To ensure ourselves some likelihood of crossing the border into Jordan, which is only open a few hours a day, we set out from Bethlehem at 4:30 in the morning. Luckily, Tala is sleeping. We get through the first checkpoint, called the container, without any particular problems.

I’m the only Westerner in the bus, one of the few Westerners to take the roads reserved to Palestinians. The soldiers at the checkpoints have often asked me, “What the fuck are you doing here?” And I’ve always answered, “It’s a long story, actually,…”. To save themselves the boredom, they almost always let me through.

Having arrived as far as Abu Dis, I’m beginning to think that this is a charmed trip, with a remarkable lack of snags, when we suddenly come up against a mobile checkpoint. They stop us and tell us that we can’t pass this way. The passengers start to get upset. They start shouting, waving airplane tickets departing from the Amman airport. The soldiers pretend they don’t hear. There’s no point in arguing.

Tense and irritated, the taxi driver turns the car around and after a few yards sets off down a back road through the countryside. Tala wakes up: the car is rocking a little too violently to be mistaken for a cradle. I hold her baby seat against my chest as tightly as I can. We cut across a beautiful field of ancient olive trees. After a short while, we’re once again on the main road, with the soldiers behind us grinning from the checkpoint.

The road starts to go downhill and we gaze out the windows onto the extraordinary landscape of the hills of the Dead Sea, dotted by colonies and Bedouin camps. My thoughts turn toward the nomadic city designed by Constant. I tell myself that its tragic dimension, rarely discussed, takes on concrete form in this place. I have always thought of Constant’s New Babylon as a dystopia: the vision of a world in collapse, in constant conflict, not so much between nomads and sedentary peoples as between different conceptions of nomadism.

As I look out the car window, I recognise the encampments and the new colony expansions. Lost in my thoughts, I fail to notice that, instead of driving straight toward the Jordanian border, the taxi has detoured and is entering into Jericho. And I suddenly find myself in front of the mutated form of the border that I had crossed four years previously.

The first time I arrived here from Jordan, I first met up with the Jordanian police and then with the Israeli forces, assisted by a Palestinian police unit. Now the Palestinians have been moved away from the border and have set up a sham border of a non-existent state on a piece of land measuring 150 by 500 feet.

A barrier appears in front of our vehicle. We get out of the taxi and climb onto a bus that stops again after a few yards. Some Palestinian policemen climb on to check documents and luggage. The bus starts again, and stops a few yards later. They make us get off. We pick up our suitcases from practically the same spot where we made our entry.

The Palestinian border is like a service station that leads nowhere. I’m flooded by a sense of overwhelming sadness. The idea of Palestinian sovereignty appears to have achieved its final form in this place: a sovereignty exercised over a miniscule plot of land inside of which all procedures are complied with for a border crossing into… nowhere. The real border is 5 miles away. I’m flabbergasted: the police and the people in transit diligently recite their parts in this puppet theater. Everybody knows that it’s make-believe, but no one objects to it.

Back in the bus, we leave for the real border, presided over this time solely by Israelis. As an Italian citizen in a taxi, I could have reached the border directly. Sandi and Tala, as Palestinians, had no way of avoiding this sham performance.

The trip from Bethlehem to Amman – less than 125 miles – normally takes more than eight hours. The puppet-theater border crossing has radically disheartened me. The day will come, I say to myself, when the Palestinians will climb out of their rundown buses, their overcrowded, stuffy group vans, and with a resigned but peaceful expression, say to the Israelis: “Fine, you win. This cannot be the dream of a Palestinian state that we nurtured for so many years. We don’t want a fake state, a sham border. We simply want to live and move around freely like you. We give up on our state. We just want our rights.”

We continue our journey, this time in the direction of the real border. After hours of waiting to be able to enter the border zone, the moment comes to show our documents. Many Westerners with privileged passports do not understand the anxiety of people who are faced with the potential of being sent back. The Palestinian travel document is once again the paroxysmal expression of this control device. It’s a travel document, not a passport, and it doesn’t even specify a nationality. I’ve seen policemen at the airport stare at it with puzzled expressions and ask, “What the heck is this?” Whoever thought up this document didn’t have the courage to write the word ‘Palestinian’ in the box for ‘Nationality’. The adjective ‘Palestinian’ is becoming like the adjective ‘Jewish’: a lot of people are too scared to even pronounce it. Bad consciences.

Even though Tala is registered on my passport, for the Israelis and Palestinians she’s Palestinian, so she has to follow the same route as Sandi, a different one from mine. I don’t object to this, I just ask the Israeli soldier to allow me to go with them, to let me follow the procedure reserved to Palestinians. I want to give up my Westerner privileges, air conditioning, cleanliness and cold drinks, in order to accompany my family into the crowded buildings and hallways reserved to Palestinians.

The soldier informs me that this will not be possible and that I have to stick to the procedures for tourists. A confused jumble of questions comes to my mind. By accepting this treatment, to what extent do I make myself an accomplice to this madness? Why do all the things I’ve read not come to my aid, preventing me from going crazy with rage? To stop myself from dehumanising the soldiers standing before me, I imagine that Nadav, Eyal, Ravit, Runit and many other Israeli friends of mine might very well be disguised behind their uniforms and rifles. All I know is that I give in and, dazed, I watch Sandi and Tala walk away from me.

I enter into the area for non-Palestinians. Air conditioning and men in Bermuda shorts. I feel ashamed of myself for giving up and accepting this privileged treatment. Me, here, with the tourists and them, over there, hoping not to be sent home. Stunned, I obey the orders issued to me: pay here, open there, get up here, go there, step down, step up, sit down…

After a few hours, I cross the bridge. I’m in Jordan. I immediately start looking for the Palestinian exit, but it’s not easy to find. The building is built in such a way as to prevent human traffic flows from ever meeting up, like in hospitals, where areas and routes for healthy people and patients are kept rigorously separated. Breathlessly, I search among lazy Jordanian policemen and sweaty tourists for the door connecting the area reserved to Palestinians with the area for everyone else. I finally find the door, and before opening it, I feel like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when he discovers the hidden door in the painted blue skyscape that may possibly eject him into the real world.