Bethlehem Letter: "Welcome to Paradise in prison," the coach driver said cheerily as he pulled up at the Paradise Hotel, Bethlehem. We had just come through a checkpoint opening in the biblical town's monstrous nine metre-high concrete "security" wall. At the entrance is a huge Israeli Ministry of Tourism banner declaring "Peace be with you" in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Bethlehem, a once-bustling tourist town, has an army of trinket sellers whose pained line is "please, you will help me and my family!" They mean it. The Church of the Nativity, Jesus's birthplace, was far from thronged - apart from the hungry hawkers outside.
The impoverishing effects of the US-led western freeze on funds to the Hamas-led government, as long as it refuses to recognise Israel and renounce violence, were everywhere to be seen in the life of this so warm, generous people. I was with a group of 26 Irish people whose idea of a busman's holiday was a week in the West Bank experiencing what Palestinians - including academics and politicians - call their "apartheid" system, symbolised by the incomplete, ubiquitous $3.4 billion, 670km barrier encircling towns and villages and running along the west of the occupied territory itself. There are more than 500 checkpoints.
The wall is said to be in contravention of the 1993 Oslo Accords and has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice.
Using public transport to get to Jerusalem, which Palestinians are not normally allowed to do, necessitated a taxi to the Kalandia checkpoint, walking through one of its many turnstiles, taking a bus, then another taxi.
The change from the impoverished Palestinian world I had left to the familiar, comfort of a well-run, bustling western-style metropolis - with pleasant, helpful people - was palpable. The fine cars were a contrast to the West Bank's many clapped-out bangers.
We saw where Palestinian homes had been demolished to make way for settlements, how the wall cuts off access to Palestinian farmland and to other Palestinians - but mostly to about half a million Israeli settlers, some sponsored by US Christian Zionists.
These commuters to Jerusalem travel on good roads reserved for them. The system is obviously designed so that settlers hardly ever see a Palestinian. "It's like going to Ireland and not wanting to see the Irish. The wall is a shit idea," Nasser Lahham, chief editor of Bethlehem TV, said emotionally - nothing unusual about that here.
The wall has nothing whatever to do with security, said Dr Jad Isaac of the EU part-funded Applied Research Institute - Jerusalem. "The wall building is part of a land grab", designed ultimately to reduce the West Bank's estimated 2.5 million population to a one million-strong "labour force to empty the rubbish" and to leave Palestinians with minimal territory. The intention was to break the people's spirit and encourage them to join the 4 million-plus diaspora. The Palestinian spirit has already been broken - "they just won't admit it". That's how a TV cameraman at last Friday's troubled events in Bethlehem put it.
At a lively meeting with Conor O'Riordan, Ireland's representative to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, the Irish group (only one of whom was connected to a Palestine solidarity body) expressed outrage at finding what one of them, Declan McKenna, described as "a political and economic meltdown of a society", with daily humiliations to Palestinians.
Empathising with their concerns, O'Riordan explained that his office was doing "all sorts of contortions" to get aid to ordinary Palestinians hit by the "major humanitarian problem" posed by the western aid freeze on Hamas and the consequent non-payment of salaries to hundreds of PA workers.
McKenna said the EU seemed to be "favouring the oppressor [ Israel] in a David and Goliath situation", but O'Riordan said EU states were doing all they could to help people.
"I would be happy to be woken from sleep and told we are in business" and able to give aid to the Palestinian "National" Authority, as Palestinians call it, but on the refusal of funding to the Hamas-led government: "We had no choice." No Palestinian I met understood this position or the West's dilemma. Hamas was elected last January and that's it.
I asked a Fatah thinker and writer, Nassar Ibrahim, about a scenario where President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah dismisses the present Hamas-led government and there are elections. He said that if Hamas lost - because the people then voted with their bellies to get back the frozen aid - "Hamas will go on the streets and collapse the government".
In Hebron, where Muslims were not allowed to say Ramadan prayers at their mosque - apparently because of the week-long Jewish agricultural festival of Sukkot - an old man, Natsheh Awni, stopped us in the souk to say quietly: "You must do something to help the people of Palestine if you want good things from God," and invited us all to his house for coffee.