What is the Israel-Palestine conflict?
1897: Amidst growing anti-Semitism in Europe, World Zionist Organisation established to try and create a Jewish state in Palestine.
1918-1947 - Britain recommends partition into Jewish and Arab states, which is rejected by Palestinians who demand an end to Jewish migration. But many more Jews flee to Palestine because of Nazi Holocaust in Europe.
1948 - Jewish forces fight Arab armies and occupy 77 per cent of Palestine. 750,000 Palestinians flee fighting or expelled by Jewish troops. Most move to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thousands of Jews flee Arab countries to Israel and refused right to return.
1987 - The first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, begins against growing number of Israeli settlements in occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
2000 - Palestinian militants begin series of suicide attacks. Israel responds with increased number of air strikes and killing militant leaders. Many Palestinian cities isolated and kept under curfew for lengthy periods.
2002 - Israel re-occupies West Bank cities and begins building 600 km-long (370 miles) barrier separating West Bank from rest of Israel.
Source: Alertnet
The first time I saw Bethlehem, I was five years old leafing through the pages of an illustrated children's bible I'd found gathering dust somewhere. Sandy dunes under starry skies stared up at me alongside a cluster of shepherds, huddled together in dusk-coloured cloaks.
More than a decade passed before I heard the term 'Palestine' for the first time, and many more years passed before I began to understand all that that place represented.
It is a region with multiple histories of a struggle so prolonged and ingrained that I felt I needed to see it for myself to make up my own mind.
Of course, one visit alone would not be enough. To truly understand the conflict of Israel and Palestine, which spans more than 50 years’ long, is to understand thousands of years of history, knotted with religious differences and flawed storytelling. You can get vastly different versions of the past, depending on who you speak to.
But on my visit to Lajee Centre, the only youth organisation inside Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank, I am an audience for Palestine.
Officially, I have come to help the Centre by clearing the land behind it, building walls, clearing rubbish, raking weeds. But in my head, I have a different reason. I came here to understand.
Thirty of us have come from all over the world. Among us there are academics, policy makers, students of law and politics, but also creative types: a cartoonist, a filmmaker and a clown.
We all have eager intentions but little experience when it comes to manual labour. But despite our 'soft' backgrounds, we learn fast.
Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
Aida Refugee Camp is a half-hour walk from the centre of Bethlehem, pressed against the looming shadow of the occupation wall.
Twice as high as the Berlin Wall, it hovers over our backs as we begin work on a small slice of land near the Lajee Centre.
Wheelbarrows filled with concrete scurry back and forth, olive trees are pruned and lined with stones, and rubbish and rocks slowly disappear to the United Nations-marked skips by the side of the road.
The presence of the UN has greatly diminished since 1950, when Aida began as a row of branded tents, to house the thousands of Palestinian refugees left homeless from the creation of Israel.
The landscape is barren and dry. It is hard to imagine this unremarkable piece of land has been the cause of so much suffering.
Australian-born Helen has run Aida’s summer camp for the past nine years. She points out the signs of the Israel-Palestine conflict: the tank marks that scar the streets and sidewalks, the high walls where snipers once sought out their enemies.
Across Manger Street, there is a valley that cuts away to reveal a source of deep resentment - an Israeli settlement built where the last forest in Bethlehem once stood.
The manger at the heart of my bible’s Christmas story no longer exists. But the Church of the Nativity does.
It sits atop a hill in Bethlehem, in a city only mildly different from that of my childish ponderings, filled with narrow stone streets that are lined with stalls selling carpets and spice, long keffiyehs and plastic children's toys, and hills rolling gently out to the horizon.
Salah is the director of the Aida youth centre, and one of several hundred Palestinians held in the church for 40 days during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002.
We trail Salah into that same church, whose ornate ceilings and delicate mosaic flooring go unmentioned. His memories of an uglier scene are clearer.
"After two days, bullets are coming from everywhere. They cut the power. In the dark, one of our friends has been trying to fix the lights, and he has been killed."
Salah, trapped by the fighting along with many others in the district at the time, hid in the church to seek shelter from shelling. "We thought we'd be safe there," he says.
The Israeli army held the church on the pretext that 'terrorists' were inside.
Like many Palestinians, Salah rejects the term used to describe resistance to the army. He tells us there were "shopkeepers, farmers, children" inside. "Not a lot of people who could fight," he says.
There were nine deaths inside the church during the siege and many other injuries.
One man was shot through the stomach from an unseen sniper. For more than a fortnight, Salah says, he lay in appalling agony.
"He couldn't eat anything because it would come straight out of his stomach."
Salah takes us down a dark staircase in the belly of the church, where they put the men and women who were similarly injured during the siege.
We stand listlessly looking at the narrow walls.
A few steps away, a family of Christian pilgrims is snapping photos of a silver star lying in a recess in the floor.
This is the spot, history has decided, where Jesus was born.
Sunrise over Jerusalem
Many of the older residents work with us, and some days the younger kids come too. When it gets too hot to work, the concrete won't stay stuck, and volunteers sidle off to the shade of the olive trees.
Some of the boys loop old tyres around their waists and fight like sumo wrestlers.
It is the height of summer, and the water - controlled by the Israeli Government - hasn't been running in homes in the camp for months.
As we leave work each day, we pass a long line of residents standing at a single pipe filling spare jerry cans of water. Some of the younger kids come up and grab at our water bottles. Nobody ever refuses.
AS we leave work each day, we pass a long line of residents standing at a single pipe filing spare jerry cans of water. Some of the younger kids come up and grab at our water bottles. Nobody ever refuses.
Our home for the duration is a boy's school, and we sleep under chalkboards in unused classrooms. Someone has rearranged the boy's amenities block and covered the squat toilets with duckboards.
When there's water, purchased by the tank load and delivered on the back of a truck, hoses are looped through the toilet windows, and these become our showers. You can get used to the limp trickle of cold water, but never the smell.
It's the land outside the camp, on the other side of the wall that shows the full extent of the situation.
Israel's Jerusalem is a shining mega-city, with rows of chain stores and bustling cafes, vast green nature strips that are well watered and purely for decoration.
Its stark contrast to the dry land stripped of its resources, is a testament to the brutal success of Israel's occupation.
The occupation wall wraps around the West Bank in a vast, wiggling line; and together with the settlements, acts like a scoop, picking out the tourist attractions and fertile land, the valuable gems of Palestine, claiming them for Israel.
There's a sign outside the Lajee Centre that tells the distance from there to Jerusalem: seven kilometres. But it's purely symbolic, because with few exceptions, the Palestinians in Bethlehem are not allowed to pass the checkpoint to the city closest to them.
As the days pass, the Palestinians we meet tell us their stories. There are people here the same age as my parents who have been refugees since they were born.
They each have homes and families, but no state legislating in their best interests, or functional government, or passport. They struggle with water, electricity, jobs and education. They are a population with no freedom.
Khalid, a 22-year-old law and economics student, is too young to remember the village of his grandparent's youth, but he remembers the second intifada, when the flammable tension between Israel and Palestine combusted, late in the year 2000.
"The strongest tanks in the world were used in the second intifada," he recalls. "You image a tank, like this [he lifts his arms wide apart], here in the camp…"
I don’t doubt his story. During our visit, the camp is quiet. If there are soldiers behind the blackened tower windows aligning the separation wall, we cannot see them. But as we get used to our surroundings, we see evidence of conflict everywhere. Even the UN-run girl's school near the Lajee Centre has bullet holes in the gate.
Khalid's memories are echoed by those of the others.
Linda, who was 10 when the intifada started, remembers cowering in her home as soldiers and Apache helicopters swooped low in the camp outside.
Miras was shot by an Israeli soldier when he was 12, playing on the balcony of his home with his cousins.
Mamjet remembers the death of his father.
But it is Mohammad that recalls his friend's most painful moment: "Mamjet's father was killed in 2002. He was shot at breakfast, and all his brains mixed with the food."
Many have unsurprisingly grown up strongly opposing the Israeli occupation, in some cases openly resisting the soldiers with stone throwing and verbal hostility.
Our Home: A maths classroom in a boy's school, outside Bethlehem in the West Bank
"We've grown up in this second intifada," says Mohammad, one of several young people I meet who has spent time in prison for his actions.
"The only thing we know is occupation, bullets, people killed [and] losing people from the family."
Over shisha and Turkish coffee he tells us of his arrest. Around 300 soldiers came to his house at night, while his family was asleep.
"My father, he was shouting 'wake up', wake up. Two soldiers [took] me, and they started running. I fell three times on my face, blood running.
"They put me on the floor of the jeep and about four soldiers came and put their legs on me, and their guns."
Though he was not the only one arrested that night, Mohammed was luckier than others. "I know some people were killed," he says.
Once under arrest, the interrogation began. "They told me: 'You were throwing stones'," he says. "I said no, but I was throwing stones. I said no, I cannot say yes."
Stone throwing is ingrained in the Palestinian rebellion. It is the weapon of choice for angry young kids in the camps, who use the small rocks to goad soldiers, in groups of a dozen or more.
A friend of mine who came here a couple of years ago remembers seeing the stone-throwing in action and said it reminded him of a schoolyard game.
Mohammad was sentenced to 18 months in jail. His friend Mamjet was imprisoned twice - the first time when he was 15 years old. He was buying felafel in the camp when soldiers came for him and the friends he was with that day.
"They blindfolded us and started to beat us and took us to a detention centre in Beit Jala," Mamjet says of his arrest.
"I was injured so they took me to the doctor. [I was] shot by six bullets in my leg."
Both young men are pragmatic about their actions, and about the future. "It's not like being in a prison for being a thief," Mohammad says.
"This is a national resistance. But for now, at this stage in our lives, I think we do not need armed resistance."
After the stories end in the evening, someone turns the music up and we unfurl our mattresses on the school's second-story balcony. It's a balmy night, and a few of the volunteers drag their spongy beds out into the open to sleep.
Soon our time here will end, and we'll make the long journey back to the world outside the wall.
For me, it will take nine hours to cross the crowded checkpoints of the 75-kilometre long stretch of land between the West Bank and Amman.
But for the Palestinians, the world outside their camps remains largely off limits.
They can travel only with permission from the occupying government, but not to the place they want to the most — the land of their grandparents' memories, on the other side of the wall.
To find out more about the Lajee Centre
If you have a story that offers insight into a war-torn region we want to know about it, hit us up at theifprojecteditor@gmail.com
There are people here the same age as my parents who have been refugees since they were born.
"This is the spot, history has decided, where Jesus was born.
""The only thing we know is occupation, bullets, people killed [and] losing people from the family."