Travelling to Palestine?

As an American citizen, what do I need to do in order to travel to Palestine? Are there airports in Palestine? Do I need to get a passport to Israel instead? Are there only airports in Israel? What can I expect when I reach Palestine? Does anyone speak English? How much of the Arabic language do I need to know? Hotels???

There is no state called Palestine at the moment. I think you mean the West Bank and Gaza which are under Israeli occupation now and which will hopefully become a Palestinian state in the future, but they are not officially called Palestine now.

You can go there via Israel. I visited Israel in the last days of December 2007 and went to Bethlehem on Christmas, which is part of Palestinian Authority (PA) Territory. I'm a German citizen but I think for American citizens the conditions are the same. You can enter Israel without applying for visa before, but they will ask you at the airport where you're going to stay and what you want to do. Most Arabic countries don't let you enter with an Israeli stamp in your passport, but you can ask them at the airport to give you the stamp on a seperate piece of paper, not in the passport itself, if you want to travel to an Arabic country later.
When you go from Israel to PA territory, there is a wall and a big checkpoint with security controls like on an airport, but with a foreign passport you can cross it. I'm not sure how safe it is. When I was there, there were many Western pilgrims there, so the situation was a bit different. I heard that all the hotels in Bethlehem were empty because foreigners were afraid to spend the night there. However, the people there seemed overall nice and normal and it seemed to me that everyone knew English. I think most of the people are okay, but I'd still be afraid of extremists if I went there alone and not knowing much about the place.

You wrote in your other post that your boyfriend comes from there and has family there, I think he will know better about the situation than I do.