As we tear down Highway 1 to Ben-Gurion International, the plastic cup that Jalal hands me is both flimsy and scorching. Somehow, his brother is brewing coffee in the backseat for everyone in the car. I struggle not to spill as the cup wilts in my hand. Barbed wire flies by my window as we drive alongside Israel’s ‘Security Fence’ or ‘Apartheid Wall’ depending on your politics. Taking advantage of the scenery, I ignite a brief fraternal argument over the appropriate name for the barrier. A few hours ago I didn’t know either of these men, but after spending the past six weeks at a news agency in the West Bank I’ve learned that in this place one can make fast friends so long as coffee or tea is provided.

One of the first people I shared a cup with was a protester in Bethlehem. I arrived in Palestine just as it joined the ‘Arab Spring’—the wave of youth-driven, democratic uprisings that began in Tunisia and is now blistering Syria. It is now referred to as the March 15 movement, to commemorate the first day of demonstrations. Rather than calling for the abdication of a dictator as in Egypt or Libya, the youth of Palestine demanded reconciliation between the secular Fatah party, which controls the West Bank and the recognized government, and the rogue Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

The young protester who treated me to a mug of Turkish syrup voiced his desperation in between sips: “This split between Hamas and Fatah has held back our struggle for a Palestinian state more than any Israeli policy could hope to do.” Having arrived at the movement’s beginning, I suppose it was only fitting that I left as its demands were finally reached. A few hours after I touched down at Heathrow, the two parties signed a unity deal in Cairo. Netanyahu is fuming, and my friends in Manara Square are celebrating.

Shopping for ceramics with a friend in Hebron, we ended up having tea with the shop’s owner, a man named Munir. Hebron is a city in the southern West Bank that provides the most extreme example of the volatile Israeli-Arab dynamic. The city has been partitioned into H1, governed by the Palestinian Authority, and H2, inhabited by a small group of settlers and fully occupied by Israeli forces.

Shuffling around the streets of H2 I’m sure that my friend and I underwent the same bewilderment as any visitors to Hebron. It is known as the ‘sterile zone’, a euphemism that fails, since it fully conveys the numbness of H2. The barricaded shops, the abandoned schools, and the glares of the settlers—some all too happy to finger the triggers on their chunky firearms—briefly placed us somewhere other than planet Earth. Eight hundred illegal residents have turned this section of town—population 30,000—into an urban husk.

In the middle of our tea break, a fight breaks out in front of Munir’s shop, between some young settlers and a Palestinian boy. Within seconds an IDF jeep rattles into view and the tussle is over. “That one, with the pink hat,” croaked Munir as he pointed, “he is around here often. He causes trouble.” With that he lowered his hand and went back to stirring his tea in silence.
Halfway through my stay, actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered outside of his home in Jenin. I had hoped to have a coffee with Juliano before I left. Having seen his film Arna’s Children a few days after arriving in Palestine, I made a plan to visit the destitute refugee camp in Jenin where he ran a theatre and drama school for Palestinian kids. Instead I ended up writing up a report of his assassination. On the evening of April 4 a masked gunman stepped in front of Juliano’s car, a few feet away from his home, and opened fire. While the wave of reports on his murder subsequently referred to him as ‘Arab-Israeli’ – his mother was Jewish and his father Palestinian – Juliano once stressed that he was “one hundred percent Israeli, one hundred percent Arab.” Far be it from me to ignore his specification.

Juliano was much loved in Jenin, where he erected a professional-grade theatre with all the trimmings for youths that knew only the poverty, violence and boredom of the refugee camp. But at the same time, among the godly and the literal-minded he was deeply hated for his productions at the Freedom Theatre, many of which empowered Palestinians children to reject religious and societal subjugation as well as Israeli occupation. In a recent interview, he candidly and humorously predicted his own assassination. He announced that he would die from a bullet fired by someone “very angry that we are here in Jenin,” then with a theatrical scowl and a forbidding voice, “to corrupt the youth of the Islam!” Though the investigation of his murder is not yet closed, that is most likely exactly what happened.

Not content with the demise of only one innocent activist, a little more than a week later a Salafist group in Gaza kidnapped and hanged Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni in an abandoned house in Gaza City. The group in question was considerably to the right of Hamas and among other things demanded that the government release its co-religionists from prison. By the time the police in Gaza reached Vittorio’s body, however, it had been lifeless.
A few days after Arrigoni’s death I attended a vigil at Bethlehem’s unity tent. There were calls for perseverance and there were calls for blood. There were tears for both Vittorio and for Juliano, from those that knew them and those who did not. A colleague of mine delivered a eulogy in short bursts, as another speaker translated her words across the circle of mourners. I scribbled them on the back of a magazine for a story on the event due later that night.

Soon a doctor in the crowd, a native of Palestine who spoke to us all in English, ended his own tribute to Vittorio with a crackling voice as he began to talk about the recent murder of his friend Juliano. He suddenly spoke very slowly, and the candle in his hands started to quiver: “We will continue to do our best, to end all the violence here…to win ourselves a normal life,” until his features withered and he began to sob, “so we can finally stop things like this, from happening anymore.” With the doctor in tears, most everyone around me began to weep. He had touched the nerve not only of Vittorio’s death, or Juliano’s, but the entire tragedy of Palestine in all of its confusion and violence.

At that moment I nudged my friend and fellow intern Carlos, who raised his eyebrows and shook his head, before nodding in the direction of a coffee stand nearby. I nodded in turn and we started toward the cart. We had a lot to discuss.

Dr. Christian Jessen, made famous by Supersize vs Superskinny and the not-for-the-squeamish Embarrassing Bodies seems absolutely unshockable. If you’ve got three testes, a purple boob or a claw for a hand, he’ll have seen it before. What’s more, he’ll be surprised you haven’t volunteered to show it to the nation on prime time channel four. But does he really never squirm at the sight of such shocking maladies?  “I suppose what shocks me is going to be different to what shocks you, or what shocks the public, you’re going to be shocked by yucky, yucky things while I’m going to be shocked by the implications behind them, rather than the actual thing itself. I’ve probably seen it before so that’s not going to have much effect anymore.”

“While I was working on Embarrassing Bodies, a little girl called Charlotte was brought to see us with a case of bad verrucas, she had been to see her GP who seemed to ignore it, and firstly, it was the most shocking case of verrucas I’ve ever seen, and secondly, I was shocked by the whole management behind her. She ended up having a bone marrow transplant.” He seems just as unsettled by the patient’s treatment as he is by her condition. “It was how bad this was and the fact that nobody had thought to ask, ‘maybe there’s an immune problem going on, and perhaps we ought to check it’. The thing that shocked me is, how the hell did that happen?”

‘It was the most shocking case of verrucas I had ever seen. She ended up having a bone marrow transplant’

Talking to a man who seems unfazed by everybody else’s body problems, I couldn’t help but ask, had Jessen has any embarrassing bodily malfunctions of his own? I half expected, or guiltily hoped for, a brazen confession of a mortifying, repugnant condition. Instead, “I got appendicitis, which I decided to ignore. So that was fairly embarrassing, but that was for other reasons because I knew exactly what it was, I just didn’t want to have appendicitis at that particular time”. While he jokes about trying to hide from his own diagnosis, he admits to what troubles him most. “I suppose my biggest issue is my body dysmorphia; my issues with weight. I obsess with the gym and my body weight and how I look. Not in a completely superficial way, but what I see in the mirror is not really how I look.” Now, I’ve seen his show where he swans around the beach of Marbella telling tourists to slather on the sun cream, and his body should not even be humanly achievable for a 44-year-old man. But he maintains, “I’ve had issues with that for a long time and I’m fully aware of it; I need to not weigh myself obsessively when I’ve been to the gym. Being on the telly obviously doesn’t help when people are commenting on how you look and your build and all the rest of it.”

So how did he wind up working on one of the most bizarrely compelling shows on the television? “It was like so many people in television, it’s a lucky break. You kind of say yes to things that sound like a bit of fun and it escalates from there.” Not only that, but he didn’t even plan to be a doctor. “I actually wanted to be a film director, but because I was academic my school sort of pushed me towards something more worthy, in their eyes. But to be honest at that age, you don’t have a clue do you?”

He went on to study medicine at UCL, about which he says, “I enjoyed parts, hated other parts and ended up as a doctor. But in fact, what I do, I love. I love what I do – it ticks all the boxes for me.” While so far it seems like he stumbled into the job he now loves, he is quick to admit this and laughs, “a lot of my life has been lucky accidents I suppose, I’ve found myself doing things that I never actually intended to do but then found that I quite enjoyed them.”

‘Here’s a picture of my boobs, doctor, I thought you might like them’

But what does Jessen think of us? Young people are always in the media for our obesity rates, eating disorders, STIs, teenage pregnancies, and binge drinking, for example. But refreshingly, Jessen doesn’t blame young people. “I think the majority of students know exactly what they’re doing. It’s partly to do with the age that students are at, it’s all  about taking risks and finding out who you are, so to me that’s fine to an extent, as long as you’ve evaluated those risks accurately. If you know that you’re going to have a wild summer and drink a bit too much, then, fine. I suppose taking sexual risks is a different matter because that’s not so simple. As long as you have evaluated things carefully in your head then obviously it’s your decision and I’m never ever going to tell anyone not to do something. I don’t believe in that. I think it’s a small minority of young people that generate bad press. Being a student is about having fun, if you drink an awful lot and have fun then actually I think that’s a good thing, because you get it out the way and then you move on. And you can cope with it when you’re young.”

I ask Dr. Jessen whether he had received any strange fan-mail, he laughs and says, “Oh God yes, lots, masses. Particularly being a doctor people think they can be a little bit more open with you than they are with other people. But it’s things like ‘here’s a picture of my boobs, doctor, I thought you might like them’. I get things like ‘here’s my knickers with discharge in, I thought you’d like to look at them’ but not just in a pervy way, in a really serious way, they’ll say ‘I really need to know is this normal? Should I be worried?’ and I just think, what? You sent me your knickers!”

Dr. Jessen is now busy preparing for his next show due to air on Channel 4 at the end of May. He says, “it’s going to be a completely live, interactive health show in HD. People will skype in for consultations and there’ll be specialists there. It’s sort of interactive medicine via your TV set, the first time it’s ever been done. It’s going to involve a lot of the web, and we’re linking up with the NHS Choices and the NHS website. It’s going to be high tech, the future of medicine, with diagnosis from the comfort of your own home I think. But it’s very scary indeed, we’re doing six one hour shows initially and I guess we’ll see how it goes.”

Dr. Jessen’s new show ‘Live From the Clinic’ will be airing 8pm on Channel 4 later in May.