In Ramallah, you can sip a latte in a café. You can also find yourself getting arrested on a Sunday morning stroll. Or worse.

(This is a part of a special coverage of the Second Palestinian Festival of Literature, as it brings some 20 international writers – western and Arab – to the West Bank, from Arab East Jerusalem to Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem and Hebron.)

It is past midnight but that should not stop anyone from having a good time, not the guests occupying the lower floors of my hotel anyway. I just heard “Happy Birthday!” being played as the clock struck 12. Now they have reverted to Arab dance music, and the DJ sounds like he is getting quite a response from the revellers.

This is Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian West Bank, where the late Yasser Arafat spent his last days under siege before succumbing to illness in 2004. It may be just ten kilometres from East Jerusalem, but it could well be a world away.

While East Jerusalem appears like most Middle Eastern cities – busy, cluttered and bustling with life – away from the centre, the Ramallah that we encountered was quiet,

with tasteful limestone bungalows that had their own gardens of lovingly-tended rose shrubs. Apartments had their own security systems and views overlooking the areas around Ramallah. The roads were paved and in good condition, perfect for cruising the black Audi TT Coupe and BMWs I saw.

A Ramallah home

From here, life under occupation was looking rather good. Why wouldn't it? This part of Ramallah is the domain of the well-to-do. Since the Oslo Peace Accords were signed with Israeli in 1993, it's been relatively calm in Ramallah, save the odd skirmish. There was now more development and correspondingly property prices had gone up. According to Raja Shehadeh, a local lawyer and author, they were comparable to New York, and land just as hard to acquire. Hence you had to be relatively well-off to live in these parts of the West Bank, which explained the secured apartments, villas,  imported cars and coffee houses.

Shehadeh was the perfect person to introduce us to Ramallah. An avid walker, he had just published a book entitled "Palestinian Walks" and was going to take us on one of the routes described in it today.

The Ramallah Hills

It may called the Ramallah Hills but the terrain was not steep as much as it was tedious. The paths were perhaps a fitting imagery of the life on the ground in the Palestinian areas. They were rocky and full of thorned shrubs whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to get into the socks, shoes and pants of anyone who passed. Even if they didn't draw blood, at the very least, they would cause great annoyances and inconvenience.

Shehadeh had planned today's route to carefully avoid regions known as Area C, strictly off-limits to Palestinians, and are guarded by Israeli soldiers. These were largely occupied by Jewish settlements, inhabited by communities of religious Israelis, who believe their right to reside in the West Bank stems from their claim over it. For them, the Palestinian West Bank is a part of the biblical Judea and Samaria, lands promised to them by God. They will not be moved from this divinely-gifted territories, which in part explains the continued Israeli presence in the Palestinian West Bank.

From a distance, we saw an access road that served one of these settlements, financed by an American Jewish lobby group. It was allowed to be completed though it had been built without official permission. This wasn't quite the case for a Palestinian building project. Israeli authorities refused to let it carry on because it was said to have been illegally constructed in an Area C location.

The illegal road leading to the settlements financed and built by an American Jewish lobby group

It would be over two hours before we reached our end-point of a small Palestinian village. Looming on the hilltop above was an Israeli settlement. Realising that we were in full view of an Israeli military outpost on the next hill, it was decided that was best for our group of some 30 foreigners to move swiftly out of sight.

On the distant hill are a Jewish settlement and an Israeli outpost tower overlooking this Palestinian village

Bassam, another avid Palestinian walker, told me how he once led a group on a walking trai. They came too close to an Area C locale, and the settlers living nearby complained. Soldiers soon arrived, checking identification. Mercifully, with more than a few foreign passports among the documents handed over, the group was released without further hassle.