I’m back in drizzly Manchester in body now, but my experiences in Palestine continue to occupy my thoughts and I imagine they will continue to do so for quite some time yet.
One thing that bothered me while I was there was the question over what effect the tension, the bitterness, the human rights abuses and the omnipresence of the military uniforms and guns has on the children who grow up in such an environment.

Kids are kids, of course, and will adapt to most things…it is after all mainly down to the parenting. But one thing that I noticed was that the main game among little boys in the West Bank and East Jerusalem seems to be soldiers, and the toy of the moment is a gun. It’s well documented that youngsters have often been killed an injured by army gunfire, sometimes when throwing stones but often while doing nothing to attract attention.
While visiting one community that has been adversely affected by Israel’s segregation barrier, I had the opportunity to ask about this.
In this particular village, there has been hundreds of curfews and terrifying night raids launched by soldiers, in which families are woken at all hours by tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion bombs and other devices.

“The effect is considerable…our kids have been psychologically affected by the raids and the brutality. This has a big impact – in the schools they only talk about the army, the wall resistance and when they play they play army and Arabs and guns,” I was told by one activist.
“Many have been injured and arrested and imprisoned. My son was injured several times by rubber bullets in demonstrations – he was about eight years old at the time.
“This has a negative impact on their academic life – they can suffer post-traumatic stress, bed wetting and bad behaviour. “

How, under such circumstances, could parents ensure that they were not raising a generation filled with bitterness and hate for “the oppressor”, and as such more inclined to extremism – religious or otherwise?
“We have to tell our children that peace-making is possible,” came the response. “They see that there are many good Israelis because we have Israelis supporting us – they are the minority unfortunately but we hope the number will grow.”

I’ve written numerous times about those asylum seekers and refugees who fall through the many cracks in the system and end up destitute, trapped in a position of dependence, for many months or years. So it seemed like an opportune time to look at some of the big-hearted groups and individuals from this country who try to help these unfortunates – by putting them up in their own homes, feeding them, helping them to fill out the relevant forms and fight for their rights…The story is published in the current edition of the Big Issue in the North.

Internet problems and religious festivals – Eid al Fitr and Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year – have conspired to get in the way of blogging over the past few days.
On Friday I returned to the Kalandia checkpoint for a whole morning, getting a feel for the situation and taking photos. It happened to be a particularly dramatic day to be there – the last Friday in Ramadan is one of the holiest days of the year for Muslims and there were throngs wanting to cross from the West Bank into Jerusalem to pray at Al Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock.
Many passed through but many others were refused…

Yesterday I was given the opportunity to return to Hebron, and to tour the city with a local activist. It was an interesting day that gave me a better feel for the tension the city’s residents are living with every day.
Hebron is home to a number of “sterile streets” as they call them in Israel – roads where no Palestinian is allowed to go. Some of the Jewish settlers carry camcorders and follow Palestinians and groups of foreigners around in an attempt to catch them out. This guy, above, pulled up in his jeep within seconds of us coming near one such road. He started recording Issa, our guide, and then tried to get a soldier to block our access to an area. There is anti-Arab graffiti everywhere and jeering settlers on every corner…it’s an intimidating place.

We had travelled to Hebron with Yehuda Shaul, a founder and now director of the group Breaking the Silence, made up of young ex-combat soldiers who now speak out about the occupation and particularly the situation in this town.
Yehuda, a 25-year-old American ultra-orthodox Jew, is no longer allowed into Hebron so had to wait for us outside the centre. Even there he was attacked by the settlers, who pelted him with eggs, after which he was arrested. He was released without charge an hour or so later.
Breaking the Silence now collects testimony from serving and former soldiers and runs educational tours and lectures, mainly aimed at Israeli youth.

What he said was interesting. He talked about the military strategy of separating the 500 settlers and Hebron’s 120,000 Palestinian residents, through shop and road closures, welding doors shut and putting curfews in place for the Arabs (there were 377 days of curfew in just three years).
He also talked about the policy of “making our presence felt”, which describes something I’d heard Palestinians elsewhere talking about. It basically involves random raids in houses, firing ammunition, breaking into shops and so on, and was how soldiers spent their night shifts. “The idea was that if Palestinians thought we were everywhere they wouldn’t try to do anything,” he said.

Yehuda also explained that because of the two systems of law here – Palestinians are subject to military law and settlers to Israeli rules – the army has no power to act when settlers attack their Arab neighbours.
He believes that in this way the settlers are being given the green light to act as they want by the Israeli government. If the army suspects a Palestinian is going to do something violent they can shoot and ask questions later.
But the rules of engagement say that if an Israeli starts shooting people, they must wait for him to pause – if he’s run out of bullets, say – and then overpower him without firing a shot.

What I found quite refreshing about all this was Yehuda’s frankness. He was open about the fact that he has done some horrible things during his time in uniform and wasn’t asking for any kind of praise for what he does now.
“My soldiers and I weren’t different, although we thought we were,” he said. “We might have felt bad about it afterwards but we were still occupying the land and raiding people’s homes.
“When I was serving in Hebron I’d spend my weekends demonstrating outside Ariel Sharon’s house, and attend demonstrations by Women in Black and Peace Now. I would send soldiers in military vehicles to testify to B’Tselem [Israeli human rights group] and if I found out that olive trees were going to be cut down I would tip people off. But that’s part of the silence…the mechanism allowed me to to keep quiet.
“When the order came in to seal up people’s doors in Hebron we spent our briefing hours for a few weeks talking about the morality of refusing to serve.
“But then we’d get into our armoured personnel carriers and raid people’s homes, throw grenades and so on. You can’t be there and not be there at the same time. If you are there you are part of it.”

I’ve mentioned Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock in the past few posts but until yesterday I had no real idea what they looked like. I was blown away when I made it there…the colours, the light, the energy of the place all combined to make it somewhere very special, so I thought I’d try to share it with a few images. Of course they don’t – can’t – do it justice.
I have visited some beautiful places in the past but I think this one might be the winner so far…it really captured me and it was difficult to peel myself away from the peace and quiet and to return to the hectic old city (beautiful and fascinating though it is).

Temple Mount, the name for this area, is an important place for people of several faiths. Jews believe God gathered earth from here to create Adam, and that this was the spot where Abraham planned to sacrifice his son Isaac before an angel intercepted and repaced him with a ram.
They built several temples here over the millenia, but all that is left of them is the Western – or wailing – Wall, believed to be part of the second temple. That is an interesting place to see, but doesn’t touch the mount in terms of aesthetics.

There have been Roman temples to Zeus and churches here since the time of the Jewish temples but now it’s home to the two mosques. Muslims believe the site of the Dome of the Rock – the blue building pictured – was the spot where the prophet Mohammed ascended into heaven.
Many Jewish people would like to build another temple here…a provocative visit to the site by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then an election candidate, is widely blamed for kick-starting the second Palestinian intifada – or uprising – which is still going on although in a less violent way that at its height.

As with everything in this region though, you just can’t escape the politics. I don’t think you can visit a site like this and not think about the politics and the abuses of human rights that are happening here every day.
It doesn’t seem right that I – a non-Muslim foreigner with a magic red European passport – can sit entranced by this building when almost three million Palestinians, to whom it means so much more, can’t do the same.
For the believers here – and Palestinians generally are fervent people – Israel’s control over who can visit key religious sites like this causes as much bitterness as the more everyday humiliations that they go through.
But I guess that suits a government that wants to remind a population who is in charge.

It’s impossible to talk about the West Bank and not mention the checkpoints. These are something that tourists won’t really experience fully if they travel with an Israeli tour guide or settler, whose blue and white number plates get them waved straight through.
Palestinian cars – which carry green plates – are routinely stopped. Their drivers and all passengers must all produce identity papers and answer a barrage of questions about where they are from, going and the purpose of their visit. And all this for people travelling within their own area – the occupied West Bank.

As I mentioned before, the checkpoints surrounding Jerusalem are something of a special case. Only a handful Palestinians from outside the city’s “security” barrier have the necessary papers to pass through.
For those lucky handful with jobs in the Israeli capital, this ordeal puts several hours extra on their working day.
Bethlehem, where I’m staying, is home to one of these checkpoints – called Rachel’s Tomb by locals and number 300 by the Israelis. The distance from here to the capital is about 7km and until eight years ago could be travelled in less than 10 minutes.
These days it takes workers a minimum of two hours to get across – and on a bad day they aren’t allowed to pass at all.

To experience this for myself, I got up at 4.30am yesterday and waited in line with the men who were on their way to work. For a job that starts at 8am, they have to make sure they are queuing by no later than 5am.
It’s a dehumanising experience. Thousands of normal people – teachers, office workers and health workers – up at the crack of dawn and slowly herded through metal pens that feel like a slaughterhouse crossed with a prison.

Once inside the first layer of defence – the wall – you pass through a kind of outside no man’s land before the heavy security begins on the other side. On one side of this area hangs a huge banner emblazoned with the words “peace be with you” in English, Arabic and Hebrew. The men run across this, worried about time.
On the other side there’s another holding pen, which feels something like an airport hanger. Here there are more queues, followed by X-ray machines for all bags, kiosks where you have to show your ID and papers, and fingerprint checking machines.
It’s a sinister place – you see no soldiers apart from behind reinforced glass, but you know there are hidden cameras all over and they bark orders at you over a tannoy if you do anything wrong.

Yesterday the checkpoint took two hours to get through, which by all accounts is fast. On the bus into Jerusalem I sat next to a teacher who was saying how difficult life is these days. His working day is now at least three hours longer than it used to be as a result of all this palaver. Yet he realises that although it doesn’t feel it at 4.30am on a Sunday (the first day of the working week here) he is fortunate. He has a permit to cross the border and can therefore work and support his family. Unemployment is running at 55 per cent in the West Bank so the Israeli government would no doubt think he should be grateful.

Welcome to Jerusalem’s much-hated Kalandia checkpoint, which all Palestinians entering from the West Bank capital Ramallah are obliged to go through. Only the rare few with a special permit have the right to get into the ancient city, and into Israel, while many others are trapped on the other side.

Apart from the obvious indignity of being denied entry to what is historically a key Arab city, the Palestinians have another reason for complaint. More than 95 per cent of them are Muslim and Jerusalem is home to the world’s third most important Islamic site, after Mecca and Medina.

The Dome of the Rock is where the Prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended to heaven and is sacred at all times of the year. But during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month which ends next week, it traditionally receives more pilgrims than usual.
Except that the Israelis won’t let those Palestinians without the necessary documents cross to pray there, for “security reasons” (their explanation for everything here).

Always a bone of contention, this turns ugly during Ramandan, especially on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. At Kalandia and other checkpoints to the south and east of Jerusalem – the sides ‘protected’ by its ugly security wall – spontaneous demonstrations break out and can end with rubber bullets from the army.

I was passing Kalandia on Friday morning on my way to Ramallah when just such a stand-off was taking place. The women wanted to cross to Jerusalem to pray but were being denied entry, so they got their mats out and prayed with an imam next to the wall. I didn’t get to stay for long so don’t know how it ended. I may return to Kalandia this Friday and stay for longer.

For some amazing photos of Ramadan around the world – including some great pictures of Palestine – check this out.

It seemed like an ordinary enough neighbourhood – with Israeli kids playing in the sun and their mothers and fathers looking on. But scratch the surface and you learn that Sheikh Jarrar’s anything but a quiet residential utopia.
This corner of East Jerusalem is one of the current front-lines in what some openly call the “ethnic cleansing” of this holiest of cities.
Originally a Jewish area, it has been majority Arab since the previous owners moved to other parts of the city in the 1920s. A number of homes in the district were built in the 1950s by the UN, for Palestinians displaced from villages across the new Israel.
Yet for the past 10 years, the Arabs who inhabit Sheikh Jarrar have been harrassed and bullied into leaving their homes by a group of ideological Jewish settlers.
Their interest in this particular neighbourhood stems from the fact that it’s the location of the tomb of Simon the Just, a revered early Rabbi.
There’s some irony in this name, because the treatment of the local Palestinians has been anything but just.
When I visited, the atmosphere was tense to say the least. Those homes that have been taken over by the settlers – who often break in while the residents are out – are covered with Israeli flags and CCTV cameras.
Ex-army private security guards – funded, incidentally, by the Israeli government – patrol the narrow pathways between the homes. Not, it must be said, to protect the menaced Palestinians – but to look out for the welfare of the settlers.
The handful of Arab homes left in the neighbourhood hang banners proclaiming “this is Apartheid” and “we will never leave”. Yet for all the strong words, they daren’t leave their homes unattended and are afraid for the future. No compensation is available in cases like this, and the police have already told them the issue is not a priority. The courts are also uninterested in helping Palestinians reclaim their stolen houses.
The Israeli activist who took me to Sheikh Jarrar believes the families are likely to be expelled within weeks, once Ramadan and the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur are over.
“These settlers come with a political agenda – and armed with cameras, flags and weapons,” he says.
“They come wanting to redeem the land of Israel for Jewish people only, and to expel all Palestinians. It’s a form of ethnic cleansing, in order to keep the number of Palestinians in the capital very low.
“They want to take all the neighbourhoods around Jerusalem’s old city in order to annexe it. The idea is that Jerusalem would never then be the capital of any Palestinian area.
“We should all be worried about this. There would never be peace in the Middle East if these people got their way.”

And so to Nablus, another West Bank town with a painful recent history. A hotbed of resistance to Israel’s occupation (the picture shows pro-Hamas graffiti), the place is regularly sealed off and sees army incursions and arrests almost every night.
Here I met a man whose home was taken over by soldiers for a week during the siege of Nablus in 2002. For seven days, 19 members of his family – including his pregnant sister, children and elderly people – were holed up in two rooms of their apartment, with little food and water while military snipers used it to shoot Palestinian gunmen. His brother was used as a human shield for two days before being returned, emotionally broken. Next door, eight members of one family were buried alive when army bulldozers flattened their home to clear a way into the old city. Neighbours only found the grandfather’s body – but it was missing the head.
“There’s a culture of death in this city now – people are just waiting for death to come,” he said. “We’re in daily touch with death. It numbs you, hardens you.
“We Palestinians don’t like nights. It’s when the soldiers come into our city and into our homes. We get nightmares.”

This harsh reality of life not only affects the Muslim majority. The supposed site of Jacob’s Well is in the basement of a Greek Orthodox church in Nablus. A ponytailed priest – originally from Corfu – lives in the little compound, which has been attacked countless times by fanatical Jewish settlers.
In 1979, axe-wielding zealots hacked his predecessor to death, right next to the well that he was protecting in the church basement.
His replacement arrived the following year and has also been attacked numerous times. Scorch marks are visible inside his church and the edges of steps are missing, where settlers have attempted to burn it and plant bombs in an attempt to take over the site, which is also sacred to Jews for its connection to the prophet.
Over the past 28 years the priest has single-handedly renovated the whole church – it only reopened officially this month. A talented artist, he has painted murals and done metalwork, and makes jewellery and other trinkets to sell. Perhaps in a nod to the threat to his own life, he has also built and decorated his own coffin, which sits ready and waiting outside the main entrance to the church.

Hebron is being throttled by a brutal occupation.
The charismatic old section of the West Bank town, sacred to the three main religions here for its collective tombs of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is suffering from conflict with the 400 settlers who have taken over housing in its centre.
These settlers are regarded even by some Israelis as the hardline in all the occupied territories, and regularly attack Arab homes and businesses. They are in Hebron partly because of its sacred Cave of the Patriarchs – an Abrahamic site that is the second holiest in Judaism – and partly because there was always a historic Jewish presence in the town, up to a pogrom in which 67 were killed in 1929.
A staggering 1,500 soldiers have been drafted in to protect their five communities in this beautiful but tragic town, which has been inhabited for 5,500 years.
Roads have been closed – blocked up with boulders and huge iron gates; windows and doorways have been plugged with stones; paths have been rerouted and Palestinians banned from all but a handful of routes through the centre.
To get to a shop or home two minutes from their own, Palestinians can now be forced to take a 12km detour all the way around the city – a journey hampered by the 101 check points that have been set up to ensure the “security” of the settlers.
40,000 Arabs have their lives interupted on a daily basis because of this madness. Their mosque – itself the site of a massacre by an extremist settler a few years back – can be closed off on a whim by the soldiers, and with no explanation. Shops have been looted and closed. The main souk – where this picture was taken – only has a few stores open. All in all, 850 Palestinian businesses have been closed in the old city through military order and threats. Huge numbers moved away to escape the daily harrassment.
Yet there is still hope. Funding from international donors – including Britain and other European states – is helping a dedicated team of workers to fix up homes in the old city. They are being lovingly restored and handed back to needy Hebronites for free, along with monthly food parcels, tax breaks and free health insurance – all vitally important in a town where very few people are working.
Already 4,000 people have returned. Those living nearest to the settlers are given window grilles to protect their property from their violence.