Memoir: On April 10th, 2002, Suad Amiry placed her mother-in-law's jewellery in the pocket of the trousers she intended to wear should she have to hurriedly open her Ramallah door to the Israeli army.
Next, she placed her Jordanian passport on the coffee table, judiciously removed The History of Arab Islamic Thought from the bedside table then sat down to write her diary, which turns out to be Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, a moving and witty book about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Yes, witty, for Suad Amiry is an extraordinary woman, capable of expressing the heartbreak of an oppressed people but able also to see the absurdity of the petty rules, curfews, checkpoints and restrictions imposed on the people of the West Bank. One example will suffice: her dog, taken to an Israeli vet, is issued with a Jerusalem passport denied to its owner. Stopped at a checkpoint, she hands the soldier the dog's passport. "I am the driver of this dog from Jerusalem," she announces and is waved through.
Carol Ann Duffy says that her mission in life, as a poet, is to annoy and subvert. Suad Amiry is expert in both fields. Born in Damascus to a Syrian mother and a Palestinian father - who, driven from the family home in Jaffa in 1948 was later appointed Jordan's ambassador to Cairo - Amiry, now in her 50s, has a doctorate in architecture, a subject which she teaches at Birzeit University. In 1993, she participated in the Palestinian- Israeli peace negotiations in Washington. Later, she won a prestigious architecture award for her conservation work on the old town of El Khalil (Hebron), which work was subsequently destroyed by Israeli tanks.
Her long-suffering husband, Salim, a sociologist, constantly begs her not to make trouble, to keep her head down, to keep her mouth shut. But in vain. She badmouths the Israeli soldiers, bangs saucepans in the middle of the night with the best of them and, in a magnificent outburst of unbridled frustration, storms into the office of the local Israeli administrator demanding the ID that had been promised her for seven years. Stunned by her voluble audacity, he gives it to her.
When a teenage soldier stops their car and insists she and Salim get out - in the rain - to unload the shopping from the boot, Amiry, incensed, uses the one weapon teenagers hate: she fixes him with an unblinking stare. "Stop looking at me," he shouts - and arrests Salim, takes him to the commanding officer and complains: "His wife kept looking at me." This in the middle in the Gulf War when the CO has other more pressing matters to deal with. Case dismissed. Incidentally, we learn that Israelis were equipped with gas masks during the Gulf War but not Palestinians.
Life under the occupation and during the intifada progresses intermittently. Checkpoints are opened and closed, curfews are lifted and imposed and, in the middle of it all, the Israeli army starts bombarding Arafat's HQ in Ramallah. Unfortunately, Salim's 92-year-old mother lives next to the compound - surely at that time the most dangerous place in the world to live.
Rescued by her indomitable daughter-in-law, the old woman dithers: should she bring her yellow or her purple dress? Should she water the plants? What about the lemons? Next day, ensconced in her new home, she sets to making marmalade. Amiry loves her but finds her presence a trial: lunch is at the wrong time. The plate is too big. Why are all those cars smashed flat? When Salim returns from Paris (somehow he is always absent at moments of crisis), Amiry is so thrilled to see him and to hand his mother over to him that she embarrasses him yet again by throwing her arms around him in public.
But in the midst of it all, she weeps. For young Jad, one of 29 people killed in Ramallah in one night; for the old man diligently trying to re-seed the olive, palm and fig trees torn down when the eight-metre-high Separation Wall is built.
"This is the third time I have done this," he says, and she turns away in tears.
Mary Russell is a writer who has travelled extensively in the Middle East
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, By Suad Amiry, Granta Books, 194pp. £12.99