What can writers do? Grossman says that the very act of writing, especially writing fiction, constitutes a rejection of the stupidity and despair of the situation and is a "tiny act of protest, of defiance." Possibly he is right; certainly "tiny" is the notable word. In any case, an event for the book fair called Voices From Two Sides of the Bridge turned out to have many of the qualities of good fiction: It was super-real, its development was inexorable and it ended with the kind of finality that gave it meaning and truth.

Planned by the energetic Israeli literary agent Deborah Harris, Bridge Day was to be a historic occasion, with Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab writers meeting at the neutral territory of the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, which connects Jordan and Israel up near the Galilee, and engaging in a sort of colloquium that would show that writers, at least, can rise above. The trip from Jerusalem to the bridge had the feel of a lovely holiday outing. At the bridge, small, unassuming signs read TO JORDAN. There was also a large duty-free shop and a Best Buy. In the language of the region, these felt very "normalizing."

In the excitement of the historical moment, many Palestinian writers, as well as writers from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Tunisia and Egypt, had said yes to Harris's bridge invitation. But as reality approached, one by one they called to say they were not coming and to offer their excuses. Apart from the Israelis and three lone Palestinians from the territories, only Palestinian Israelis and Europe-based Arab writers showed up.

"Many of our participants," Harris said, "have come down with an illness." Although the flu was going around, that did not appear to be the illness she was talking about. The illness was fear: fear of being taken for a collaborator, fear of political repercussions in their home countries, fear of some ruse on the part of the Israelis that would humiliate them, fear of being photographed with Israelis. As the Arab-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua said to the audience, "It is not easy to come to such a place and shake the hand of the conqueror when you have been defeated." He said he often wondered whether "my writing is just part of the maneuvering, whether my place is just the place the Israelis have designated for me."

There is another bus tour you can take from Jerusalem. It's Ir Amim's tour of the wall, which Israel has been constructing over the past three years for a multitude of reasons, the most often cited one being security--to keep Palestinians out. But the wall is like a narrative of the Israeli psyche: It's there to keep the Other out, to keep the Jews in, to protect, to secure, to stop terror, to isolate and humiliate the enemy; it's there to grab land and to establish borders unilaterally; it's there to keep the demographic ratio acceptable to the Jewish state. In some ways, the wall can be seen as yet another Israeli military incursion into the West Bank. The one good thing about it is that like any other wall, it can come down.

Ir Amim, which means the People's City, is a pro-peace Israeli group that monitors events in the city with an eye toward keeping a two-state solution to the conflict plausible. The tour leader is Amos Gil, executive director of Ir Amim and a well-known Israeli civil and human rights advocate.

Gil says his group is not political, but then he explains the day's itinerary: "We will not leave 'the eternal and undivided capital of Israel' today, but we will visit places 90 percent of Israelis never imagine and never visit." He agrees that he is speaking ironically. What he means by this is that Jerusalem is already very much a divided city, in which the Jewish citizens do not live in or visit or even imagine the Arab side, and the Arabs--except for those lucky enough to be able to find and keep work across the way, in more peaceful times--do not live in or visit or even imagine the Jewish side. Two countries, you might say, after having been to both sides.

The wall could cut off 50,000 East Jerusalem residents from the rest of the city, isolating five Palestinian villages and towns at the northeastern edge simply by encircling them and cutting them off totally from their surroundings. Kafr Aqab, a village at the city's north end, has already been cut off by the wall. The West Bank town of Sheikh Sa'ad was to be utterly sealed off from Jerusalem, which is its only egress, but legal action on the part of Sheikh Sa'ad residents has temporarily delayed construction. One remedy the Israeli authorities contemplated for its 4,000 Palestinian villagers was to put a checkpoint in the wall, which could be open to Jerusalem for forty-five minutes in the morning and forty-five minutes in the evening, a laughably insulting and unworkable suggestion. As it is, almost every Palestinian coming into Jerusalem from elsewhere must already wait longer than that to get in.

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