Israel exerts a strange power over Jews, however flimsy their identification, and mine is flimsier than most. It makes you feel proud, guilty, embarrassed, brings a lump to your throat at the most inconvenient moments. You feel it when the security man at the airport looks at the Jew-ish name in your passport and asks, almost conspiratorially: "Do you speak Hebrew?" No, you reply, a little irritated at this thinly veiled inquiry about your ethnicity. But a bit of you feels sucked in, somehow grateful for your automatic admission to this dysfunctional family.
I remember the first time I felt this pull. It was almost exactly 20 years ago and my parents had taken me to Israel as a reward for going through the motions of a reluctant barmitzvah. As we sped down the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I was transfixed by the burnt-out wrecks of vehicles destroyed in the 1948 war. They have been deliberately left as a reminder of the desperate, brilliant battles fought for the nation's very existence, and to a 13-year-old - even the surly, identity-resisting kind - they were a pretty potent one.
My other vivid memory from that trip was of giving lifts to young Israeli soldiers. Unlike in South Africa, where I had spent the first 10 years of my life, the conscripts carried their weapons while off duty, and my first reaction was sheer childish excitement at the opportunity to examine their automatic rifles up close. But it was hard to escape another feeling, a vague niggling sense of guilt that these boys, not much older than me, were out there risking their lives, at the very least giving up three years of them, to defend a place in which I had some automatic stake, however slim.
At some level, I suspect, feelings like these animate the attitude of most diaspora Jews, however disillusioned or assimilated, to Israel. You may despair over its idiotic invasion of Lebanon, its complicity in atrocities such as the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, its countless human rights abuses, its reckless and frequently disproportionate use of force, its paranoia, its sheer bloody-mindedness. But somewhere inside there is always a small, persistent voice saying: these people are putting their necks on the line, making sacrifices, doing ugly things so that there will be a sanctuary for you if ever you need one. Who are you to criticise? Perhaps it's this voice, too, that piped up as I stood at the passport control booth in Tel Aviv airport earlier this month, arriving in Israel for the first time since 1981. I knew that as a journalist I should ask the official not to stamp my passport. But somehow I just stood there; it felt faintly disloyal, ungrateful, to ask for the stamp on a separate piece of paper.
On the drive into Jerusalem, the sight of the burnt-out war wrecks along the highway stirred something like the same mixture of pride and guilt that I had felt 20 years earlier. But this time, as we climbed into the outskirts of the city, our Palestinian driver gestured down into the steep valley that dropped away from the road. "Down there is one of the Palestinian villages that was abandoned in 1948." Then he pointed up at a cluster of lights twinkling on the hill opposite. "And that is a Jewish settlement." Neither had figured on the bar mitzvah tour.
On our first morning in Israel, we woke to the news that a four-month-old Palestinian girl had been killed when an Israeli tank opened fire on the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza. The Israeli military said the attack was in response to mortar fire from the area. Iman Hijo was the youngest victim of the Palestinian uprising to date but, though her name went round the world, the story did not lead even the liberal Ha'aretz newspaper. Instead, the story of the day was that the Israeli navy had intercepted a boatload of weapons destined for Gaza.
Who knows if the arms-find story was leaked to divert attention from the killing of Iman Hijo, but the differing treatment of the two stories neatly illustrated one of the most disconcerting features of the current conflict: Israelis are exposed to precious little news about what is happening in the occupied territories and still less about what life is like there. Only a tiny proportion of Israelis will ever see the Palestinian-run areas with their own eyes and most of those will be looking down the barrel of a gun. More strikingly, only a handful of Israeli reporters, notably Amira Hass and Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz, venture into the territories with any regularity. There are safety concerns, of course, and it's true that at least one senior Palestinian figure has issued blood-curdling warnings against Israeli journalists entering the territories. But one Israeli novelist suggested another reason for the reluctance to engage with what is happening in Palestinian areas: "People don't want to know what we are doing in the territories. Hearing about it is like Chinese water torture: drip, drip, drip."
One-sided or not, the sheer volume of bad news Israelis must digest on an average day is staggering. On one fairly unexceptional day during our visit, in a single paper, I counted nine news stories and five comment pieces related to the conflict. The "situation" dominates everything. On the Palestinian side it is, if anything, worse. "There is no other subject," said Muna Khleifi, a Palestinian who works for the British Council in east Jerusalem. "Even when Palestinian poets write love poetry, the loss of the woman is a metaphor for the loss of the land."
Given all this, the first thing that strikes you about the West Bank is how apparently normal much of life is there. Ramallah, always the closest thing the West Bank had to a good-time town, is a surprisingly buoyant place, boosted by the dollars of returning American Palestinians. Shop windows are well-stocked and a late-model Mercedes is a common sight. The only signs of the bloody struggle we see on our TV screens are the posters of Palestinian martyrs and the missing top floor of the police station, blasted by helicopters after two Israeli soldiers were lynched and thrown out of its upstairs windows.
The frequent surrealism of this half-war was underlined a few days later when we watched the regular Friday afternoon firefight between the tanzim and the Israeli army. From a vantage point 200 yards or so away, we watched - or rather listened - as the Palestinian gunmen opened up, first with sporadic small arms fire, then occasional bursts from machine guns. After maybe an hour the Israelis responded with two volleys of tank fire directed at the half-built buildings in which the Palestinian gunmen take cover. Ambulances shuttled to and fro carrying the casualties, but an ice-cream seller continued to offer refreshment to the 100 or so Palestinian youths and men who had gathered near us to watch. When we headed into town for something to eat, there was no hint of the battle unfolding barely a mile away.
The first day we visit the West Bank, a Jewish settler is shot dead guarding a remote hilltop in Itamar. His son declares: "I will carry out my father's dream and build the biggest farm in the entire area on that hilltop." There is a grim hierarchy to casualties in this conflict. Even most Israelis are less appalled by the killing of a settler than by the death of an Israeli soldier or civilian living inside the green line. There is a feeling that they knew the risks when they moved there; at least until the suicide bombing in Netanya last week, a sizable majority of Israelis were in favour of a settlement freeze.
Nothing you have read quite prepares you for the provocativeness of the settlements, the sheer one-in-the-eye, fuck-you-ness of them. There are the familiar statistics, of course: some 200,000 settlers hogging a wildly disproportionate share of the land (20% of Gaza alone), with 2.9m Palestinians squeezed into the rest. But you don't quite get it till you see it: the boxy orange-roofed homes plonked on to hilltops like Monopoly houses, little patches of greenery dotting the drab brush of the Judaean hills, shiny black roads leading down to the broad, smooth highway, specially constructed to allow settlers to travel through the West Bank without having to pass through Palestinian areas.
As we speed past, our Palestinian guide points out the ones that have been built since the Oslo agreement in 1993, and you can't help wondering: why? Why, when peace was so close, did Israel continue to poke these concrete fingers in the Palestinians' eyes? Yossi Beilin, the former Israeli minister who was instrumental in the Olso negotiations, says settlement expansion was a price Labour felt it was worth paying for the support of its rightwing coalition partners. Now he's not so sure: "We believed peace was so close that talking about settlements that were not going to be there seemed irrelevant . . . What happened was that we don't have peace but we do have settlements."
Poorer and more concentrated, Gaza is far more instantly shocking than the West Bank. The stench hits you first - the area's only sewage plant has long been out of commission. Then the claustrophobia. With more than a million people packed into an area roughly the size of the Isle of Wight (20% of whose land is occupied by 6,500 Jewish settlers) Gaza would be a claustrophobic place at the best of times. Sealed off, as all Palestinian territories have been since September, it feels like nothing more than a self-governing prison camp. In the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians defy the Israeli cordon, walking over the hills to get to work each day in Israel. In Gaza, much of which is surrounded by an electric fence, closure means closure.
On one day in Gaza, we meet a man whose home has just been bulldozed by the Israeli army, visit a part of the Khan Yunis camp where 32 homes were flattened by the Israelis a few weeks earlier, and witness a rocket attack on a Palestinian Authority building in Gaza. But somehow these are less shocking than the everyday degradations and indignities of life under closure. We have seen the bulldozings and the rocket attacks on TV; the sheer brutality of closure only emerges from the steady stream of stories you hear as you travel through Gaza and the West Bank.
Stories such as the one told to me by a Palestinian woman, call her Sarah, I met over dinner in east Jerusalem. Since the intifada, her mother, who lived in Ramallah, had been unable to travel to east Jerusalem to see her or her children. So Sarah and her husband had moved to Ramallah to keep the family together. There was just one problem: since Sarah and her husband were technically Israeli Arabs, they were not supposed to be in Ramallah. Any time they travelled into Jerusalem, they risked being turned back when they tried to go home.
As someone who grew up under apartheid, I have always resisted the glib comparison with South Africa. But hearing stories like this, it's hard to avoid the parallels. "It's worse than apartheid, actually," one Palestinian said when the analogy inevitably came up. "Right now it's apartheid without the pass system." Travelling through Gaza, hearing stories like Sarah's, seeing the settlements, you can't help asking the same question: how can Jews behave like this? How can a people that has for so long been oppressed allow itself to become an oppressor? It's a naive response, of course; at the core of Israel's identity has always been the idea of the muscular New Jew, determined never to allow a repetition of the catastrophe that befell European Jewry, even if it meant treading on others to make sure.
Talk to any Israeli about why Israel behaves the way it does, why it is a nation that feels it is fighting for its very existence despite its overwhelming military and economic superiority over its neighbours, and pretty soon you come back to the Holocaust. Over dinner, an Israeli novelist described how the Shoah defined every aspect of Israeli life: "We survived to live and now we live to survive. We cannot escape it and it's very destructive."
If the Holocaust is one overwhelming influence on the Israeli psyche, the other is the deeply held suspicion that the Arab world will not be satisfied until it has pushed the Jewish interlopers into the sea. It's a view that frequently slides close to paranoia, as when one Israeli sympathiser pointed down from a hilltop vantage point at east Jerusalem and told me: "It's not the Palestinians we're worried about, but how would you feel if there were Iraqi troops down there?" But it's not entirely paranoid. When I pressed Hassam Khader, a senior Fatah figure in Nablus, on whether Palestinians would ever be completely happy with the return of only the West Bank and Gaza, his reply would not have reassured Israelis: "Sooner or later the Palestinian people will liberate their homeland. Now Israel is supported by the United States and Europe, but that will not continue for ever and sooner or later there will be a big battle between the Palestinians and Arabs and Israel."
What next? Even before last week's spiral of atrocities, no one in Israel thought the two sides could return to the brink of peace - from which they tumbled so disastrously last year - any time soon. "It will be two or three years, at least," said Nimrod Novik, a former aide to Shimon Peres. "Both sides need to shed more blood." A Palestinian academic, arguing that the Palestinians should pursue a policy of attrition rather than negotiation, thought it would take much longer. "We can stand this for a long time. The Israelis are used to the European life and they will not want to live like this. The only question is who will break first, and we are already broken. We have been broken for 50 years."