As Palestinian Airlines flight 153 taxied out onto the runway at Amman's small city airport the pilot intoned a prayer the Prophet Muhammad used at the start of every journey, beginning, "Bismillah ar-Rahman, arRahim. . . all praise is due to God, the Beneficent, the Merciful".
The pilot revved the props on the 50-seat Fokker and began the rush down the tarmac. The plane, fully occupied and heavy with great piles of luggage, climbed steeply then sailed above the Jordanian capital's seven hills, houses and streets receding into the morning fug.
We reached our cruising altitude of 18,000 feet quickly and slipped over the patchwork countryside of brown and beige relieved by an occasional square of green. White and cream towns sprawled over hillsides linked by charcoal lengths of road. A snack was served by Mr Abdullah, the steward, as we looked down at a brown map-scape scored by deep wadis running into the bright blue Gulf of Aqaba. Instead of flying a direct route, which would have taken 40 minutes, we had to follow a plan which crossed the absolute minimum of Israeli territory, consuming an hour and a half. The passengers were all Palestinians except me. They carried a variety of travel documents. Some held the creased and crumpled papers of the stateless, others had green or diplomatic red Palestinian passports or Canadian or British documents. Four were grandees - three ambassadors and a retired district governor - and one was a pink-cheeked grandmother in headscarf and heavily embroidered traditional dress. Businessmen in checked head-dresses and officials in suits and ties, babes in arms and children. The cockpit door stood open and the young captain strode into the cabin for a chat with chums. The plane executed a sharp turn at the tip of the Sinai peninsula and doubled back towards the Yasser Arafat International Airport at Rafah in the Gaza Strip, over-flying rich chocolate, then brown, then golden sand, desert. We descended along the fence delineating the border between the green and prosperous Israel "proper" carved out of Palestine in 1948 and the sandy waste of the Gaza Strip occupied in 1967.
We touched down in "Falastin/ Palestine" at 13.00 hours, only half-an-hour late. On the tarmac, Israeli security men in wraparound sunglasses made fashionable by the Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, watched us debark and climb onto two buses and proceed to the Israeli-controlled crossing point between Egypt and Gaza at Rafah. Led by a black-and-white striped "follow me" aircraft guide jeep, luggage relegated to a slat-sided cattle truck, we drove along a corridor of no-man's-land enclosed in barbed wire, iron stakes and high fences to the Israeli compound. There, every piece of our mountain of luggage was investigated by polite but probing Israelis, mostly women with white-gloved hands, and we went through Israeli, then Palestinian, immigration.
Ours was the third Palestinian flight to land. The first, on Saturday the fifth, took four hours to clear Israeli security and passport formalities. Those on the second flight, on Wednesday the ninth, escaped after one hour. We were convoyed back to the pristine Palestinian airport after two hours and 20 minutes. Outside the terminal a platform and stacked plastic chairs herald the ceremonies welcoming US President, Bill Clinton, today. One more stamp on an entry form, a cursory inspection by customs and we were free to pile into seven-seater taxis for journeys to our destinations in what one of my companions called "this big prison" of Gaza, the 60 per cent of the Strip which houses one million Palestinians, as opposed to the 40 per cent where 4,000 Israelis dwell in luxurious settlements behind high fences cornered by guard towers. A banner at the entrance of Rafah proclaims, "Welcome President Clinton to Palestine, the Land of Love and Peace" .