Mourid Barghouti was doing his final exams on the West Bank when the Six Day War of 1967 broke out. Twenty three at the time, he fled to Amman, and has lived in exile ever since. Just to see the number 67, he says, is enough to upset him. Displacement and its pains became the theme of his writings.

He married an Egyptian academic, went with her to the United States while she completed her doctorate, and then settled in Cairo. A poet in a culture which looks to poets for a lead, he was soon orbiting through sponsored conferences in one country after another. But, in his words, he "could not stand the sound and sight of President Anwar Sadat", and in 1977 objected so strongly to Sadat's peace-making visit to Jerusalem that the Egyptian security forces deported him. He then found a berth as representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in what was still Communist Budapest.

The Barghoutis are a huge and well-known clan, many thousands of whom live in a cluster of villages on the West Bank. They are PLO loyalists. One of them is Marwan Barghouti, potentially a successor to Yasser Arafat as leader of the PLO, and now on trial in Israel for masterminding PLO suicide bombings. Mourid Barghouti's close relations are spread through much of the Arab world and beyond. He mourns an elder brother, Mounif, found dead in Paris, and a younger brother, Luay, who was murdered by his wife in Hungary. Several friends have been killed in the obscure underworld of Palestinian politics.

I Saw Ramallah is Barghouti's account of a visit to his West Bank village in 1996. The hopefulness of the Oslo Accords was fading at the time, presaging Arafat's decision to resume the Intifada. The author several times insists that he is a person full of humour with a tendency to make jokes, and an unwillingness to shout slogans with the crowd. As if to bear him out, his style is elliptical, lapsing into a poeticism that often blurs clarity of meaning. The political intention is always plain, however. This is a black and white Us-versus-Them book.

On the one hand there are the kindly people who stayed put in the village, elderly and sometimes honorific aunts and uncles, about whom Barghouti reminisces with affection. The family home and the old school remain as they were in all their familiar detail, except for a great fig-tree which with sad symbolism one aunt cut down because its figs were too plentiful. In the village square he reads his poems to a warm gathering. Ramallah itself is the capital of the West Bank, and he and his friends admire the "hospitable and transparent" society they see around them there.

On the other hand there are the Israelis, nameless and faceless intruders with nails that claw and boots that kick, who build settlements and roads, and are cruel bureaucrats at best, armed thieves at worst. Abstractions not humans, they are The Enemy, Occupiers, the Occupation, these labels duly capitalised.

The book concludes with a verse which encapsulates everything Barghouti has to say. "What deprives the spirit of its colours?/ What is it other than the bullets of the invaders that have hit the body?"

Those who claim to be speaking for Palestinians regularly incite them in this insidious manner to hate Israel. It may seem naive to say so, but in my experience visiting the West Bank over many years, there are indeed some Palestinians who are good at hating to the point of murder and suicide, but not so many. Ordinary people understand that Israelis are present on the West Bank only because, over the decades, Arabs have used it as a base from which to make war. They also understand that Israelis are refugees from a hundred countries, including Arab countries, and in common with them they are victims of circumstance. There is no going back on history for anyone.

Daily experience further informs Palestinians that their leaders have introduced a violent and corrupt society swinging between tyranny and anarchy. When, three years ago, two young Israelis who had lost their way, were lynched in "hospitable and transparent" Ramallah, the killers raised their bloody hands in triumph for all to see, and some Palestinians rejoiced - but many were shocked. The population has more to fear from their own intellectuals who promote and justify such outrages than from the Israelis; and they know too that when bullets are fired and the bodies pile up these same intellectuals are sure to be subsidised and safe somewhere on the international circuit.

Cause-mongering on the part of intellectuals everywhere is a curse of the modern age. Palestinian intellectuals of course risk being murdered by their leaders if they step out of line. That is not Barghouti's excuse. Rejecting universal human values, he is willingly putting his talent at the service of militarised nationalism. Writing of that kind is what "deprives the spirit of its colours".

·  David Pryce-Jones's books include 'The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs'