We’ve decided to change our story. Instead of telling the truth and telling the Israeli’s we are going to Jenin to work on a charitable project – which is a great story and one that should be shared to raise awareness, right? – we have concocted a web of intricate lies and drilled all seventeen of the group travelling until we can lie through our teeth without batting an eyelid. Admittedly it’s not the biggest of porkie pies, but I think it raises a lot of questions.

Why should we lie? We got a call from Sahar yesterday to say that the people on the Palestine side had advised we say we are a group of tourists travelling on the Holy Land tour as this would make it easier for us to cross (because Jenin is where one of the biggest refugee camps is, and therefore a lot of resistance and troubles) and possible for the tour company to get a bus to us at the exit of the crossing. Last year I decided to tell the Israeli security the truth. I think it caused me about a 3hr wait but I don’t see why I should lie when I’m travelling to Palestine to try to contribute to fixing things that they are the cause of, and I often complain I don’t get enough time to read. I don’t have an issue with lying to Israeli’s per se, but I don’t think I should have to plus it’s a lot of pressure to lie!! Have you ever tried lying to a figure of authority when we are all told from an early age not to lie and the idea of lying to an official, whether you believe in their right to call themselves an official or not, is really working against what our societies teach us? It’s quite hard work in a stress sort of way, and so when you know you shouldn’t have to, because we would never lie to get to Spain or New Zealand, it does start to ping around all these stress chemicals in your brain.

And then the paranoia sets in. Not only do I have stress but I have paranoid stress. Great. We started substituting Jerusalem for Jenin with a wink and a smile because what if “they” are listening and watching? I wanted to tell Anna in Dubai about the ridiculousness of it all, knowing she would appreciate the dark humour in it given it was her main motivation for not coming – she wasn’t sure she would be able to hold her tongue with an Israeli if she was questioned. The problem was I couldn’t tell her. What if “they” were listening to the call or checking the sms’s as they were sent? Whilst we were waiting the 4.5hrs they delayed us at the crossing it suddenly occurred to me that I could get some writing done, but once I’d fired up my PC I realised that perhaps I shouldn’t document anything in case I got searched later on in the process and they found the truth of all our lies from the writing I had done. All ridiculous, but all feasible. Perhaps at this stage we are living our lives as if through a Hollywood camera lense – The Bourne Palestinian perhaps – but they do say that the truth can be stranger than fiction.

Do the Israeli’s really believe us? Here’s where I get a bit tied up in knots....We are aware that with a story of truth about where we are going and what we plan to do we may cause ourselves significant delays because it feels like your telling them about anything where you are trying to help the Palestinian people makes them delay you. We are made to feel like we are forced to lie to make it easier for our group of 17 people, some of whom have never been to Palestine and are nervous, others who have travelled all night and are very tired and perhaps less fit and able for this sort of stress. If they didn’t punish us for doing what we’re doing then we wouldn’t lie, so you lie and they don’t believe you and so you end up delayed. I wonder how they would feel if they knew that we had lied. When I discover I’ve been lied to I feel cheated, a bit stupid, a dose of humiliation and a pinch of anger. Would they feel the same way? Do they examine and debate why we lie? Sana and I talked about this at length yesterday afternoon and we came to the conclusion, based on words from an Israeli friend of hers, that they don’t. It’s actually much easier for them to not know the truth. The belief of the Israeli’s that they are the true owners of the promised land is so intrinsic that trying to explain to them otherwise is like me trying to tell you that black is white – you know that you know the truth and that black is black and there is nothing I can do to convince you otherwise. But the evidence of the truth of what they are doing in order to obtain what they believe has been promised to them is all around them in the refugee camps, in Gaza, in what is known as the Arab part of Jerusalem and in the wall that is built to separate the Israeli’s from the Arabs. They can quite easily ignore and bury their heads in the sand, hide from all the truths that surround them but is it so easy for them to ignore it when a group of tourists from the UK, Canada and Germany rock up at what you consider your border and tell you that they are going to try to improve the lives of the people whose country you occupy because you’ve been busy destroying them over the last 60 years? In the words of Sana’s friend, if they aren’t told the truth they don’t have to look you in the eye and know it. So perhaps it’s not us lying to the Israeli’s. Perhaps it is them lying to themselves.

To move onto a considerably lighter note – within an hour of being in Palestine we managed to find a roadside falafel seller and gorge ourselves on a falafel sandwich only to arrive at the guest house to find that a local family had cooked us a feast. Nicola’s complaint of “I’m so full” I fear will be a daily occurrence, although she’s promised herself not. We set up Chez Jenin, our very own bar, last night on the balcony of the guest house. It’ll be reincarnated as Chez Ramallah and Chez Bethlehem as we move through the country. Sami and Nic have decided that we won’t be working on the Cinema at all, but ploughing our efforts into making Chez Jenin the happening hotspot we think it should be. Foam and fancy dress parties are already in the planning. Nic and I had promised ourselves a detox since it took us both three days to recover from a hangover from Thursday night, but two bottles of vodka down over the period of last night proves that ambition to be scotched already. We didn’t drink it all ourselves, I should point out, since we were about 20 people on our balcony last night.

It’s great to be our (almost) full group after two days of travel. We met the artists from Scotland who will be working on the garden at the school for the blind, and reunited with Sahar and Ruwan (who worked with us last year). It took me all day to get bored enough to listen to music, so having rediscovered Oasis on my iPod by chance as we were driving through Palestine to Jenin what was the first song I listened to? Hello, Hello, It’s good to be back, good to be back. Serendipity.