There are so many contrasts here between living conditions for Palestinians and Israelis. None is more marked than that of travel. If you take an collective taxi from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv airport that is driven by a Jewish Israeli you will be waved through by the security guards. If your driver is an Israeli Arab the vehicle will be stopped, you may be asked to get out and identify your cases, and the driver may be taken away and searched. Number plates identify cars as coming either from Israel or from Palestine. Within Palestine itself there are roads on which Palestinian vehicles are not allowed to travel.
When I travel in vehicles from Israel, such as the car belonging to the Church of Scotland in Jerusalem or buses hired by tour groups, we bowl along good main roads through Palestine. It's only if you know what to look for that you realise that the land on either side is criss-crossed by a parallel road system of dirt tracks through olive groves and fields; these are the roads on which Palestinian vehicles have to travel, bumping along and taking off-track detours around earth mounds that the soldiers have thrown up. At certain points they have to cross the main roads.
Sometimes Israeli soldiers block off these crossings. To get between Tuwani and the nearest large town of Yatta you have to cross highway 317. This week a soldier told our fiend and translator (who is a policeman in Yatta) that if he came back again to try to cross the road he would kill him. So travelling here is often uncomfortable. In more ways than one.
Yesterday I came up to Jerusalem. On the first leg of my journey from Tuwani a small Palestinian hatchback stopped to give me a lift. When I got in I was the seventh adult in the car, not counting the four small children!
Recently I visited Bethlehem. Although it was busier than when I've been there before there were relatively few people around in what is, after all, one of the world's main religious sites. The taxi driver who took me the last part of the journey to Manger Square complained that the Israeli authorities make people frightened to travel to Bethlehem, which is in Palestine, by telling them that there are terrorists there and that their safety cannot be secured. What I did find scary was the Bethlehem checkpoint, halfway between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Part of The Wall encircles Bethlehem. To get through it from Bethlehem you first have to find the gap in the wall that leads into the checkpoint. This is a large hangar-type building, with turnstiles and baggage X-ray machines. It looks just like an international border. At one point we came to a closed door. "You first," said my friend Dave cheerfully. Eventually we emerged on the Jerusalem side. "Peace be upon you," said the sign on The Wall in several languages.