Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine

by Bidisha

Their voices come from Bethlehem and Hebron. You can hear them from Jerusalem to Nazareth, and witness their protests in Gaza and Ramallah. From the refugee camps in the West Bank, you can hear the voices of the Palestinian people call out to demand self-determination and a better quality of life. But outside of Israel and the occupied territories, these individual voices are rarely heard—until now. In Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path through Palestine, internationally renowned feminist critic and writer Bidisha collects the testimonies of an occupied people—ordinary citizens, activists, children—alongside those of international aid workers and foreign visitors for a revelatory look at a population on the margins. Called “beautifully belligerent, [and] fiercely intelligent” by The Independent and a “dazzlingly creative writer” by the London Times, Bidisha amplifies the voices of the Palestinian people in this book and lends to them her own considerable strength.

Genres: Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2012

Reviews

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nikita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually don't write reviews because I don't think that my thoughts about a book should or should not have any bearings on anyone to pick up a book.
Anyway, writing this because Barkha from That Book store asked me to sime people don't talk enough about Palestine.

It's interesting that the book was published in 2012 because the despair, occupation, military, stress, bombings that we see today didn't develop in a day. It took dedicated efforts of decades to come to this macabre annihilation. Children, as they are seen suffering today in 2023, were also suffering back in 2012. They wanted not to see blood, live in silence, free from checkpoints, both then and now.
Often when an outsider writes about an oppressed community, it is either with pity or with a poor understanding of the issue, culture and community. However, I like how the author doesn't forget that she is an outsider. The best she can be is an ally, and I think as an ally, the book was pretty good. She has written like a reporter should - observations, facts, truth, free from bias and prejudice, but not unemotional.
I like how she has also addressed the issue of Palestinian women. The book didn't impose western ideas of what a 'liberal woman' is, but she did notice the large absence of Palestinian women in public spaces and the oppression they face at the hands of military, settlers, oppressors, and their own men.

Overall, good only. Easy to read and short. Didn't turn it into a 300 page book for the sake of it.

[Rebecca]

The wall is what most outsiders know of Palestine but the immensity and the oppressiveness of the thing itself cannot be imagined. To look at it for a moment makes the bones ache with claustrophobia; to live within its slabs must feel like being buried alive.

This travelogue of broadcaster and journalist Bidisha’s firsthand experience journeying through Palestine is sufficient in its frank observations and priority of report—sequence of event and preliminary exposition, with editorial self-control—meanwhile achieving the sensitive balancing act of not neglecting the humanizing quality of affect in one’s personal account, without relinquishing itself to diatribe.

The most penetrating commentary comes with Bidisha’s brief excursion into the strategy of occupation: how subjugation of a people is achieved—“[by] nihilism, chaos and anarchy in the name of control”. She catalogues: sabotaging certainty, arbitrary and ever-changing control of movement, randomized licensure to nullify the reliability of anecdotal experience; the physical rendering of a scenery so hideous that sight itself is painful—that one’s home, even when not subject to violation or inspection apropos of nothing except the mercurial whims of the oppressor, is a place too foreign to rest.

Their consolation is that if they die, the euphemism ‘martyr’ will conceal the ignominy.

[emma rowan]

looked up the author after reading and found a blog post she wrote recently saying that this book was being reissued (a little over ten years after its original publication) and it’s interesting how she talks about it, like as purely observations of her trip to the West Bank for Palfest as someone who has no Palestinian or Arab heritage—i guess it is observations but it feels much more impassioned than she makes it out to be at times (understandably so); idk it’s really devastating

[Natalie Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good. Very grim.

[Caitlin O'Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

i quite enjoyed the first 82% of the book but then she went on a tangent of weird, sweeping statements about ‘arab men’ which i thought were quite funky

[Maria Longley · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).