---
type: Country
title: Palestine
description: Harry's observations from the West Bank — Oslo zones, village gates, green and blue ID cards and the three permits, collapsed tourism and work, and overwhelming hospitality.
tags: [palestine, west-bank, middle-east, checkpoints, permits, settlements]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T19:00:00Z
---

# Palestine

Harry cycled through the West Bank in 2026 — Bethlehem to
[Hebron](/places/hebron.md) — as part of a series showing everyday
Palestinian life beyond the headlines.

## Observations

### From [The Side of Palestine the Media Doesn't Show You 🇵🇸](/videos/BhQU4DU2WgA.md)

- **Geography of control**: the Oslo Accords carve the West Bank into Area
  A (Palestinian cities), Area B (shared), and Area C (about 60% of the
  land, full Israeli control, where Palestinians effectively can't get
  building permits). The 1949 Green Line exists on maps but not on the
  ground. Gates across roads control traffic flow and force long detours —
  a bicycle slips through where cars can't.
- **Hospitality**: the defining experience. Strangers stopped to give Harry
  water on the highway; kids mobbed him in every village; a subscriber's
  family took him in for tea within five minutes of meeting him. He
  contrasts it directly with five days in Tel Aviv where no stranger
  approached him.
- **Olive trees**: the historic economic lifeline and near-sacred to
  Palestinians — which is why settlers burning them cuts so deep.
- **Settler friction**: locals warned him about rock-throwing on the
  Bethlehem–Hebron road; in Hebron he saw the physical evidence — caged
  market streets, closed shops, families recounting violence (their
  accounts, as told to him).
- **Tourism**: collapsed since the war; shopkeepers ask visitors to come,
  film, and "not forget us" — they value the visibility as much as the
  money.
- **Money and costs**: fresh orange juice 5 shekels; handmade keffiyeh 40
  shekels; a filling lamb-and-rice lunch at a place that refused to let
  him order a second dish.
- **Safety**: Harry cycled alone, mid-war, and his worst problems were
  hills and an overloaded backpack; checkpoints treated the foreign
  tourist far more gently than the locals crossing beside him.

### From [I Visited the World's Most Controversial Country 🇮🇱](/videos/x-pZDGUahsU.md)

The Israel half of the same trip, and what it adds here is context rather than
Palestinian material — the West Bank content is above.

- **The founding date, twice.** At Independence Hall in
  [Tel Aviv](/places/tel-aviv.md): Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel in
  1948, the British mandate ended, five Arab armies invaded the next morning, and
  **750,000 Palestinians were displaced.** The same date is Independence Day in
  [Israel](/countries/israel.md) and the Nakba here.
- **Arab citizens of Israel cross into the West Bank to shop**, because prices are
  far lower — fruit, vegetables and general goods, though meat and eggs can't be
  brought back.
- **What an Israeli Arab says about the line he was born on**: that he thinks
  about it constantly, that people on the other side have no income, no state to
  help them and nobody to help them, and that he cannot imagine it.
- **Harry names the price of admission.** Deleting Palestinian contacts from his
  phone on the flight got him reported by the passenger beside him and cost him
  five hours of questioning at Tel Aviv airport, where a clip of him saying he
  loves Palestine was produced as evidence.
- **He asks viewers to spend money here**, and links Palestinian-owned businesses
  in the description — guides, a taxi driver and shopkeepers — on the grounds
  that tourism income is what is missing.

### From [I Was Warned Not to Cross Into Palestine 🇵🇸](/videos/lrmE-WiC4eA.md)

The day *before* the Bethlehem–Hebron ride above: getting in at all, by bicycle
from [Jerusalem](/places/jerusalem.md).

- **Crossing is the difficulty, and it is administrative rather than dangerous.**
  Checkpoint staff sent him on a driving detour adding 6 km; a taxi driver knew a
  pedestrian route; the pedestrian route wouldn't take a bicycle, so the detour
  happened anyway. A different road in had no checkpoint and no security at all.
- **The wall is 8 m**, on his figure, and he first meets it circling
  [Bethlehem](/places/bethlehem.md) with no obvious entrance.
- **Road signs mark villages Israeli citizens are prohibited from entering** —
  the restriction running in the other direction, which he notes without comment.
- **It doesn't read as a border, it reads as a different region.** Lebanon,
  Syria, Egypt; and considerably more developed than he had been told to expect,
  closer to Beirut.
- **The warnings were symmetrical and both wrong.** Israelis told him Palestinians
  would blow him up; Palestinians told him Israelis would shoot him. What actually
  happened is that two Israeli men stopped for a stranded cyclist heading into the
  West Bank, drove him somewhere quiet, changed his tyre and refused the roughly
  $30 he offered — *we do good deeds around here*. See
  [talk to both sides](/tips/talk-to-both-sides.md).
- **Tourism**: a four-star family-run hotel in Bethlehem at **$50 a night** that
  has had **zero tourists in two years.** His closing argument is that the losses
  nobody reports are the businesses with no income and the jobs gone, belonging to
  people with no connection to any of it beyond where they live.

### From [I investigated illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank 🇵🇸🇮🇱](/videos/y52gSxWP_PM.md)

The last video of the series, and by some distance the most useful page-material
in it: a day with an Israeli settler followed by a day with a Palestinian driver
in [Bethlehem](/places/bethlehem.md), who explains the administrative machinery
the earlier videos only glimpse. The settler's positions are recorded on the
[Israel](/countries/israel.md) page with the other Israeli voices.

**The figures Harry opens with**, attributed by him to the UN and recorded as
his:

- **Around 1,800 settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank last year** —
  the highest since counting began 20 years ago, roughly five a day.
- **Over 230 Palestinians killed** in the West Bank by Israeli forces and
  settlers in the same year, against **12 Israelis killed** in Palestinian
  attacks on settlers.
- **54 settlements approved in a single year**, where the previous record was
  nine; **86 new outposts**, illegal under Israeli law as well as international
  law; and **nearly 28,000 new homes** through planning.
- The Oslo split was meant to last five years, and is about thirty years old.

**The wall**, and the video disagrees with itself about it:

- Harry gives **roughly 700 km and about 8 m** — twice the height of the Berlin
  wall. The Palestinian driver gives **about 780 km, and 8 m with another 2 m on
  top** *(from video – unverified; both figures are stated in the same video and
  not reconciled)*.
- Both agree on the shape: it does not follow the 1967 line, it wanders like a
  snake deep into the West Bank, and it separates farmers from their fields and
  villages from their water.
- **The ICJ ruled in 2004** that the sections built inside the West Bank are
  illegal under international law.
- It was begun in **2002**, under Ariel Sharon.
- **Crossing it is now lethal.** A watchtower every several hundred metres,
  permanently manned. Before 7 October, being caught meant a beating or a few
  days in jail; the driver's account of the present is a man of 47, out of work
  since the crossings closed, shot in the face attempting it to reach a job — and
  his own summary of the odds: **99% you die, 1% you get over.**

**The gates**, which are the part of the system Harry says he did not know about:

- Not a single checkpoint but **a gate for every village and town** — the driver
  gives a figure in the high 1,900s *(from video – unverified; the transcript
  garbles the number)*.
- **Since 7 October they are shut**, opening mainly when the army goes in. A
  one-minute drive between a village and Bethlehem becomes four or five
  kilometres.

**Green card and blue card** — the single most useful explanation in the
Palestine cluster. A green ID means you live in the Palestinian areas; a blue ID
means you live on the Israeli side. With a green ID:

- **You may not drive into Israel.** Palestinian cars carry white plates and stay
  on the Palestinian side; Israeli yellow plates go both ways.
- **You may not buy, build or rent** on the Israeli side.
- **Marriage across the line is close to impractical**: a blue-ID spouse would
  have to give up their ID to move here, and a green ID cannot be exchanged for a
  blue one. In practice green marries green — which the driver says has divided a
  great many families.
- **You may not fly from Ben Gurion.** Travelling anywhere means Jericho, then
  Amman, then onward — and a brother who has since taken German citizenship still
  cannot come in through Tel Aviv.

**The three permits**, in his account:

- **Prayer** — to reach Al-Aqsa in [Jerusalem](/places/jerusalem.md), and mostly
  issued to the elderly.
- **Hospital** — granted fairly readily for serious cases a Palestinian hospital
  cannot handle, and useless without money: treatment costing about **100 shekels
  here can be 10,000 across the line**, which he puts at **three or four months'
  salary** *(from video – unverified)*.
- **Work** — and **99% of it is construction.** He is blunt about what that
  means: building houses on the other side of a dispute about land.

**The work economy has collapsed.** Around **400,000 Palestinians crossed daily
to work in Israel** before 7 October; he says roughly **300,000 of them now have
nothing**, that the labour has been replaced with workers brought from China,
India and Sri Lanka, and that the Palestinian Authority does not support them.

**What the people inside it say about each other**, which is the reason the video
is paired with the settler half:

- The driver's own verdict on the settlement beside his village is that it is
  **peaceful** — and that other settlements, further north, are not. His
  formulation is that his own fingers are not the same as each other, and neither
  are Muslims, Christians or Jews.
- His estimate of the split on both sides: **about 70% on each who would share
  the country, 30% on each carrying hatred** — and that the 30% are the people
  who lost someone *(from video – unverified; his own estimate, offered as one)*.
- See [a government and its people](/tips/separate-a-government-from-its-people.md).

**Informers** are how he explains the jail population, and he says they are now
protected by both sides. His figure for people held over social-media posts alone
is **more than 5,000** *(from video – unverified)*.

**Harry's closing observation**, and the one he says he took from the whole trip:
he arrived expecting anger and a wish for revenge, and did not find it — people
talked about their homes, their children, their olive trees, and whether they
would be allowed to build.