Jidariyya, "Mural," is one of the productions being staged by the Palestine National Theatre. (Wesam Saleh, Maan Images)

The woman snapped her fingers at me. As I stood at the customs corral at David Ben-Gurion airport at Tel Aviv, I was astonished to be treated like an errant puppy by a young customs officer, a girl perhaps in her mid-twenties with an abundance of curly blonde hair. "Look at me! I'm talking to you!" she bellowed, and snaps her fingers again.

I had in fact momentarily taken my eyes off her to look in my jacket pocket for a document I'd mentioned, and she had demanded from me, explaining my business in Israel.

This, I should add, occurred after a good hour of queuing and passing through the most elaborate security X-ray machines I'd ever seen, then having my small, if overstuffed, flight bag packed and unpacked several times for a further hour at this corral. All this after I'd been asked to turn on and off my laptop, and display its various functions to the point where I became convinced this woman was interested in purchasing the same model. Its battery was nearly flat by the time I moved on.

"And what," she demanded triumphantly, as if she had uncovered, at the umpteenth sweep of my bag, a black ball with a lit fuse protruding from it, "is this?" Gingerly, she pushed my old-fashioned cassette recording device across the counter with a extended finger, as if it might sprout wings and take flight about the departure hall at any moment.

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"You say you are a Scottish journalist - what newspaper are you working for?" "The Scotsman." "The Scotsman? I've never heard of such a newspaper. Why would it be named The Scotsman?" she asked incredulously.

It was about this point that I realised that Amir Nizar Zuabi, director of the Palestinian National Theatre's Jidariyya, was a master of understatement. The day before, he had described Israeli security precautions as "neurotic", yet, as any psychiatrist knows, there is a dangerous point where neurosis flips into psychosis. The line that divided the two seemed a long way behind this customs officer. No reasonable person would quarrel with the need for strict security in a country as troubled as Israel, but the impression remains with me that my treatment at the hands of this public official had little to do with passenger safety. The fact that I was a journalist, a profession that has become unpopular with the Israeli authorities for obvious reasons over recent times was, I believe, at the heart of all the finger-snapping, and spurious questioning of the obvious.

What Palestinian people I've met over the years have complained to me about most frequently is not so much the violence, dispossession or injustice in their situation, though these are often mentioned. Most often, it was the pure inconvenience of their position, the inability to get on with everyday life, that vexes them. I had experienced only a tiny fraction of this inconvenience in the farce at Ben-Gurion Airport.

I recalled the day before, sat upon the sun-drenched balcony of a pleasant Tel Aviv cafe, vegetable couscous and coffees between us, Zuabi's take on the political situation of Palestinians. "We sometimes tend to reduce ourselves to the conflict, the situation, and it's hard not to because that's the prism you live your life through. You open a door and there's a wall. You can be very artsy and say, 'I'll ignore the wall, a man lives within himself', and so on, but when you need a carton of milk, there's a wall."

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