Part one

"Be careful in Ramallah, it's a sticky place." It seems an odd kind of comment, coming as it does from the man behind the counter at the airport bureau de change. I'm not entirely sure whether to take it as a warning or a threat, but then I suspect they are often interchangeable in the Middle East.

Whatever he meant, his words stay with me pulling out of Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The highway climbs past olive groves and a few settlements, white breeze-block affairs strangely at odds with the rocky biblical landscape. Not what I remember from Sunday school picture books, but this is my first time in 21st-century Israel.

And then, snaking over the horizon, we see the wall, one of the defining monuments to today's political reality. The Israelis began building it in 2002 in response to a wave of suicide bombings by Palestinian militants, who had launched an uprising two years previously. The Israeli response was uncompromising: "Bomb us in our cities, and we will shut you out." They weren't kidding.

More than 600 kilometres of mesh fencing combined with eight-metre-high concrete slabs now slice the West Bank off from Israel 'proper'. Razor wire, strips of no-man's land, guard towers and surveillance cameras complete the job.

I've seen this before. I spent my early childhood in West Berlin. Days out for us were visits to the Berlin Wall, where we'd climb the observation decks and wave at the Russians. Coincidentally, my travelling companion, Mark Brayne, was the Reuters East Berlin correspondent at the time. And here we are three decades later: different era, different context, same response; another wall, another landmark failure of human beings to co-exist.

We get out of the taxi to cross through the checkpoint into Ramallah on foot. It's one of the bleakest pieces of real estate I think I've ever seen. Heavy revolving gates let us through under the flood-lit gaze of Israeli soldiers. Palestinian workers, the few who are allowed to cross, trudge wearily ahead.

We've come here to run a training session for Palestinian journalists on trauma and resilience. After an earlier career as a foreign correspondent with Reuters and then the BBC, Mark is now a psychotherapist and Europe director of the Dart Centre, an organisation set up to increase awareness among journalists of both the trauma they cover and the psychological damage it can do to them personally.

It's a new field, even in the West. Both Reuters and the BBC, for instance, have begun to invest in this kind of training, but only very recently.

For the most part, journalists tend to assume they're coping with the disasters they witness. It comes with the territory. Although it's compulsory to receive hostile environment training on the practicalities of surviving physical threat, the psychological impact is still routinely neglected, often at massive personal cost to the reporters themselves. Tragically, they're often the last to admit it.

We set up a few initial meetings to get a sense of the context, and something quickly becomes apparent. The chronic, relentless violence of the journalistic beat here poses one very specific threat to the long-term capability of reporters to function, both professionally and psychologically. It has become normal.

"The abnormal thing now is not to be stressed or feel pressure," says Issam Baker, chief editor of Amwaj Radio, one of the most popular stations in the West Bank. His seventh-floor office looks out over the compound where the late Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat was besieged in 2002. Israeli soldiers occupied the building during the siege, destroying equipment and bringing the station to the brink of collapse. He shows us the window where the marksmen set up shop.

The construction of the barrier has added to the grinding pressure. Foreign correspondents can file their reports and return to comfortable lives in the West. Palestinian journalists and their families, however, must contend with the cumulative stresses of checkpoints, shooting and bomb attacks. They are part of the story they're reporting on.

"We are people before we are journalists," says Issam. "The difficulties that any citizen faces here, I face them too." I wonder how long it has been since anyone actually listened to him say that.

To read Part Two of Mark's blog click here

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