Attempts to end the violence in Gaza have focused on the exchange of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. One of the many Palestinians is Nasser Abu Srour, who has been incarcerated since 1993 for his alleged involvement in the death of an Israeli intelligence officer during the first intifada. This is the fourth time the prospect of freedom has been raised, the past three ending in disappointment, even when his release was part of a 2013 peace process pledge brokered by the Obama administration.
His experience might be difficult to imagine but for the extraordinary memoir he has written, translated into lyrical prose by Luke Leafgren. “This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and did,” he begins. In a prison, walls are ever present, the single reliable feature of the world. The idea of the wall becomes a focal point for Abu Srour’s narrative, the stability to which he clings, the source of comfort and continuity.
Aspects of this life are familiar from his upbringing in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, his parents both having been displaced by the Nakba in 1948. The camp, walled in on four sides, unable to expand to fit its growing population, erupted in 1987 as part of the first intifada. The response of the occupying forces was mass repression and imprisonment, including Abu Srour’s.
“Farewell world,” he scratches on the wall after he is placed in solitary confinement at the beginning of his sentence. Following an extended hunger strike across the prison population, conditions improve, and he is moved to a shared cell. Although he now has people to cook, eat and discuss politics with, he experiences the shift as profoundly unsettling. He resists a rare chance to look at the spring landscape from a prison transport because he “was eagerly awaiting our destination and a return to my wall, with the clarity of all its empty space the profusion of questions and answers as yet unwritten, since they would all come from me”. Frequent changes in his location, from the Negev desert to coastal Ashkelon, are used as starting points for reflections on the history, geography, literature and religion of this small patch of land.
Abu Srour’s position apart from the society he grew up in gives his accounts of the wider conflict a curious objectivity. He is no longer an actor in the drama of Palestine, and so follows the developments at one remove. The Oslo accords initially bring hope: “The prison camps rose to their feet and remained standing,” he writes. But this soon ebbed away as details emerged. Yasser Arafat, the “Chief Storyteller”, signed documents and maps with the “Occupying State” that “he was unable to explain”. The attacks of September 11 and the subsequent rise of Islamism within the Palestinian struggle is condemned. In the Arab spring he initially perceives hope, and a sense of continuity with the Palestinian struggle.
What emerges from this memoir is the internal landscape of an individual in extremis. Abu Srour’s humanity shines through, even as he endures an incarceration with no end in sight. Yet enduring is not the right word for his story. He instead speaks in terms of “soaring”, the prisoners being “people of the sky”, whose souls and bodies have separated, leaving them free to attain new heights. It is this poetic sensibility that brings freshness to the telling of the well‑rehearsed story of this long-running conflict: we see it anew.
• The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour translated by Luke Leafgren is published by Penguin (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
