We turn the corner of the road when the first round whips in. It kicks up dust one yard in front of Bassam Almohor. He stops walking.

“We’re being shot at,” my guide says. His voice is aggrieved. “That was a bullet.”

It was, to be precise, a rubber bullet. Or, more exactly still: a rubber-coated bullet, a slug of steel dipped in hard plastic. The term “rubber bullet” connotes non-lethality, harmlessness, a comical form of deterrence—a bouncing ball, a children’s toy, a pea-shooter. Yet anyone who has been struck by these projectiles knows differently. Rubber-coated, metal-cored bullets can flatten people with the force of a swung baseball bat. They can kill at close range. The source of this particular rubber bullet: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF.

This comes as a shock. Why? Because it is Wednesday.

We have strolled, Bassam and I, out of a small Palestinian village called Nabi Salih.

Nabi Salih: a clutch of stucco houses clinging to a sun-hammered hill in the West Bank. Clashes between local Palestinians and the Israeli army are common here. In fact, they are predictable. Every Friday, like clockwork, a ritual begins. After midday prayers, scores of civilians—men and women, old and young—march, chanting, out of the village mosque, usually toward a nearby spring. This spring, a watering hole for cattle, has been encroached on illegally by a nearby Israeli settlement. (Such settlements are themselves deemed illegal by most governments of the world, because they occupy the territory of a proposed homeland for Palestinians.) The Israeli army is waiting. Platoons of soldiers block the crowd’s progress. A provocation occurs. A slur. A shove. And the dance of violence starts. From the Palestinian side: a hail of rocks flung by boys and young men armed with slingshots. From the Israelis: rubber bullets, teargas canisters, stun grenades and, sometimes, a high-pressure stream of “skunk water,” a stinking chemical brew sprayed from a police truck.

I imagine seeing this battle from the air, a strange diorama, with men, women, and children running about on roads and in open fields, amid white blooms of teargas, to the sound of gunfire: These figures sometimes topple over wounded or, on rarer occasions, fall dead. (Since 2009, two villagers have been killed in the protests.) The green-clad soldiers maneuver in lines, in clusters. Occasionally, one of them may drop out, too, injured. Such weekly violence is a minor set piece in an older, much larger, more layered standoff in the West Bank. In toxic summary:

The commandeering of the village spring, an ancient trickle called Ein al-Qaws, is to many Palestinians just another outrage in a military occupation that began 47 years ago, following the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The people of Nabi Salih want their waterhole back, but they also wish to be free of checkpoints, of walls, of segregation, of humiliation. The Israelis, meanwhile, demand to be safe from Palestinian terrorism. (A radicalized young woman from Nabi Salih, for example, assisted in a 2001 suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed 15 people.) Palestinians curse the armed Israeli settlers proliferating in their midst—in a future Palestine. Ultra-religious and nationalist settlers claim the West Bank for themselves, either by right of conquest, or as Samaria and Judea, part of the 3,000-year-old homeland for Jews. Such rival narratives of primacy and grievance have been refined, purified, distilled, faceted, polished, and codified through years of conflict. They are petrified.

Which is why Bassam and I are caught off guard. The shooting at Nabi Salih happens on Fridays. (It is Wednesday!) Something has upset the schedule.

We blunder, chatting, around a bend and into the free-fire zone. We don’t hear the pop-pop-pop of the rifles until it is too late. Israeli soldiers, mistaking us for village protesters, begin firing our way. We retreat. We scramble behind a road embankment. We see boys slinging stones. We circle around the battle in a low crouch.

“I feel bad,” Bassam says, as teargas drifts across the grassy pastures. “Just walking away like this.”

But I do not feel bad. I have walked away from dozens of conflicts before. Few were mine. Most were obscure bush wars in Africa, the type of bloodlettings that nobody anywhere else much cared about. Once, in Congo, where between one and five million people have perished, I could not pitch a story about a battle that killed one thousand civilians because nine people—Palestinians and Israelis—had died in the West Bank. (The dead Congolese got their due only later, in a special project.) The world’s gaze burns on Israel, on the West Bank, on Gaza. Yet this is no solution. There must be some virtuous fulcrum point—an ideal balancing line between outside concern and utter neglect—at which mass violence can more easily, naturally subside: exhaust itself. Few outsiders witness Somalia’s agonies. In Nabi Salih, perhaps too many do. (Palestinians videotape their clashes. So do Israeli settlers.) These disparate wars grind on.

In either case, little of war’s madness can ever be accurately communicated.

“A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war,” wrote the Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski. “They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war. Everyone has to live out his own war to the end.”

Bassam and I walk on.

The valleys of the West Bank are golden in the low afternoon sun. We stop and brew a pot of tea in a grove of silver-leaved olive trees. Palestine, the West bank, Samaria, Judea—the tiny enclave that Palestinians and Israeli settlers die for—is one of the most beautiful inhabited landscapes in the world: Its broad valleys, serried hills, orange groves, and bone-smooth deserts are a Middle Eastern California. The only difference, I tell Bassam, are the faint gunshots that can often be heard, mostly from IDF firing ranges, echoing in the distance.

“Distant gunfire?” Bassam says looking up from his cup. He smiles sadly, nodding. “I never noticed that.”