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them down the stone steps in front of Damascus Gate, through the long portal, around the donkey carts, and back into the Old City. Damascus Gate was the commercial heart of the Muslim quarter, and the plaza just inside the gate was thronged with vendors and shoppers. My charges were always from the most neutral places: Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand. I led them up Khan al-Zeit and inhaled as we passed the spices.
    In 1998 I went to Jerusalem again, now with a summer job as an intern for a wire service. During my first two visits I had rarely ventured into Jewish West Jerusalem; now I would live there. The Muslim quarter of the Old City had always felt like a tidier extension of the Arab world, so this was my first real introduction to Israel. It was the first time I was surrounded by Hebrew and Jewish Israelis. In West Jerusalem the white stone buildings seemed to glow at night, and outside of the Orthodox neighbourhoods the girls wore tank tops.
    On my first day at work my boss introduced me to another intern, Sarah, an ambitious photographer.
    ‘You from the States?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah. No. I mean –’
    ‘Where’d ya go to college?’ she asked, cracking gum.
    ‘University of Washington,’ I said.
    ‘Jews-U?’
    I stared.
    ‘Jews-U? Wash-U?’
    I still couldn’t make out what she was talking about.
    ‘Washington University?’
    ‘University
of
Washington. In Seattle. U-dub.’
    ‘Ohhhhhh. I thought you meant Washington University in St Louis. Never mind. That’s what people call it. Are you Jewish?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Right, see, I assumed you were Jewish. Anyway. I went to Penn. We should get a drink.’
    I agreed.
    Sarah and I rented a breezy ground-floor apartment in the neighbourhood of Rechavia. Together, we took the bus every day to the well-fortified JMC, the Jerusalem Media Centre, where nearly every foreign news organisation had its offices. Almost everyone else in my bureau was either Jewish or Arab. Some were from Jerusalem, while others had come from elsewhere to work – Jordan, Egypt, England, the United States. Underlying their nonpartisan professionalism, they all had a visceral reason for being here that I lacked. I felt a slight envy.
    My first reporting assignment was on Jerusalem Day, which celebrated Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War. My editor asked me to do a man-in-the-street story, and I thought immediately of Damascus Gate. When I got there the steps were strangely deserted. So was the plaza just inside. On Khan al-Zeit, men were heaving their bags of spices and buckets of olives back into their stores, rolling up their polyester carpets and stowing them away. They were padlocking the metal grates across their storefronts and retreating into nearby doorways. Plastic bags skittered along in the dry breeze.
    I approached an old man who was standing on the lopsided stone steps leading up to his door. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ he said;
il-nakba,
the disaster. He was locking up and lying low. ‘Go in peace,’ he said, before his grate clanged shut. When I made it back up to the western part of the city, an old man told me proudly how he hadfought in the war, how he had helped take Jerusalem. ‘The first thing we did was pray at the wall,’ he said.

    In a way, every story was like that first one. A quote from one side and a quote from the other. There was nothing, it seemed, that could be covered without reference to the conflict – not a film festival, a crime story or the gay pride parade in Tel Aviv. The conflict sold the stories to the outside world. At first I thought my understanding would grow, and that by the end of the summer I would have gained some key insight. Like the many outsiders who had tried to broker peace, I thought that something other than a permanent state of war would eventually make sense. I thought it was just a question of missing knowledge, and now I was acquiring knowledge every day.
    And yet things did not start to make sense.