Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine by Bidisha

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine Reviews

• 
  Arnoldo Garcia

  Beyond the Wall by Bidisha is a brief excursion into the daily life and struggles Palestinians face under apartheid Israeli rule and occupation. Bidisha presents a first-person account, mincing no words describing the Israeli military and settlers inhumane treatment and obliteration of Palestine. Bidisha brings you along to see the walls, feel the bombing of Palestinians persons, homes, traditions and lands, the normalization of racism, hate the sexism and militarism on the streets, the treatment of women, experience the virtual interpenetration of resistance and culture at the Palfest she is attending.
  
  This is a good book to gift to someone who should already be familiar with the situation in Palestine. While this may not a book for experts or organizers who have studied, organized protests, visited the Middle East, everyone should read it to understand how the occupation of Palestine and her resistance has implications for all of us.
  
  Closer to the U.S. home, the wall the U.S. is building and extending along the Mexican border are directly linked by the same policies of Israeli apartheid. Further, the same companies and strategists that built the Israeli walls have been consulted b the U.S. government for the Mexican border wall. The walls in Palestine and on the U.S.-Mexico border are meant to funnel people, communities and cultures to evaporation, disappearance and death. This is not inevitable but deliberate. Although the walls represent deliberate policies and strategies meant to harm and undermine people's mobility, right to place, and self-determination, survival cannot be deterred by walls, armies and occupation, the Palestinians and migrants and women on the U.S.-Mezico border are paying a deadly price. Survival is the hallmark of resilient cultures. The walls in Palestine will be torn down; it might take a decade or two and from behind them will emerge a new people more determined and having the potential of renewing human culture on a world scale.
  
  Well, Bidisha doesn't say all this in her short "Beyond the Wall." She writes so that we can see over the walls and whatnthey are covering up: settler colonialist violence against Palestinian, against women, violence against the land and dignity. Bidisha lets us oeer over the walls so that we can decide with a deeper certainty if we will be or not be part of this apartheid now or in the future. Our futures are bound up by the walls and the struggles to tear them down. Her book could have easily asked her readers: which side of the wall are you on? Well, which side are you on?
• 
  Karim Anani

  This book is a report of Bidisha's experiences at the Palestine Festival of Literature and the treatment subjected by the Israeli army to its attendees. It is empathetic and evocative.
  
  

  It is only now, about halfway into the trip, that I think about the strategy of occupation. How do you subjugate a people?
  
  By nihilism, chaos and anarchy in the name of control. You do it by sabotaging their certainty, by toying capriciously with their presumptions, by continually tilting the playing field, moving the goalposts, reversing decisions, twisting definitions, warping parameters. You control where people can and can’t go, then change the rules arbitrarily so that they cannot make plans or have any stable expectations. You give a permit to one person but deny one to another person who’s in exactly the same circumstances, so that people cannot deduce, conjecture or extrapolate based on an individual’s experience. You make them feel that their house is not their home and can be violated, occupied, demolished or taken at any time, so they cannot fully relax even in their own beds. You isolate them and put a wall where their view used to be. You instigate a faux ‘system’ of permits, which is deliberately obscure and can be changed at any time. You shout at them in a language that is not their own and which they do not understand. You monitor them. When they travel you put your hands all over their possessions. You arrest and question anyone for any reason at any time, or threaten to, so they are always in fear of it. You are armed. You intimidate their children. You change the appearance of their cities and ensure that the new, alien elements—the walls, roads, settlements, sides of walkways, gates, tanks, surveillance towers, concrete blocks—are much bigger than them or on higher ground so that they feel diminished and watched. You make everything ugly so that seeing is painful.
  
  Their consolation is that if they die, the euphemism ‘martyr’ will conceal the ignominy.

  
  
  Read it.
• 
  Natalie Claire

  Pretty good. Very grim.
• 
  Maria Longley

  Bidisha goes to Palestine to participate in a literature festival and through her writing we get a glimpse of life in Palestine. Unfortunately my copy of the book was missing pages 103-110, but apart from that the journey through Palestine is moving and informative (as well as beautiful and angry-making).