British Novelist Writes About Apartheid Wall: So Much More Brutal Than I Thought It Could Be

Local Editor

William Sutcliffe, a British novelist known for his novel, Are You Experienced?, wrote a fiction novel on the racial Apartheid Wall, separating the West Bank from the "Israeli" settlements.
 The Wall, the novel Sutcliffe wrote, is set in a city split in two by a vast wall. On one side live the privileged, the occupiers and the hero Joshua. On the other live the desperate, the occupied, and when Joshua, hunting for his lost football, discovers a tunnel that leads under the wall, he sets in action a series of dreadful consequences. It soon becomes clear that this is the West Bank, which Joshua, 13, is Jewish, and that Leila, the girl who saves his life on the other side of the wall, is Palestinian, the Guardian reported.
"If you criticize "Israel" you are going to be attacked. I expect one of the angles of attack to be: who is this guy?" he stated, who describes himself as a Jewish atheist.

Sutcliffe had been to "Israel" before, but after hearing about PalFest, Palestine's annual travelling festival of literature, he decided to go and conduct an in-depth research of the two regions for his novel.

"Everything I thought I knew about "Israel" was shattered. Seeing a military occupation up close, seeing a small number of people with guns telling a large number without guns what to do... it was so much more brutal than I thought it could be," the British novelist mentioned after attending PalFest.

Sutcliffe then realized he needed to see how the Jewish settlers were living. He found a tourist company that arranged for him to stay with three different Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the novel's setting became "almost entirely literal", the Guardian mentioned.

"What's happening in this book is a kid living in a complete fantasy, who discovers a portal to reality. I'm taking the cliché and turning it upside down," he said. "I've been with the settlers... and I think they are living in a world of complete fantasy."
"It is illegal for an "Israeli" to visit downtown Ramallah or Bethlehem, and Palestinian writers are not going to visit the settlements, so the answer to the question "who am I to write it?" is that no "Israeli" or Palestinian could write it. Because only a foreigner can see both sides of the wall," William mentioned.

Source: The Guardian, edited by moqawama.org