The first time I went to Gaza City last summer, the time I went with Gal to interview some PA officials, I was accompanied by a local translator and guide whom I'll call Khaled. He was in his late twenties and spoke fluent idiomatic American English - which he said he'd learned while working as a barman in a southern European resort city. Khaled wore his sunglasses perched on his close-cropped hair, and he liked to quote the lyrics of American rap singers like 50 Cent. He also looked a lot older than his age, and he knew it. It's because of the shitty life here, he explained.

According to his story, Khaled was born and raised in Gaza but went to Europe in his late teens to work and study. He returned to Gaza in 2000, he said, because he believed in the promise of the Oslo Accords - the promise of peace and normalcy, and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He missed his home and his family, and he didn't want to lose his right of residency in Gaza as a result of a prolonged absence.

And now, he said bitterly, I'm locked in. Then he said - longingly, but not angrily - I can't believe that, 10 minutes' drive from here, there are ordinary people sitting in cafes and living a normal life. And I'm stuck in this... (and here he just waved his hands expressively at the donkey carts and badly paved roads).

Khaled told me and Gal the following story about fear:

Shortly after he returned to live in Gaza, a few months before the second intifada broke out in October 2000, Khaled went to East Jerusalem to meet a friend who lived in the West Bank. He had never been to Jerusalem before, and he had never - he said - met a Jew who was dressed in civilian clothes.

After Khaled and his friend went out for drinks at a bar in East Jerusalem, they got in their car in order to return to Ramallah. But they took a wrong turn and found themselves in an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in West Jerusalem.

"I started to sweat real hard," said Khaled.

Gal and I didn't understand. "Why were you nervous?" we asked.

"Because," answered Khaled, "What if one of those religious Jews saw me and my friend, recognized us as Arabs, dragged us out of our car and beat us up or killed us?"

Gal and I were astonished. I think we even laughed.

That would never happen, we said. There are Arabs all over Jerusalem. Jews don't go around randomly beating up Arabs on the streets. Where did you get an idea like that?

A few days ago, I told this story to a friend of mine in response to a story she told me. This friend reads my blog, so I'll call her Hadas and hope she'll forgive me for not asking her permission before writing about our conversation.

A couple of months ago, Hadas went to the West Bank for the first time. She is 30 years old and was born and raised in Israel, but she had never visited the occupied territories. She has attended conferences devoted to co-existence with Palestinians abroad, she speaks several languages fluently and she has a graduate degree from Tel Aviv University. She is well-traveled, well-read and an all-round cool chick.

She drove in to meet a Palestinian journalist whom we both know as a truly wonderful guy - warm, open and incredibly generous. We both think the world of him, and for very good reasons. I'll call him Sayed.

Sayed and I spent the day in Gaza together in August. While we were walking through Jabalyeh, he asked if I was afraid, as an Israeli, to walk through a Palestinian refugee camp.

No, I told him, I'm not afraid. (and I wasn't).

Because you know that I would die before I'd let anything happen to you, right? said Sayed, very seriously.

Sayed met Hadas at one of the checkpoints near Ramallah, got into her car, and guided her into his city. Then, while they were driving around downtown Ramallah, which Hadas noted looked completely normal and quiet, he suddenly got out of the car and, without a word of explanation, walked over to a group of men who were standing on the street and began talking to them. Then he started to make calls from his mobile phone. Hadas was left waiting in the car, in a Palestinian-controlled city whose name is synonymous for many Israelis with the word lynch, and suddenly she began to shake with fear.

All sorts of thoughts went through her head - thoughts about politically-motivated kidnappings and killings. Images that we have seen on television and in the newspapers under banner headlines.

When Sayed returned to the car he saw that Hadas was terrified and immediately began to apologize profusely. He was a journalist, he'd seen a couple of contacts he wanted to speak with, and he'd just jumped out to talk to them. It hadn't occured to him that an Israeli who had never been to Ramallah would be afraid - any more than it occured to Gal and me that a Palestinian would be afraid to wander around a Jewish city or neighbourhood. And it certainly never occured to him that Hadas would be afraid of him - because they were friends.

Hadas and I were sitting in a cafe near Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv while she told me this story. We were drinking cappuccinos, a song by the Cocteau Twins was playing on the stereo, the barman wearing retro-frame glasses and a vintage shirt was frothing milk at the espresso machine, and we were surrounded by the trendy, leftist Tel Aviv bohemian types who populate the neighbourhood - writers, artists, actors and musicians.

I was so ashamed, said Hadas, as she smiled painfully. I can't believe I thought that Sayed would hurt me. Now I really understand how deeply the fear is lodged in our subconscious.

Once my bank account manager tried to call me on my mobile about my very scary overdraft, but she couldn't contact me because I was in Gaza and my mobile service provider doesn't extend its service across the Green Line. So she left a message, and the next day I went to the bank to sit down for a lecture about my dire financial situation and to try to sort things out. I explained that I hadn't been reachable the previous day because I'd been in Gaza.

"You were where?!" she shrieked. "Oh my God!" Turning to her colleagues sitting in the cubicles on either side, she yelled, "Orna! Rachel! Lisa went to Gaza!"

Orna and Rachel gathered around, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads and asking what in the world I was thinking about, wasn't I afraid to be in such a dangerous place, and did my mother know I went to Gaza?

Listen, I told them, it's really not the way it looks on the nightly news. I didn't see any masked Hamas men walking around, no-one threatened me. Actually, I had a really good time. I had a great lunch at a seafood restaurant near the beach in Jabalyeh.

Ah, they said, but you went as a journalist! And you spoke English! You didn't tell them you were Israeli, right?

Um, actually I told everyone I was Israeli, I said. I spoke Hebrew to a lot of the locals, because they didn't speak English but they'd worked in Israel so they spoke the language. And I didn't wear a sign that said "journalist."

Orna and Rachel looked at me doubtfully. My bank manager asked me again what my mother had to say about the matter of my life-threatening day trip across the Green Line. They all seemed to think I had a screw (or two) loose.

For a couple of minutes I hoped that my perceived bravery would win me a break, and that my motherly bank manager would agree to extend my overdraft for a week or two. But noooo.....

We Jews and Arabs, we live side-by-side and we watch each other and we interact (sometimes) but we don't really know each other. We think we do, but we don't. Ignorance leads to fear, and too often fear does lead to loathing.

Jews read the breathless reports in the Israeli mass circulation dailies about drive-by shootings of civilians in the West Bank and they draw their conclusions about "those Arabs." Not the Arabs who carried out the shootings, but those Arabs. And the Arabs read in their newspapers about the Jewish resident of the West Bank who shot and killed four of his Palestinian employees for no reason, and they draw their conclusions about "those Jews." Not the Jew who shot his employees, but those Jews.

When I interviewed an assistant minister of security in the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah a couple of months ago, he asked why the Israeli media never reported the incidents of cooperation between the Palestinian and Israeli police. He gave us a two-page list of such incidents - just for the month of June. Each incident had the name and contact number of the Israeli police officers involved, and we were invited to call them to confirm the veracity of the report.

No sane person would try to deny that there is a lot of political violence in this region. What we do deny is that we are far too influenced by how those incidents are reported. A three-page heart-rending story about the widows of the two men who were murdered in the lynch five years ago does sell newspapers. A story about Palestinian-Israeli cooperation does not. And I'd bet money that a nice story about a conference on Israeli-Palestinian co-existence wouldn't sell too many Palestinian newpapers, either.

So yes, we have a free and lively press in Israel. But let's not forget that a free press depends on its revenues to survive. And I really don't think that we're going to get anywhere around here until we learn to read between the lines, and to let the reporters and editors know that we'd like a more complete picture of what's going on. Otherwise we'll just remain convinced that the Other is a terrifying, murderous beast who simply cannot be trusted. Because he's one of those.