Customer Reviews

Behind the Wall: Life, Love, and Struggle in Palestine

5 star:		(3)
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So much of what we see in the U.S. press is what appears on the 24-hour news loop, not what happens behind the scenes when the cameras are turned off. However, there is a reality out there, in the shadows, behind the Israeli built wall to exclude. Here, Rich Wiles brings home that reality, and if not in living color, then surely in unforgettably grotesque and heart-wrenching emotional pictures.

The pain that we Americans do not see; and pretend not to know is being inflicted on the Palestinians every hour of every day is brought out into the open here. Our collective denial can finally end with this book: Through Rich Wiles journalistic eyes we finally get to see a stark reality that has been shielded from our delicate and sensitive pro-Israeli eyes. And it is not a pretty sight.

I am not a sentimental person, nor especially pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israeli), yet even for me, this is an amazingly powerful read. It is about suffering, about pathos, about the life of the dispossessed, about oppression and repression, hostility and unimaginable and unaccounted for hatred. It is a story of arbitrariness of military rule, of decapitating air strikes, targeting of primary infrastructures, incursions into farmland, villages, of shortages of every imaginable basic necessity, including water. It is about a superior adversary with a deep seated and conscious plan to demean and to dehumanize, and one that systematically succeeds at it while the rest of the world watches, stunned and cajoled into silence.

Indeed, is it not reasonable to ask: where did we last see this picture? I believe it was when Arthur Koestler, among many others, was trying to raise to the attention of the world what was going on behind the screen in Nazi Germany in the concentration camps. No one was listening to the Koestler then, and again apparently no one is listening to Rich Wiles or the Palestinians now.

But on the other side of the coin, this book is also about the incredible will of the human spirit to endure tragedy and to bounce back: about how people will somehow find the strength to persevere against a superior but uncommonly mean-spirited and evil enemy. It is about steadfastness and the deeper elements of internal strength, and above all, about hope for the next generations. It is a story seen mainly through the eyes of Palestinian children: second and third generations growing up in refugee camps, camps that paradoxically, again can be compared properly only to Hitler's concentration camps - where, by design of the enemy, there are no amenities to protect even the most basic human dignities , even of women and children.

And in the end, we again "over" understand why a people cannot be bombed or terrorized into submission, whether it be England in 1942, Vietnam in 1972, Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. on September 11, 2001, or Palestine today. The bombs, the terror and the mayhem only serve to reinforce the will of the people to resist. It reinforces the idea of "never again." [And again, where did we last hear that cry? I believe it was at the very establishment of the state of Israel?]

Clearly, the book reinforces many of the messages from the movie Munich, in which the Israeli hit team finally realizes at the very end the utter futility and moral bankruptcy of the strategy of "an eye-for-an-eye." Here it is not clear what the Israeli strategy is intended to accomplish, but whatever it is, it will forever tarnish the memory of the victim of the European Holocaust. Five stars

Excellent read for those of us who do not know much about the conflict, or wish we knew more. Touching and profound.

Rich Wiles creates face to face meetings with Palestinians who are refugees in their own country but trapped in the Israeli illegal occupation that illegally denies them their right under international law to return to their beloved villages.

We learn intimately of the anguish of unemployed fathers desperate to care for families that survive, just, on the poverty line. We glimpse the inner trauma of prisoners ( even children)tortured by Israeli military and share their familiy's rapture on their release; we cry along with the generational pain of nostagia for stolen farms with once cared-for orchards, olive trees, rocks and wild herbs. We feel the fear when enclosed by Israeli snipers and belligerant soldiers and colonial settlers; we are strung out by concern for relatives taken to hospitals that we are not permitted to visit; we crouch in terror as soldiers invade homes in the night or scream as a home is demolished around us.

Simply put- we enter the 'normal' life of Palestinian refugee families.

We leave Wiles' book amazed by the courage of Palestinians and their samoud (steadfastness) for the love of their land and for their rights under international law.