment for having talked to an Ha’aretz reporter who sought an interview, his permit was cancelled for nineteen days.

Until January 2005 permits were granted to most members of an extended family; at that date eligibility was restricted to owners and their spouses and children. Since then it has been further restricted; in 2009 villagers needed ten different permits and documents to enable them to set foot on their own land. Only 18 permits were issued in Jayyous (population 2,800) during 2008. Abu Azzam received one but all applications from his children failed though ageing parents so obviously need help on the land. He of course must pay the penalty for being so vocal, durable and mobile as an anti-Barrier campaigner. The IDF give him special treatment – like six-or eight-hour checkpoint delays – as he tries to get his now limited produce to Qalqilya market. In Ramallah a Machsom Watch monitor showed me her photograph of an Omar load of perishable goods which only got through on a mid-summer’s day (35°C in the shade) because of her intervention.

During the second Intifada Jayyous lost six men to the IDF and at the time of my visit twenty-three were in jail. Among the twelve in ‘administrative detention’ was the second Omar son, a university law lecturer now nearing the end of his second six months of imprisonment without due process. No one could guess the outcome of his case-review on 1 April; a neighbour had had his sentence renewed nine times. (Nine sixes: that’s four and a half years …) Shareef Junior, when arrested (abducted?) had been organising a non-violent students’ anti-Barrier demo. Not much has changed since the 1980s when Amneh was jailed for advocating non-violent trade union activities – except that nowadays universities (and some employers) deflect prisoners’ salaries to their families. Umm Azzam was allowed a half-hour visit per month – sitting on one side of a bulletproof glass wall. In eleven months Abu Azzam had received only one permit to visit but detainees could make a three-minute telephone call every four weeks and Shareef Junior always spoke to Shareef Senior.

How frail is ‘the West’s’ loyalty to the rule of law! Think Guantanamo Bay, where innocent men have been rotting for years because the US couldn’t admit it blundered by paying lavish bounties to impoverished Afghan peasants who pretended to identify ‘terrorists’. And think administrative detention, the Zionists’ way of ‘neutralising’ men and women whose only crime is having the courage to resist injustices. As Uri Davis repeatedly reminds us:

Also there’s religious law, not to be scoffed at because so many settlers heed it. As laid down by a former Chief Rabbi – ‘The land is the heritage of the Jewish people and if anyone plants a tree on my place, both the tree and the fruit belong to me.’ In the late 1990s Amira Hass was reporting – ‘The famous immunity of the olive tree does not serve it in the face of settlers’ attacks.’ Since then, throughout the OPT, Palestinians have suffered ‘the chopping down of thousands of olive trees at night by unknown perpetrators who are never caught and never punished’.

In 2002 Jayyous was the first village to organise weekly anti-Barrier demos – non-violent, large-scale, multinational (including Israelis). Soon many other communities were being equally active and international media attention put Bil’in, near Ramallah, in the spotlight. Many of this campaign’s leaders emphasise that supporting BDS is ‘the most powerful thing’ we outsiders can do to help the Palestinians. So wrote Mohammad Khatib, an articulate and passionately anti-violence member of the Bil’in Popular Committee, in The Nation (11 September 2009). He had recently been detained for two weeks, accused of stone-throwing and encouraging others to throw stones. Unluckily for the IDF, his passport proved his presence in Canada on the relevant date. But for that, he might still be imprisoned.

In Jayyous too, some elderly people condemned ritual stone-throwing; they recalled a time when children were cowed by the IDF, now most are implacably defiant despite seeing their schoolmates injured and occasionally killed. But they are also indifferent to the damage done by retaliatory tear-gas and house incursions and Abu Azzam was doing what he could to restrain youngsters. In one recent week thirteen had been injured, six with live bullets. Quite often conscripts tauntingly tell women how much they enjoy ‘playing with your children’. (In my journal I wrote: Something symbiotic here? Bored young villagers, bored young soldiers, confrontations breaking monotony for both?)

Throughout the OPT, tear-gas is used indiscriminately against anti-Barrier demos which never threaten the well-armoured IDF with more than stones. That evening five of us sat around the kitchen table nibbling olives and nuts and drinking a memorable vintage of home-made lemon juice. Then Umm Azzam joined us, seeming close to tears. She had been visiting friends who were mourning an asthmatic toddler; the child’s roadside bedroom had been filled with tear-gas as he slept. The IDF frequently invaded Jayyous; on the previous occasion, eight hives of bees, five in-lamb ewes and countless hens were killed by tear-gas. A fortnight after my return home, a Bil’in activist, Bassem Abu Rahmeh, was killed by a high-velocity tear-gas canister fired at close range.

The Palestinians’ apparent lack of bitterness repeatedly astounded me. When fifty-three-year-old one-legged Jawad called to meet me, Abu Azzam explained that in 2003 his house had been demolished around him – the least of his family’s misfortunes. In 1984 an IDF sniper shot his paternal grandmother, through the heart. Ten years later another sniper killed his youngest brother. In 2006 his eldest son was sentenced to fourteen years for possession of a weapon. Now his land lay beyond the Barrier, neglected because so difficult of access. Therefore he was angry – but not bitter.

As Umm Azzad brewed more coffee Jawad told us that nine young men had left the locality in the past week. Some leave Palestine forever (what the Zionists want) if a relative or friend abroad can help them. Others move into already overcrowded Area A. Everybody believes the Barrier is permanent. Jawad quoted a relevant proverb: ‘Whoever catches a bird will never release it again.’

Early next morning, on my way down to the Barrier, I paused outside chez Omar to watch the sunrise. Only ten miles away, yet always inaccessible to Palestinians, the sea glinted faintly beyond the coastal conurbation: Netanya, Kefar Sava, Herzliyya. Closer, between Qalqilya and Tulkarm, lay more than 27 square kilometres of rich farmland known to the IDF as ‘the Seam’ – Palestinian territory trapped between Green Line and Barrier. From here one can see how the Barrier had to contort itself to protect various settlements, diving into wadis and generally making no topographical sense in relation to Israel’s ‘security’. (The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was then recording more than 1300 permitless Palestinians slipping through the Barrier each week to work in Israel.) The less perspicacious settlers were at first anti-Barrier, fearing it presaged the two-state solution and their own uprooting; then they found the plot and set about using it to speed up land-grabbing. Ze’ev Schiff, a senior military analyst, wrote in Ha’aretz (31 October 2003) – ‘The hijacking of the settlement fence by the settlers, with the government’s help, and its transformation from a fence intended for protection into a political fence, is liable to contribute to the deepening of the occupation.’

I descended briskly through the village, pleased that my disability seemed none the worse for the previous day’s exertions. The narrow streets were quiet; farming apart, there’s no reason to get up early in Jayyous. Pre-’48 this must have been a handsome, thriving village with its domed and dignified Ottoman dwellings – some now crumbling or shelled – and its bustling markets, long since subdued or closed. Approaching the Barrier, I passed a few solitary houses surrounded by boulder-strewn scrubland and cut off from their groves; each little front garden, once flower-filled, had been planted with compensatory olive saplings. Hereabouts I met the first traffic of the day, an empty rubber-wheeled donkey-cart being driven by an old woman in traditional dress. Her husband, tall but rather bent and wearing an all-white keffiyeh, leant heavily on his stick and walked beside the donkey. They were of the Nakba-witness generation, survivors who often carry sorrow in their eyes.

From above I had seen many miles of the Barrier’s military road, a thin pale snake undulating across a deserted landscape, blocking the old farmers’ track on which I was now walking – and all other similar tracks. However, at its own level the Barrier takes one by surprise. Suddenly there’s a massive tangle of razor-wire, and beyond that a wide, deep dyke, and beyond that the IDF road, and beyond that the nine-foot-high electronic fence. Some say the dyke is mine-lined, others say mines lie on the far side of the road. An oblong red and white trilingual notice, embedded in the wire, warns:

On the gate across the road – supplemented by a pole-barrier – an orange trilingual notice says:

All those blank spaces prove the Civil Administration’s cynical contempt for the locals and that ‘humanitarian’ hotline makes one want to retch. This metal notice’s several deep dents are a tribute to some rash stone-throwers’ accuracy and vigour.

I walked beside the razor-wire towards Zufin settlement, soon to be expanded by 1,100 housing units. Hundreds of trees had been sacrificed to ‘Nofei Zufin’. In I was Born Here, I was Born There Mourid Barghouti writes with piercing poignancy of the olive tree. ‘Everywhere you look, huge olive trees, uprooted and thrown over under the open sky like dishonoured corpses. I think: these trees have been murdered, and this plain is their open collective grave. With each olive tree uprooted by the Israeli bulldozers, a family tree of Palestinian peasants falls from the wall.’ Mourid’s lament continues at some length and for those pages alone it’s worth buying this book. My own heart was breaking as I gazed across a plain once tranquil in its business, now become the tense tormented ‘Seam’ where armed Israeli men and women limit the hours and the spaces Palestinian men and women may devote to their crops and land. Here I felt I at last fully understood Mourid’s other lament in I Saw Ramallah: ‘The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved: distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine.’ Viewing the settlements, Mourid wrote: ‘These are not children’s fortresses of Lego or Meccano. These are Israel itself; Israel the idea and the ideology and the geography and the trick and the excuse. It is the place that is ours and that they have made theirs …’

Perhaps travellers from agricultural societies (as Ireland was until very recently) are more affected than others by the Palestinians’ grief at being separated from land not valued merely as the family’s source of income. It isn’t as simple as the land belonging to them. They belong to the land in a way incomprehensible to most urban dwellers, people many generations removed from the rhythms and bonds of farming.

I had a noon appointment with Mr Saif Sitta – tall, lean and white-haired, a sad scholarly man with an endearing hobby: collecting eccentric pebbles. He lived near Qalqilya and, through Karim, had offered me a guided tour. Around Qalqilya I would see the Barrier’s contortions at their most perverse and malign.

Qalqilya has grown on the OPT’s border with Israel and is said to be Palestine’s most misfortunate population centre where even at the best of times tensions remain high. Originally a Canaanite trading village, it became a large town in ’48 when the new State of Israel seized much of its land. A disproportionate number of suicide-bombers emerged from this community during the second Intifada and ever since prolonged military closures have isolated Qalqilya from its hinterland, to the detriment of health care, education and employment. When Barrier-building began, most of the remaining land was confiscated without warning and at once people began to organise resistance. A futile attempt: until December 2003 the town and five nearby villages had to endure a curfew lifted only one day a week. Hereabouts all the emotional distresses and material deprivations occasioned by the Barrier are magnified.

From Jayyous, Mr Sitta and I took a collecteeve to the roadblock outside Azzoun, then walked to the main road and boarded a Nablus minibus bound for Qalqilya. On the way my companion pointed to numerous scars on this military-mauled landscape and said, ‘If we were walking you’d also see a little beauty. Anemones and cyclamen, coming up between the rubble. For me, they’re symbols – tiny blossoms, strong symbols.’

Then Mr Sitta cautioned me to express no opinion to anyone we might meet about anything remotely related to the Middle East. Here ‘Fatah versus Hamas’ was interwoven with daily life. Qalqilya had elected a Hamas municipality for several years, until Hamas’s undisputed victory in the January 2006 Assembly election prompted the ‘Leaders of the Democratic World’ to label the winning party ‘terrorist’.

To me impoverished Qalqilya felt quite friendly and around the souk’s lively shwarma and falafel stalls it had a raffish sort of animation. But that drained away as we traversed a once-crowded shopping street where we saw nobody and only a few poorly stocked premises remained open. ‘Take note,’ said Mr Sitta, ‘Qalqilya shows you a second catastrophe. Terrorised families came here in ’48 with so little and worked hard to make another business. Now Zionism expands and all is lost again.’

I find myself not wanting to remember or write about that afternoon. A taxi took us towards the settlement of Alfei Menashe, almost completely ‘protected’ by the Barrier. Here it’s a 25-foot wall of bleak grey concrete unrelieved by the wit of those graffiti activists who operate near Bethlehem and Ramallah. All around, the IDF’s obsession with security has transformed farmland into wasteland. Mr Sitta drew my attention to three isolated homes now one-storey because their upper storeys had bothered the soldiers in the watchtowers. We passed areas on the Seam where once the sheep of three Bedouin communities safely grazed; in 2002 all had to be sold – grazing stolen, no shekels for fodder. At one point the space between the Barrier’s two arms was scarcely wider than the road. Claustrophobia is not among my problems but for a moment I felt almost panicky.

We parked on an open dusty expanse some 30 yards from a wide closed gate beside a watchtower. Mr Sitta, recognising the lone elderly man waiting to be let through, ground his teeth audibly before informing me, ‘Salim’s land is 20 yards from his home. This gate is four miles from his home.’

Briefly we fell silent and could hear the four conscripts arguing above the traffic hum from Israel’s nearby motorway. (There is little motor traffic in this corner of the OPT.)

‘They won’t let Salim through because it’s 2.00 p.m.,’ said Mr Sitta. He opened the taxi door, looking angry. Our driver restrained him. The unit on duty were known nasties, an intervention might provoke them into ‘punishing’ Salim. After only a slight hesitation Mr Sitta shouted to his friend, offering a lift home. Slowly Salim walked towards us, explaining that he’d come at this hour having found the previous unit decently flexible and knowing nothing of the nasties’ arrival. I hoped the presence of an outsider wasn’t rubbing salt in his wound of humiliation. Afterwards Mr Sitta reassured me; Salim wished more foreign writers would come to report on Zionism in action.

We included in our Misery Tour that spot where the Barrier encloses Kfar Saba, a place of pilgrimage for Mr Sitta. There, in July 2004, he attended a rally organised by the People’s Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which seeks to show how many ordinary people on both sides are hungry for peace. He recalled with joy – and an ember of hope – the Israeli mayor of Kfar Saba, surrounded by 400 or so supporters, leading the two rallies in a megaphone conversation across the Barrier.

The People’s Campaign for Peace and Democracy was co-founded by Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian aristocrat, academic and activist, and his old friend Ami Ayalon, a former Shin Bet director. Karim remembered the hostility aroused in some Nablus circles by its brave effort (foreshadowing the one-state solution?) to show how many ordinary people on every side were longing for Peace. ‘Maybe peace more than democracy?’ mused Karim. ‘What had democracy ever done for us?’

Strong feelings had also been aroused in An-Najah University by the campaign’s recruiting drive. Sari Nusseibeh, himself president of Al-Quds University, was to have addressed a student meeting – prudently cancelled at the last moment. Instead, the two college presidents debated their ideal on television, hoping thus to spread its message to every West Bank home. However, most Palestinians dismissed it as one more offshoot of the peace process that never processed to anywhere. They noticed that Professor Nusseibeh had long since proved himself a not very shrewd judge of character. (Example: he once described Mahmoud Abbas as ‘a decent man free of the opportunism tainting so many of his colleagues’.) Moreover, with an Old Etonian son and a brother (Zaki) serving as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi’s most trusted financial adviser, Sari has a credibility problem. He admires his brother’s contribution to turning Abu Dhabi into ‘the Singapore of the Middle East’ but most of my friends don’t want to live Singapore-style. They want their fertile land back and a fair share of the region’s water in an unoccupied Palestine.

Before we parted Mr Sitta advised me to avoid all anti-Barrier demos. International protesters run the risk of being blacklisted, forbidden entry to Israel for at least ten years. And one can’t enter the West Bank without passing through Israeli-controlled territory. For the vast majority of its inhabitants the OPT is a ‘lifer’s’ prison and increasingly the prisoners’ visitors are being vetted and controlled.