The young writer Nir Baram has done what hardly any other Israeli has dared to: he spent a year behind the barrier in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, visiting places farther from fellow Israelis than the moon, and speaking with Palestinians who know Israelis almost only as uniformed soldiers.
He also criticizes the Israeli left, which still dreams of a two-state solution. Baram shows clearly that the idea is long obsolete: that the West Bank is a patchwork, strewn with settlements now inhabited by more than 550,000 Jewish settlers. Together with Palestinians and Israelis, Baram has founded a peace initiative advocating coexistence of both peoples in one homeland.