Life in the West Bank behind the wall

I thought we had entered a war zone.

"Don't be afraid," one of the passengers said to me soothingly, smiling broadly.

"Tear gas," the woman chipped in.

The van pulled to a halt and we quickly filed off.

The woman lifted a corner of one of her scarves to double the covering on her face and shouted a muffled: "Cover your nose, cover your nose."

With my one free hand - I held a camera in the other - I covered my nose, at the same time holding my breath, and ran after the woman. It is the one time in my life I would have liked to have been wearing a face covering.

Acrid black smoke and fumes belched from a pile of tires burning on the ground. One of the checkpoint's two watchtowers was shrouded in smoke, probably from petrol bombs. A young man 5 meters away from me was throwing stones at the other tower.

He was thin and lanky, like many of the youths I had seen in the refugee camp. As he prepared to hurl each stone he slowly arched back 180 degrees, his long legs and arms like the rubber bands of a giant slingshot.

As I ran past him he stopped what he was doing and fixed his eye on me. Like my companion in the van, this young man wore headgear. Whether the eyes behind those black and white scarves sparkled or raged, I do not know. Nevertheless, as I looked at him and he looked at me, I fancy he must have been thinking: "What the hell is this Chinese b**** doing here?"

The instinct of any photojournalist in such a situation is instantly to aim the camera and snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. I froze in the moment, one voice in my mind saying, "Keep on running," and another saying, "Stop and shoot." I kept on running.

An Israeli reporter, obviously inured to these kinds of things, would later tell me that young men of this ilk lap up media attention, seeing it as a great aid in their cause. That kid, in the early days of the selfie and of images going viral, may well have hoped I would put him in the frame and even on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Whatever, to this day, I wish I had stopped and shot rather than run.

When I finally reached Jerusalem and recounted to my relieved friend all that had happened to me that day, we laughed about how carefree and innocent we had once been all those years ago.

When she first traveled to Israel all those years ago in quest of a scholarship, she wrote in a personal statement: "If we could solve the conflict between Palestine and Israel we could also solve other conflicts in the world."

That of course, is an admirable goal - as admirable as wanting to tear down a wall that keeps people apart.