Ship of Fools editor, Simon Jenkins, is currently travelling in Israel and Palestine with the Amos Trust, which works for justice, peace and reconciliation in the region. Over the next few days, he'll be updating us with his experience of the situation on the ground in a daily online diary. For previous diary items, go here.

The Palestinian archipelago
FRIDAY 1st JUNE

Walking in the streets of Arab East Jerusalem this morning, the mood is quiet and mournful. On car and shop windows are taped photocopied pictures of the Palestinian leader, Faisal Husseini, who died yesterday. The funeral procession takes place this afternoon through these streets, once the body has been brought down from Ramallah to the north of Jerusalem.

We visit the offices of World Vision, a few streets away, where Paul Beran, their Church relations man, talks us through a large map of Israel showing the bits and pieces of territory which the Israelis have not yet taken from the Palestinians.

They look like scattered islands: Bethlehem is 10km across; Ramallah is smaller; Hebron is bigger, maybe 25km long. Some of the islands are tiny: individual villages surrounded by Israeli territory. All of them are isolated from each other and travel between them, regulated by the checkpoints, is difficult and takes a long time. Sometimes all connections are broken by the Israelis as a form of punishment, and the people are stuck on their islands, with soldiers keeping them in like sharks patrolling a forbidden sea.

Commuting to work, paying a visit to relatives, getting women in labour to hospital in time for their delivery, going to the beach... these are just impossible dreams. Ambulances are frequently held up in a dangerous game played by the soldiers.

This is the new Gulag Archipelago, created by Israel and controlled by the fifth largest army in the world. And it is shrinking, as the waters of Israel steadily erode the islands, eating their way steadily inland, drowning or driving away the people who have always lived there.

The world's politicians and media keep calling for an end to Palestinian violence, but in reality the Palestinians are under siege from their deadly and implacable enemy – an enemy armed with all the technology of war and with a cunning PR machine to keep the outside world onside.

This has been a stunning, eye-opening week for me. For any Christian, being forced to choose between the Jewish people, who suffered so greatly in the last century, and the people they are so efficiently oppressing, is sharp and painful. But according to Judaism's own prophets of the Old Testament, God is for the oppressed and against the oppressor. For this reason, Judaism itself stands in judgment on the modern Israeli state. Anyone who has read the Bible will be familiar with the scenario: it is hardly the first time that Israel has got on the wrong side of God.

But today is a bad day for the Palestinians. They have lost a great leader, and the past few days it's struck me that they're desperately in need of good, credible leadership. Around 3pm, the sound of crowds chanting in the streets drives a number of us onto the rooftop of St George's Guest House, part of the HQ of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, where we've been staying this week.

Looking down into the streets, groups of young men are carrying Palestinian flags, punching the air and chanting. I've seen these scenes on television many times before, of course, and have always wondered what the people are chanting. This time, one of the people leaning on the balcony next to us is an Arabic speaker and translates some of the slogans...

Palestinians are going to paradise...
We're going to Jerusalem even if it means we will be martyred...
Sharon, be patient, one day we will dig your grave...

Suddenly, crowds start pouring out of a side street and the road quickly fills up with thousands of people. Three young boys in jeans and trainers carry big palm leaves, one of them with Husseini's portrait attached. Then a giant Palestinian flag appears, carried flat with maybe forty people walking underneath. And finally, the coffin, lurching and twisting as it is buffetted by the mass of people trying to reach out and touch it.

A young man faints at the side of the road and his friends gather round pouring bottled water onto him. A woman in yellow leads one section of the chanting in a voice so hoarse it is almost a whisper. A few members of the Knesset bravely walk in line, their security utterly compromised in the heaving, swirling crowd.

Tonight, talking over supper, George, a young Palestinian who's arrived to take a couple of our party out to dance in a local club, tells us he thinks war is inevitable. Like many of the people we've talked to this week, his attitude is: bring it on. His people are suffering enough already, he says, and war with Israel would only mean a change in the pace of killings. War will help us to move on, he says.

George has no enthusiasm for war, but like everyone else, he knows it is coming. It is just below the horizon. As a Jewish man said to us today, "If our hearts are not open to each other in compassion, they will split wide open in grief."