The following book review is featured in the August 2003 edition of the Palestinian English language monthly This Week in Palestine.
The Wall in Palestine: Facts, Testimonies, Analysis and Call to Action
Edited by The Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON)
Jerusalem, 2003, 199 pages.
To date, some 300,000 people are currently affected by the land confiscation, tree uprooting and inaccessibility to lands and water due to the
caging off of their communities, throughout the northern West Bank, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with concrete walls and electric fences. This
book is critical in surfacing what the Wall is, its shocking impacts, and its re-shaping of the entire West Bank.
The pictures themselves, some one hundred of them, can tell the whole story. The book is an impressionable cross between a detailed
report, a photo journal, activist resource guide, and an anthology. Contributors to the publication include the PENGON member organizations
and the Wall Campaign Emergency Centers. Nine guest articles covering a range of topics and angles give further depth to this massive
construct, while highlighting the point that is consistent throughout the report and testimonies: in whatever which way, the Wall is meant to
control, destroy, and oppress.
The book provides an overview of the Wall, while focusing on the Wall’s “first phase” which is nearing completion in the northern West
Bank districts of Qalqiliya, Tulkarem, and Jenin and which represents only 1/6 of the projected completed Wall. The book dedicates a
section to farmers and individuals from the affected communities who tell their stories, highlighting the countless violations. A
comprehensive section on the Wall in international humanitarian and human rights law provides an important gateway into the illegality of this
offensive.
Amidst the current focus around the Road Map, the existence and continued building of the Wall (with over 200 bulldozers working on a
daily basis) stresses the actual road that is being forcibly paved for Palestinians. Canton, enclave, ghetto, or Bantustan; are all terms used by
PENGON to describe the current reality and future prospects. It is frightfully clear after reading this book and the facts and numbers it
contains, and looking at the projected maps, that the future continues to look grim.
The book is perhaps the best resource currently available on the Wall. But more so, the layout and the section about the Apartheid Wall
Campaign, an NGO and grassroots coordinated effort lead by PENGON, demands us to acknowledge that the book be used as a tool in
advocacy. Wall or fence, the results are the same. If the Wall is completed it will cross and besiege every West Bank district.
For a copy of the book, contact PENGON.
