A pair boys look at posters at an exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba in Gaza City. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

At Birzeit University in Ramallah last week a young woman student in a headscarf asked how it was that Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and Nobel laureate, could agree to visit and speak in Israel. Hadn't Gordimer fought apartheid for years - famously fought it in her writing and her actions? And now she was about to appear at the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, a guest in one way or another of the Israeli government. What did we think of this? Weren't these double standards? Wouldn't we condemn her?

The question was asked of Roddy Doyle and myself, both of us participants in another literary jamboree, the first Palestine Festival of Literature, whose six-day tour of the West Bank and East Jerusalem ended last Monday.

There is a moment in all literary festivals when the participants feel like Joseph Cotten's character in The Third Man: Holly Martins, the innocent writer of pulp westerns who is suddenly and dismayingly confronted by an audience of Viennese intellectuals who want to know his opinion of James Joyce. For me, this moment came in Birzeit.

Like every other writer and journalist on the tour, Doyle and I agreed to do "workshops" at universities. A paper put into our hands an hour or two beforehand informed us our discussion would be devoted to "the role of fiction in creating new political realities".

"Let's just get them to ask questions," said Doyle, the author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. "It's always more fun for everyone that way." Six or seven students were waiting in the classroom; they were all young women - men rarely study English literature at Palestinian universities - mostly wearing headscarves and very bright.

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One knew the work of Edith Wharton, which I do not, and there was an interesting exchange about writers ranging from Austen to Orwell. Then came the Gordimer question, to which Doyle gave the wisest answer: "We don't know what she will say. Let her come and let's hear what she says before we condemn her."

Perhaps less wisely, certainly less clearly, I suggested that to equate apartheid in South Africa with Israeli behaviour towards Palestinians in the occupied territories was still "a big step" for most people in Europe and North America. Really, I was talking of myself: it was a big step for me and one I was reluctant to take. Two days' experience of the West Bank didn't seem enough to reach such forthright condemnation, and yet the evidence was already abundant that Israel's behaviour towards its captive Palestinian population is profoundly racist, oppressive and unjust.

It started when we crossed the border from Jordan at the Allenby Bridge. All of us had EU or American passports and most us got through immigration in less than an hour. Then we waited for our colleagues with Arabic names. One hour, two hours, three hours. Khalid Abdalla, the actor, got out first; a conversation about his co-star Matt Damon seemed to be key. Last were our two American-Palestinian women poets, Suheir Hammad and Nathalie Handal. What had detained them was hardly rigorous research into their political connections.

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