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To get to the birthplace of the Prince of Peace, I have to negotiate a military checkpoint. Opposite the church marking the site of the Nativity, a building flies a huge poster of man infamous, in some circles, as a terrorist. Although the modern brick block wearing this vast portrait of the late Yasser Arafat presides over the square of a town all but empty of tourists, its souvenir shop is open. One of the magnets for sale in the souvenir shop inside this building - the Bethlehem Peace Centre - bears the word “Palestine” beneath a photograph of green graffiti on a wall. Later, someone who reads Arabic better than I do will look at this, smile, and explain that the words are a slogan supporting Hamas. It is difficult to be a tourist in Palestine without one’s irony detector making anguished grinding noises, belching blue smoke, erupting springs and cogs, and terminally overloading.

Aside from the absurdity-induced migraines, it is otherwise pretty easy to be a tourist in Palestine, or at least some of Palestine. The Gaza Strip is closed to all visitors bar journalists, diplomats and NGO workers, but the West Bank is accessible to anyone willing to put up with the same inconveniences endured by those who live there: checkpoints, roadblocks, vehicle searches. The British tourism and fair trade outfit, Olive Co-Operative, runs visits to the Occupied Territories, organising meetings with Palestinian and Israeli activist groups, touring the safely accessible areas of the West Bank and often, depending on his availability, dropping in on Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu - who, since completing his 18-year prison term last April, receives visitors at St George’s cathedral in East Jerusalem.

There are, probably, two principal concerns that will be perturbing the potential visitor. The first will be a question of decorum, of whether vacationing in a war zone is really the done thing. On this front, I can only report that I’ve never met a Palestinian (or an Israeli, for that matter) who objects; quite the opposite, in fact. Even aside from the innate and currently largely unrequited hospitality of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian economy, especially in Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, is (or rather was) hugely dependent on tourism. If a Palestinian state is ever going to work, it will have to pay for itself; those whose sympathies lie in that direction could make no greater gesture of solidarity than booking a holiday and spending money there.

The more immediate worry will be that of personal safety. There is, after all, a war on here, and neither side has much respect for the heritage sites. The Church of the Nativity itself was besieged by the Israeli army for 39 days in 2002. In March 2005 in Hebron, - a regular part of Olive Co-Op’s tours, two Israeli soldiers were wounded when Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a security post near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, final resting place of Abraham, and a site holy to Jews and Muslims. But it’s yet another irony of the Palestinian Territories that, the grim open-air prison of Gaza aside, they often feel less scary than Israel. The violence visited upon Israel by Palestinian militants tends to be sudden and random, which is why it is impossible to enjoy, for example, the peerless iced coffee in West Jerusalem’s Cafe Hillel entirely free of worry about any other patron wearing an unseasonably heavy coat.

On the West Bank, it is usually possible to see trouble coming at sufficient distance that you can get out of its way.- Israel’s assaults on Palestinians tend to be fairly predictable as regards location. Any tourist who was injured by violence in the Palestinian Territories would have to be unlucky, or foolish.

I did have reservations about joining the tour, but they were less to do with physical danger than they were with the possibility of being bored to death. Depressingly few people manage to express a partisan interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without resorting to the shrill, dogmatic hectoring which prompted Colonel Sir Ronald Storrs, British Governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, to declare: “I am not for either, but for both. Two hours of Arab grievances drive me into the synagogue, while after an intense course of Zionist propaganda, I am prepared to embrace Islam.” After several previous visits to Israel and the Territories, it was a view I’d developed some sympathy with.

The dismal state of Bethlehem’s economy is immediately obvious - from the joy of the first taxi driver past the Israeli checkpoint at spotting a foreign visitor, and from his desperation as he tries to stop at three souvenir shops, owned by friends or family, en route to the hotel where I¹m meeting the tour; on arrival, he won’t let me out of the taxi until I¹ve accepted his business card and made a solemn promise to the effect that if I am seized with a sudden desire to own quantities of unpleasant holy tat, he’ll be the very first guy I call.

Tonight, the Three Kings hotel in Beit Sahour, a suburb of Bethlehem, is a rendezvous, not a terminus. Tonight, we’re being parked with locals. Myself and one of the four others on this tour are billeted with a young Christian family. The man of the house, who I’ll call Tariq, flicks with compulsive speed between channels on the vast satellite television in the living room, and speaks almost as quickly. He talks, as most Palestinians do, about what dominates their lives - he outlines uncountable petty, vindictive restrictions that he claims are imposed upon them by Israel - but has an endearing ability to be funny about it.

“I love movies,” he says, “but it’s hard to see any here. So once I applied for a pass to go to Jerusalem to worship, because I’m Christian. So I went to Jerusalem, and went to the Cineplex, and worshipped every day for a week.”

The following morning, the full strength of the tour -- me, four others and Olive Co-Op’s Sarah Irving - gathers for a day trip to Hebron. To my relief, there’s no element of consciousness-raising about the drive down, not even while we change vehicles at a sprawling makeshift bus station/market/taxi rank at about the halfway point - a process necessitated by the fact that the license plates on the minibus we left Beit Sahour in would not be allowed past the Israeli checkpoint before Hebron. The paying punters on the tour all seem motivated more by curiosity than ideology.

Sarah, though a veteran activist - she once had a hip broken by an Israeli soldier at the Erez border crossing into Gaza - has spent enough time here to understand that the realities of Israel’s occupation speak for themselves. As an advocate for the cause, she is all the more effective for taking a line in wry understatement unusual in this context.

“Most people we bring aren’t zealots,” explains Sarah, as the yellow Mercedes limousine heads for Hebron, at the unnecessary speed favoured by taxi drivers throughout the Middle East. “This is really Palestine 1.01, for people who know a bit, but haven’t been before. Interestingly, 30 to 50 percent of the people who’ve come on our tours have been Jewish, and it’s sometimes a bit strange for them. I think my equivalent would be finding out that everything the Daily Mail said was true.”

Hebron certainly doesn’t require over-selling. Its downtown is an eerie inversion of what it should be - the closer we venture to the centre of town, the quieter it gets. Hebron’s heart used to be a classic Arab souk, hundreds of tiny shops huddled along narrow alleyways leading to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Today, Hebron’s old market is dead, but for a few persistent, optimistic traders - a couple selling rugs and keffiyeh scarves, another offering excellent hand-made Turkish delight. The shopkeepers moved out when the Jewish settlers, and the Israeli soldiers, moved in; Hebron’s famous glass-blowers now trade from shops on a road outside town, and the layers of the thick dust coating their merchandise date, at a guess, from around the beginning of the current intifada.

The entrance to the deserted market is dominated by an Israeli army position - one soldier tells me, with the weary air of someone who¹d rather be, say, anywhere else at all, that 3,000 of his comrades are guarding Hebron¹s 700-odd Jewish settlers. These Zionist flag-bearers are asserting their claim on Hebron with a peculiar campaign of vandalism. Many of the green shutters on the abandoned shops have been daubed with the Star of David. Above the alleys, chicken wire hung by the Arabs before they gave up and moved out heaves with household rubbish and rocks, tossed into the streets by the settlers in the overlooking apartments, to persuade the Arabs to hasten their departure.

My time with the tour ends in Jerusalem, where Sarah steers us through the Old City. Before the current intifada began in 2000, shoals of tourists made it difficult to move in these lanes. The hardcore - the pilgrims and the backpackers - are trickling back, but it¹s still possible to wander at will in and out of the Church of the Holy Sephulcre, the reputed site of the Crucifixion, and shopkeepers of all denominations are still underemployed enough that they’ll provide copious servings of tea and/or their entire life story in response to the merest flicker of interest. Of all the ironies of Palestinian and Israeli tourism, this is the most crushing: the circumstances which have put so many people off mean there¹s never been a better time to go.

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