What life is like on the other side of the wall

The sun setting over the settlements on the other side is beautiful, turning the sky overlapping shades of warm colors. As the sky darkens, the buildings illuminate, pinpricks of light dotting the windows.

All is tranquil, and the soft glows blur together as I close my eyes and drift off to sleep.

The morning brings activity, with machines buzzing in the distance, songs emanating from the school adjacent to our farm. People meander about, and vehicles idle down the roads.

The buildings make up an unassuming urban area, until one makes a few distinctions. The most obvious is the concrete barrier lacerating the terrain, winding and dipping, but never receding from sight. Neat houses with slanted red-tiled roofs are on one side, minarets and older buildings on the other.

The wall divides, but the land on each side remains the same. Undulating hills make up the landscape, dotted with bushes and olive trees. The ground is rocky, but plants persist, sinking their roots into the ground to get at the reservoirs underneath.

People draw arbitrary lines to separate communities, but the landscape remains unchanged after thousands of years. It acknowledges these differences as ambiguous, signaling a path without divisions and appropriation, emphasizing coexistence and recognition of the legitimacy to exist for more than a select few.

However, this ideal is inequitable without acknowledging the histories and pain endured, and the current facts of the living situation on the ground, which the wall dividing Israel from the West Bank ensures.

On one side, people live in relative ease, enjoying high standards of living, adequate access to world-class health care, water, travel, a vibrant economy, a powerful military, and a sense of control and legitimacy.

This is not the case in places sometimes a stone’s throw away. Here, although there is a strong sense of pride and resilience among the people, their smiles belie the pain and hardship endured on a constant basis.

They have seen their communities invaded and appropriated, fields burned and olive trees uprooted to make room for the expanding settler community. Water is diverted from their farms and sent to lush gardens and vineyards they are banned from.

Hundreds of checkpoints are dotted across the land, restricting movement and leading to traffic, intimidation and fear anytime one wants to visit a friend or relative in a neighboring town. Most people I spoke with knew someone who had wound up dead or in jail at the hands of the Israeli army. Kids live in fear everyday of going to school, harassed by angry settlers.

Those in the occupied territories lack control in how they build and protect their communities. They are constantly at the mercy of an unsympathetic military force, one whose ultimate goal is the claiming of the West Bank, known to them as Judea and Samaria, as rightfully its own.

Although discriminatory, this system has persisted for decades. One question I had in coming to this region is how? How do people justify this disparity of resources, rights and power? The ones on the other side are neighbors, and don’t the Abrahamic religions tell us to treat them as if they were our own families?

This system has existed before the wall was erected, but a physical divide makes it easy to ignore the affronts on the other side. What you are shielded from allows you to go about living and loving as if the security and livelihood of you and your community are paramount.

As a wall is erected, life becomes simpler — keep the ones within safe, and the ones on the other side out. Without a wall, there would be drugs, terrorists, criminals pouring in and jeopardizing your country. This security barrier is essential to the safety of all you care about.

Or perhaps this is just what some want people to believe.

What if those who would cross over are simply trying to visit the people they are now separated from?

Maybe they are searching for better work in bustling urban centers like Jerusalem. Perhaps they are tired of being relegated to an ever-shrinking portion of land in a country that once belonged to them, and all they want to do is sink their toes into the warm waters of the Mediterranean. And yet, this unyielding wall of concrete serves as an ugly reminder of the current reality.

Is this the kind of world we wish to live in? Do we want to erect barriers to set at odds communities that may disagree or differ in a handful of ways, and yet agree on or are the same in thousands of others?

Or do we want to put an end to these fruitless divisions, and instead forge bridges of compassion and understanding that would lead to a more emphatic and deeply caring world?

It appears as if we are at a crossroads, one at which we have to decide what kind of world we want to sculpt for us, our families, and the successive generations that will look back at our decisions and shake their heads in wonder.

The author recently returned from a multi-month trip to the Middle East.