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 army decides who plays
WEDNESDAY 30TH MAY

Driving through Jerusalem as we travel north this morning, I notice the flags. Every 50 metres we're passing an Israeli flag flying in the road's central reservation. The pale blue and white emblem is everywhere and it reminds me of the saying that a nation's self-confidence is in inverse proportion to the length of its national anthem.

Soldiers young enough to be looking forward to their first shave wave their guns to let us through the military checkpoint guarding the exit from Jerusalem and a sudden decrease in road quality tells us that we're in a Palestinian area. Here people pay their taxes but don't receive the public services Israel is meant to provide. Black bin bags by the side of the road swell and burst in the hot sun.

As we squeeze into the few available seats and go round the circle introducing ourselves, I'm alarmed to find that all the other seminar-goers are seasoned, keen-eyed political activists from Europe and America who have probably never seen a barricade without leaping forth to man or woman it. I'm suitably impressed as the credentials are rolled out. It's a long time since I've been among the bran, brown bread and breastfeeding brigade.

Dr Aghazarian props his elbow against a letter tray on his desk, puffs on his pipe and tells us about the university's football team. They are due to play another team 50 miles away, but because they are Palestinians, Dr Aghazarian must apply to the local Israeli army commander for travel permits. He has to supply detailed information for every member of the team, which takes time to collect. He submits the applications and several days later they are rejected. There are mistakes in the information, he is told, so none of the permits can be issued.

He sorts out the mistakes and re-submits the applications. This time the information is OK and the permits arrive, but five of the football players are denied permission to travel. Why? Because the army considers them a "security risk". When Dr Aghazarian asks why his students are a security risk, he is basically told to mind his own damn business.

"Sometimes it is your best players who cannot go to play the match," he mourns.

At other times, players who have been allowed to travel to the match are stopped at checkpoints and prevented from returning to the university. Dr Aghazarian gets on the phone to his military commander. "Oh, it's just a mistake," breezes the commander. The "mistake" takes several days to sort out and meanwhile the student has to find somewhere local to stay – at the university's expense.

Palestinians are not free to travel in their own land. The parallels with South African apartheid are striking, except that here the land is much smaller, to the point of claustrophobia. Local populations can be imprisoned by army checkpoints in areas of only a few square kilometres.

After farewell hugs with Dr Aghazarian, we go up the road to Ramallah.

Here, in the main street, there's a shop with Mickey Mouse on the signboard and Disney toys inside. And a pharmacy and a shoe shop with a TV dish on the roof. There are crowds walking in the bright sunshine, people going in and out of offices, fruit for sale on pavement shops, men sitting smoking or playing cards. And there are the pulverised remains of Ramallah's police station, destroyed by rockets fired from Israeli helicopters last October.

It was in this police station that two Israeli soldiers were beaten to death while a crowd of 1,500 people bayed for blood outside. Hours later, the helicopters swooped in to destroy the spot.

As I stand in the street to take a picture of the ruined station, I'm acutely aware that the people watching me curiously are very probably the same people who formed that crowd. And yet when I stop to look at them, they are ordinary people and not the demons depicted in Western newspapers. These are office workers, fruit and veg sellers, van drivers. These are people I recognise from my own High Street.

Fifty years of having your land occupied, your villages bulldozed and your young men tortured – and having your football teams screwed up, too – do terrible things to a people. "The houses can be rebuilt," Mr Zoughbi told us yesterday, "but the psychological damage will last for a long time."

My low point of today happens during a visit to the inspiring Sabeel Ecumenical Centre in Jerusalem. The centre exists to give Palestinian Christians the theological tools they need to carry on their struggle, to carry on believing that God is with them. As we talk about what hope (if any) there is for peace, Nore Carmi says, with incredible sadness, "Our greatest hope is that God will do a miracle."

My heart sinks. This is the hope of a cancer patient after being told that all medical treatments have failed. With the greatest respect for God's ability to work miracles, it is the kind of hope you have when there is simply nothing left.