Obama paid his respects to cultural difference with his usual sophistication (and impatience with Western secular fundamentalism), dismissing the ‘view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal’. But he pointedly added that ‘a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous.’ One country that has benefited from the progress of women is Iran, where more than 60 per cent of university students are female, and where women have come to play an increasingly prominent role in civil society – in contrast with, say, ‘moderate’ Saudi Arabia. Obama didn’t mention this, but he did make an example of Iran in less flattering ways, as he did in his speech at Buchenwald the following day, where he indirectly criticised Ahmadinejad’s revisionist pronouncements about the Holocaust.

It would be easy to say Obama puts the cart before the horse in talking about violent Islamic extremism (though not Jewish or Christian extremism) before addressing the question of Palestine. But Palestine isn’t the only cause of jihadism, even if it’s an inescapable grievance and a major ‘recruiting tool’, as the pundits say. And Obama was much franker on the nature of the conflict than he’s tended to be, referring matter-of-factly to the ‘displacement brought by Israel’s founding’, and to the ‘intolerable’ occupation. As the son of a Kenyan man and a student of American history, Obama knows something about the Mau Mau rebellion, and about Nat Turner – not to mention the American civil war, in which more than a half million people died before slavery was abolished. So he can’t possibly believe his fable that black Americans won their rights through ‘peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the centre of America’s founding’. Still, it would have been shocking, and politically suicidal, for him to say the Palestinians have a right to resist occupation by force of arms. And it wasn’t surprising that the country most conspicuous by its absence from his remarks on nuclear weapons was Israel.

Obama has rejected the messianic American ‘project’ for the Middle East, which was a gift to authoritarian leaders like Bashar Assad in Damascus, who can point to Iraq as an example of the good democracy will do. Still, human rights activists in Egypt – where there are 17,000 political prisoners, and the president hasn’t faced a serious election in three decades – couldn’t take much comfort from the fact that Obama devoted twice as much time to ‘violent extremism’ as to democratic governance. To be sure, a reproach to Mubarak could be heard when he said: ‘You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party.’ But Obama was too polite to mention that his host had prevented the Egyptian opposition movement Kifaya from holding a protest the night before, or that he’d ordered Cairo University to be emptied of students: both vivid tributes to the most efficient branch of the Egyptian state, the security services.

America’s special relationship with the Mukhabarat state in countries like Egypt – as much as its support for Israel – has made it a target of popular anger, and of attacks by radical Islamists. Obama’s rhapsody in green, with its repeated invocations of the ‘holy Koran’ and its blunt inventory of the crimes of Western colonialism in the Middle East, certainly sets a new tone in relations between the West and that imaginary, impossible monolith known as the Muslim world. But the perception that the US is an enemy won’t fade among Muslims until America overhauls its policies in the region, no matter how much Obama praises the finer aspects of Islamic civilisation, no matter how thorough his account of the abuses of colonialism. Obama surely knows this. Whether he can act on it remains to be seen.

The majority of our students, between twenty or thirty people, are enrolled in the English faculty. (The political science students have opted for other workshops, among them a packed session on Guantanamo.) All except one are women. Most are wearing the hijab. Soon it emerges that most speak good English. Right now, though, they’re looking at us with an air of polite concern as you would at something on its last legs, but there’s life in Robin yet: we introduce ourselves and he says a few words about stories, lyrics, film scripts, rap and YouTube. About speed of transmission, low costs, ubiquity of access. About the way that anyone can have a hearing; all they need to do is to get the content right.

The students divide into groups for a polemic-avoidance exercise: prepare a piece about the situation in Gaza during or since the December 2008/January 2009 assault, a text, a song, a scenario, a poem, a dialogue, an outline for a story, anything. No opinion about the assault, or open condemnation of it, is allowed. I’ve already steeled myself for the question, ‘You mean like the BBC?’ and the terse laughter that’s sure to follow, but it turns out the students are too polite for that and before we know it, one of the groups has sailed out of the lecture theatre to rehearse in the corridor. Another asks if they can perform a mime. This is about language, I say. ‘We believe that silence is a language,’ a young woman replies.

There’s a group thinking about dress sense as another kind of language: finding the idiom in which you’re comfortable and using that ease as part of your case.  One of them begins to map out a fashion show, with archive footage from Gaza projected on the walls to the side of the runway. A fourth group has observed the no-polemic rule with an ambitious draft for an epic movie: they’ve already packed scores of refugees from around the world onto a bus – this could soon need David Lean or Richard Attenborough – in order to downplay the plight of the Palestinians as part of a bigger, universal story. ‘Uzbekis too!’ says a young woman in a fawn headscarf, determined not to use the P-word. They’re jolting along a mountain pass somewhere in northern Anatolia, and I’m looking at my watch. They’ve got five more minutes.

When time’s called, each of the seven groups presents its work to the others. A band of comedians in hijab have turned the Hamas-Fatah conflict into a Premier League game with a running commentary as balls explode in the back of the net. Then the mimes give us a (spoken) synopsis of a drama in three acts: there will be sinister soldiers shrouded in black, but no one’s going to be chanting slogans. Another group presents a scene in which a family fails to get through a border crossing at Christmas (Christmas, they explain, adjusts for the view of the Palestinians as ‘Muslims’). And here’s another mime. Three students are on stage. A rucksack is hurled onto the ground in front of them. They study it, withdraw, approach again with care; they look as if they’re about to sing to it but instead all three kneel and start to write on it, gingerly at first, and then with more confidence; they’re scrawling frenetically when the rucksack detonates.

The actors explain this mystery by saying that the rucksack should be seen as something originating in Israel that’s come the way of Palestinians: it could be a political initiative, say, or a description of their own identity and history that they don’t recognise; however seriously the women mean to take it, respond to it, or make a mark of their own on it, it’s sure to go off in their faces.  The other groups, who’ve enjoyed the minimalism of the piece, don’t seem to need the explanation: it’s for Robin and me.

These raw presentations were worked up in roughly fifteen minutes; some contained the kind of detail you’d only expect to come with the finishing touches. What if we’d had more time? But time in the West Bank is eaten up by the byzantine demands of the occupation, which interfere with everything, including sitting finals – any moment now. The rucksack, I notice, as the owner shrugs it onto her back, is full to capacity.

A common objection to the tagging of villages emptied or razed during the nakba is that living memory, along with other kinds of record, doesn’t always get it right: several villages identified as casualties of the war were already uninhabited before 1948. A bigger gripe, voiced by André Oboler last year in Jerusalem Issue Briefs, was that user contributions, mostly from Palestinians, have been incorporated into Google Earth’s ‘core layout’, meaning that visitors ‘wishing to find directions, explore the cities of Israel, or randomly wander across this small piece of land are immediately taken to a politically motivated narrative unrelated to their quest’. By contrast, the WWF’s material on deforestation and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s information on Darfur are ‘custom’ layers. You really have to want to go there.

Sooner or later, if this were to continue, Google Earth would become a virtual dogfight over every disputed area of the planet, from Western Sahara to the East China Sea – or that’s the Oboler argument. At the same time, the web is one of the few places where Palestinians, losing ground by the day to the realities of occupation and settlement, can make their aspirations plain. (And put the modest query: is there any such thing as a non-’politically-motivated’ map of Israel and Palestine?) Only not on Google Earth – or not any more. At a glance it looks as though Google have taken Oboler’s objections seriously and changed the core layer.

Palestinians are not forgiven for demonstrating or resorting to violence, and it’s no surprise to find them taken to task when they defend their dwindling lands to the best of their abilities on the internet – especially on Google Earth, which gave them a rare promontory in the war of position from which they could look down at the scale of their dispossession and chart it, for others to grasp.

In the non-virtual space of the West Bank, this kind of viewpoint is seldom available to Palestinians, because Israel has grabbed the high ground and dug into it, changing the skyline and calling the shots. Last week the Palfest contingent set out for the remains of the countryside around Ramallah with Raja Shehadeh, the author of Palestinian Walks: it took a bus ride and a descent on foot between two terraced slopes before we had a glimpse of a landscape without an Israeli settlement shimmering above it. The security towers along the wall bid for height and vantage in the same way. You can’t be in the territories without feeling overawed and observed – some distance, in other words, from Fanon’s sense that the colonised are largely ‘invisible’, ignored and unexamined by the coloniser. To be on the West Bank is to feel like a walking X-ray or a tagged convict, monitored in high places.

This two-tier geography, with the occupiers raised above the occupied, has some startling applications. During the 39-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002, the Israeli army put a remote-controlled sniper rifle at the top of a crane in Manger Square: facts in the air, as the people of Gaza know, can be as vivid as facts on the ground. Nowadays in Hebron, as you walk through the market in the old town, you move under long strips of mesh strung across the street by Palestinians to protect them against the rubbish, stones and bottles thrown by the settlers who live above. You’re encouraged to move quickly even so – the nets are no good against urine or bleach. The market in Hebron is not the bustling place it used to be. The settlers have done for it, just as the occupation has done for so much of Palestine. That’s the idea of staying on top.

The Palfest way is to hold events in the evening and get the writers out and about during the day. Since it’s very difficult, often impossible, for Palestinians to circulate in the West Bank or go to and from Jerusalem, the festival participants do the moving, and negotiate the many checkpoints. The Gilo checkpoint, through which you pass to enter or leave Bethlehem, is a grim pedestrian rat-run, flanked by a large rectangle of asphalt, bare as a coach park at a British seaside resort in February. The bus dropped us at the entrance, drove around and picked us up on the other side, after Israeli security had processed us. There are about a dozen turnstiles but few are manned, which makes for drastic queues from three to six in the morning, when hundreds of Palestinian workers want to get into Jerusalem. The Pope’s schedule in May spared him the sight of the Bethlehem apartheid rush hour.

My memories of the town twenty years ago – the anniversary of the first intifada – are of a sombre place, menacing, cold and curfewed, yet the structural grip of the occupation is now far tighter. The separation wall is the key. The towers and cameras posted along its length give the Israeli army a thorough hold on Aida camp, where 4700 refugees are housed; children who once walked across a nearby patch of open ground to school in the camp have had their access cut off by it; and it’s turned one edge of Bethlehem into a concrete vista where the enormity of their imprisonment confronts residents every day as symbol and reality.

People have been scrawling on the wall for a while. Banksy, who came to Bethlehem in 2007, is the best known, though he didn’t stick to the wall. A minute’s walk from the Jacir Palace (now the Intercontinental Hotel) there’s a witty, powerful stencil of a little girl frisking a soldier. Other artists and agitproppers may not have an international reputation but all their efforts, from good to mediocre and worse, break up the repressive monotony of the wall. Even the simplest tags seem to make a point: Kilroy was here and so is Palestine.

Soft propaganda for the Palestinian cause, made up of words and images that speak in vivid terms about the incredible shrinking universe that Palestinians in Palestine inhabit, has a promising future. And already it’s no longer propaganda in the strict sense: it’s real and felt, vivacious and streetwise, web-years beyond the old mementos of the PLO and its counterparts around the world, who kept a wary eye on their national poets and projected their struggles in terms of the gun and the olive branch, the gun and the hoe, the gun and whatever else, from the smokestack to the ballot box. Any artist or writer worth her salt can be a credit to the Palestinian cause now, without the imprimatur of a liberation movement or a conspicuous nod in favour of armed struggle. Suheir Hammad, a poet out of Brooklyn (Drops of This Story, ZaatarDiva, Breaking Poems), is a good example: a younger, image-conscious, thoughtful militant for Palestine, one of a new generation who do the writing, while the Israelis oblige by extending the wall.