A Palestinian child waits to cross the Huwwara checkpoint, on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Nablus. (Rami Swidan, Maan Images)

Waiting in line at a West Bank border checkpoint, intimidated by the prisonlike atmosphere and frustrated by the Israeli soldier denying me passage back into Israel, I got my first real taste of what it's like most days for thousands of Palestinians.

There I was, having just enjoyed visits to several Palestinian towns, looking very much the harmless, middle-class American tourist, with what I was sure were the right stamps in my passport, being told I could not re-enter Israel nor continue my trip to Nazareth.

I gave the young soldier my best surely-you-don't-mean-me look. Then, a polite request to "please call a superior officer." All to no avail. I would have to return to "wherever I came from."

This was my second trip to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. I had wandered all over Jerusalem, spent a day at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, talked with young people at the Aida refugee camp and walked the battle-scarred market in Hebron. I had been treated to full-gauge Middle Eastern hospitality at friends' homes in Jifna and Jerusalem.

I was on a distinctly personal mission. For four years I had been working on a project that others devote their lives to: trying to understand the endless conflict that grips Israelis and Palestinians and causes such suffering to both.

My mission was born reading of the 2003 death of David

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Applebaum, an innovative Israeli emergency room physician who along with his daughter was killed by a suicide bomber the night before the young woman's wedding.

It has been reinforced many times since, in part by stories of Palestinians killed or imprisoned or those who simply endure daily humiliation at Israeli checkpoints.

On this trip I was trying to understand a life under occupation.

For a caretaker at a Jerusalem nursing home, it meant that a daily trip that should take half an hour instead takes two to three hours. For a Palestinian father of five, a Jewish holiday meant "closure" of the border and the threat of a lost job when he could not get to Jerusalem for work. For a man in his 60s from Zababdeh whose identity papers would not allow him to travel to Ramallah for the heart surgery he needed, occupation meant "borrowing" his cousin's identity papers to gain passage through a crucial checkpoint.

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