It’s probably fair to say that every nation has its dirty little secrets, and the more powerful the country, the bigger and more plentiful those secrets tend to be. Successive governments in Australia, for example, have long hidden the truth about the near extermination of its indigenous people and the on-going humiliation of those descendants that have survived. Spain and Portugal have a similar secret in that they have never really come to public terms with their attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas during the creation of their respective South American empires. Britain has perhaps the biggest back-catalogue of dirty secrets of all, most dating back to their colonial empire; the dirtiest secret being the one closest to home; that of its six hundred year subjugation of the Irish peoples.

As for the United States, where does one begin? Oliver Stone, in his recently published, The Untold History of the United States has made a courageous start, but US dirty little secrets, even under the hopefully more enlightened Obama, just keep on piling up. And then there is Israel, a state little more than sixty five years old, who just cannot seem to come to the acceptance that their long dreamed of homeland was actually built on land occupied by another civilized people. From that fundamental denial, it is downhill all the way. William Sutcliffe, in his quite brilliant new novel, The Wall, makes a powerful and emotional inroad into Israel’s very own dirty national secret, a shameful secret unfortunately at the very heart of Israel’s existence.

Sutcliffe’s story is told through the eyes of a young Israeli teenager but it could easily be read and enjoyed by a teenage audience from any background in any country. It has all the ingredients of a rites-of-passage story complete with tragic loss of father, overbearing step-father, and all the usual trials and tribulations of youth. But this is anything but a child’s story, quite the contrary. Built into the DNA of The Wall is a searing critique of Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territories and the fascistic brutalities of that occupation.

Increasingly central to that occupation is the towering concrete edifice the snakes it way through what is left of the Palestinian territories in defiance of countless UN resolutions and in defiance of any sense of natural justice. It is a wall that, in size and intent, puts the old Berlin Wall into the shade. It is being extended and reinforced as we speak, yet due to US imperialist strategy in the Middle East, few governmental voices in the West will speak out against it. To Sutcliffe’s towering credit, he has produced a simple story that has the potential to rock the very foundations of that sinister and oppressive creation. That Sutcliffe is originally of a Jewish background, simply adds further power to his critique.

When Joshua, the main protagonist, is pressed by his mother to reveal his secrets about The Wall, Joshua is wise enough to keep quiet. He already is beginning to understand the dynamics of occupation.

Anything I say to her, she will pass on to Liev. If I tell her the truth, a chain of events will begin that will move immediately out of my control. Liev will tell the police, the police will tell the army, the army will go over The Wall and get to work. There will be an investigation, cross-examinations, imprisonments. An angry, vengeful machine is primed to leap into action, just as soon as I open my mouth. If I don’t want to start up that machine, I can’t say anything to anyone. P84

In those few lines, Sutcliffe gets to the very heart of Israel’s pathology. It is an angry and vengeful machine that grew in response to the Holocaust but is being visited on the Palestinian people for crimes they had no part in. It is a collective punishment against the Palestinians, who played no part in the barbarism of German fascism, and whose so called terrorism is an entirely legitimate response to Israeli occupation. It is perhaps an understandable pathology on the part of Israeli Jews but a criminal one nevertheless. The very people that should have empathy for a dispossessed nation show absolutely no empathy whatsoever. Israel is rapidly reducing itself to the level of Pariah state with an openly fascist mentality. And their justification for occupation is just as spurious as the lies spewed out by German fascism half a century ago.

Sutcliffe is astute enough to expose that justification by creating in Liev, Joshua’s stepfather, a brutal and enthusiastic exponent of Israeli occupation. Here is Liev lecturing young Joshua about Israel’s right and duty to create a Greater Israel at the expense of its Palestinian and Arabic neighbours. When Joshua asks Liev why he brought his family to the Occupied Territories, he replies in typical religious fundamentalist terms:

To do the Lord’s work! He gave this land to our people, and no one is willing to fight for it except us! We’ve been in exile for two thousand years and only now are we fighting back, taking what is ours. If you can’t take pride in that, you’re a weakling and a traitor. Do you not understand what this is for? How long we’ve waited? Can you not even see that at long last, after all this time, we’re winning! Bit by bit, we’re winning! And if it takes another thousand years, and we have to fight inch by inch, so be it. P188

Yes, with lines like that, we could easily be listening to Hitler ramble on about Germany’s historic destiny to rule Europe with a thousand year fascist Reich. The moment someone justifies their actions by reference to God’s will, you know you are in the company of dangerous lunatics. All countries attempt to justify themselves by reference to God or destiny and in so doing allow themselves to carry out the most heinous of crimes. Israel is just one more in a long line of brutish, conquering states. The sickening irony of it all, is that the recent victim has now become the perpetrator, but is still, with a few heroic exceptions, criminally ignorant to the fact. No doubt, future events will rebound upon Israel and awaken it from its self-imposed delusions. Sadly for all concerned, it will likely be a terrifyingly bloody awakening.

My favourite passage, in a story so wonderfully crafted, comes towards the end, when Joshua finally sees the bigger picture. Having left the Occupied Territories and his Zionist step-father, and returned to the place of his birth on the coast with his mother, Joshua is able to reflect on the real nature of what Israel has become:

I have left Amarias, but I now realise Amarias will never leave me. I hated that place because it felt like a huge lie, but this place doesn’t feel so different. The Zone is less than an hour away. Leila and her family and millions like her (Palestinians) are just as close. The off-duty soldiers, sitting around in cafes, sipping cappuccinos, will be going back there at the end of their leave, to man the checkpoints and police The Wall, and keep their tanks and planes in readiness for the next crackdown, but we are all supposed to behave as if The Zone is far away, in another world, out of sight beyond the horizon. The lie here is different, but more convincing, easier to fall for. P284

Indeed, all nations are built on a lie. Israel is no different to most, but its lie seems bigger than most because it is glaringly in the here and now. Its tanks and planes and jack boots are in operation this day and every day. But as Marx once rhetorically said to the English workers; England can never be free while Ireland is in chains. Similarly, Israelis will never be free while the Palestinians are in chains. Oppressor and oppressed are dialectically linked and in the end the jailer becomes as much a prisoner as the imprisoned. As the cultural boycott against Israel intensifies so too will that feeling of imprisonment. If Israelis want to know what their future looks like, they could always ask their white South African mates who tried to prop up the apartheid state until the very last moment. Israel may not be so lucky in having a clever Nelson Mandela character to dig them out of their self-inflicted mess.

In one sense, the starting point to resolve Israel’s self-created dilemma is blindingly obvious the establishment of a secular state where all citizens, irrespective of religious affiliation, are democratically and socially equal. But while there is a toxic mix of Western imperialist machinations and fanatical religious exclusivity on both sides of the wall, the chances of progress on that front are exceedingly slim. The moment Israel established itself as a Jewish State was the moment a wall was erected. The towering edifice that now separates Israel and Palestine is merely a concrete manifestation of that philosophical dead-end. Religious states all religious states – ultimately belong in the dustbin of history.