I do not remember where exactly I was when I first saw the Wall in the West Bank, but I do remember my feeling of shame and fright when I saw it. For me, as a child of survivors, the Holocaust imagery was inescapable; the watchtowers with their small, nearly opaque windows echoed most painfully of all. I stood bewildered and silent, knowing with certainty what my mother and father would say if they could see it and grateful they never would.

Proponents have argued that the Wall was built to stop terrorist attacks against Israel and point to the cessation of such attacks in recent years as proof. Some among them further point out that the Wall is not always (or really) a wall but also (mostly) a "fence," implying perhaps a more benign structure that Palestinians might possibly cross under the right circumstances, alleviating any grievance caused.

These arguments, among others, are carefully and meticulously examined and challenged by Rene Backmann in his excellent and authoritative study on the Wall. First published in 2008 and translated into English in this 2010 edition, A Wall in Palestine is a compelling and substantive examination of the West Bank barrier, the historical context from which it emerged and the actors involved. Backmann is not an academic, but his book is, in effect, a work of scholarship that deserves a notable place in the literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A particular strength is the fluidity with which the book weaves together hard data and human narrative, moving back and forth between the present and the past, and between those people most deeply involved with and affected by the Wall: Israeli officials and planners, Israeli settlers, Palestinian officials and civil-society actors, Israeli human-rights activists, and Israeli and Palestinian individuals — some of them friends and neighbors — whose lives were forever changed by the Wall's presence.

Backmann's analysis is rich in data and some are truly striking, revealing the devastating nature of the barrier. He writes, for example,

According to the Israeli defense minister, every mile costs $3.25 million. Every mile displaces 85,000 cubic yards of earth and rocks, requiring 6,000 cubic yards of backfill, and is paved with 5,000 square yards of asphalt; over each mile there is an average of about 300 concrete poles holding up 40 detection lights, 2,500 yards of fencing, and 8 miles of barbed wire. . . . [S]ince September 2004 the separation zone has also had, by order of the army, a buffer zone between 500 and 2,500 feet wide on the Palestinian side of the barrier. . . . Whenever the barrier follows the Green Line, the buffer zone is on the Palestinian side of the barrier. When it snakes into the West Bank, onto Palestinian territory, there are two buffer zones: one on each side of the barrier. [Because of this] the buffer zone freezes more than 12,300 acres of land in the largely Palestinian towns of Tulkarem and Qalqiliya and in the forty or so villages that line the barrier's path (pp. 65-66).

The deleterious impact of the barrier (400+ miles), which is more than double the length of the Green Line (195 miles), is simply, but poignantly, described in Backmann's many interviews with Palestinians and Israeli human-rights activists. The interview with Maarouf Zahran, the mayor of Qalqiliya, is typical of the human impact imposed:

Before the wall I was convinced that peace was still possible, that it was only a question of time. Up until the Second Intifada, we had always lived on good terms with the Israelis. Nearly six thousand of our residents worked in Israel. . . . I even had sealed administrative agreements with the municipality of Kfar Saba for water treatment. But the blockades and the ban on traveling in the West Bank hit us hard. Many who worked in Israel lost their jobs. The Israelis are afraid to come to our city. We no longer have the right to leave. Commercial exchanges have come to a halt. . . . More than eight thousand families receive food or financial assistance. Now the wall is the final blow: we have lost five hundred acres, including dozens of greenhouses and around thirty olive trees, which were confiscated or cleared away by bulldozers to make way for the cement. Almost 45 percent of our arable land and nineteen of our thirty-nine wells are now on the other side. More than six hundred stores have closed and eighteen Israeli-Palestinian companies [out of 20] have been liquidated. Qalqilia is left with only one point of entry and exit. Today, people over the age of thirty-five are permitted to enter and leave the city only by foot (pp. 103-104).

For Assad Atalla, a farmer, the Wall has taken most of his family's land, burying it under cement or isolating it on the other side of the Wall, except for a small plot wedged in between the road and the Wall. But for him, "the worst part is that they uprooted eight thousand olive trees. Right before our eyes, they loaded them onto their trucks, and when we asked the soldiers what they were going to do with them, they said that they couldn't tell us, for security reasons" (p. 103).

While the economic damage incurred has been acute both individually and collectively and carefully documented by the author and others, Backmann's interviews with Palestinians from many sectors of society reveal something that I have consistently encountered myself in nearly three decades of work in Gaza and the West Bank: a continued sense of shock and disbelief at our blindness to the humanity and equality of Palestinians. Referring to the Wall, Zahran implored, "How could they have come up with this? How could they sever all ties woven over the years between our two communities? And how could the international community allow one country to unilaterally draw its borders on its neighbor's territory?" (p. 103)

Indeed, Zahran's questions point to a critical theme that runs through Backmann's analysis: the tragedy of the Wall lies not only in the devastation of Palestinian communities and their way of life, but also in the destruction of any context that would allow for and encourage a normal and peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians — a co-existence that once was a reality for some, but which the Wall has destroyed. That the Israeli authorities aim to consolidate and institutionalize this reality is another theme that Backmann carefully addresses by examining the role of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the building of the Wall. He shows how the barrier and the settlements are opposite sides of the same coin, demonstrating that the principal (but not the only) aim of the Wall's planners was to (de facto) annex territory into Israel that would not only incorporate and ensure the security of major settlement blocs but also allow for their continued expansion.

There is another important argument that naturally emerges from Backmann's impressive work, although he himself does not make it: as long as the Palestinian struggle remains focused on land, it cannot be won (particularly given the gross asymmetries in power between Israelis and Palestinians and the latter's virtual abandonment by the United States and other members of the international community). While land will always remain central, it should no longer form the basis of the popular struggle. If the Palestinian struggle has any chance of being effectively waged, let alone won, it must be on the basis of rights — human, political, economic, social and civil — that others, Israelis and Americans among them, possess. Why should Palestinians be dispossessed or barred from familial lands they have owned and lived from for generations? Why are they prohibited from demanding the return of lands illegally expropriated? Why are they denied the right to plant a tree, dig a well, build a house, market their goods or develop their economy? Why must their children be forced to walk through sewer pipes to get to school or denied access to critically needed medical care? Why are they prohibited from traveling freely within their own home and beyond it? In light of the remarkable demands for equity and human rights currently erupting in the region, Palestinians must now ask these questions and, as Backmann would undoubtedly argue, demand real answers. Absent this, the walls will remain for some time to come.