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Award-winning journalist and author Nir Baram spent a year and a half travelling around the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In this fascinating recount of that journey, Baram navigates the conflict-ridden regions and hostile terrain to speak with a wide range of people, among them Palestinian-Israeli citizens trapped behind the separation wall in Jerusalem and Jewish settlers determined to forge new lives on the West Bank. Baram also talks to children on Kibbutz Nirim who lived through the war in Gaza, and ex-prisoners from Fatah who, after spending years detained in Israeli jails, are now promoting a peace initiative. And he returns again and again to Jerusalem, city of his birth, where a hushed civil war is in full swing. A Land Without Borders is a clear-eyed, compassionate and essential guide to understanding a complex reality; a perceptive and sensitive exploration of a labyrinthine conflict and the experiences of the people ensnared in it, by one of the most distinctive writers working in Israel today

IF IMPLEMENTED SUCCESSFULLY, THE PEACE ACCORD BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS WILL VINDICATE THOSE WHO BELIEVED THAT NEITHER DECLARATIONS, NOR SETTLEMENTS, NOR LAND SEIZURES WOULD TRANSFORM THE WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP INTO PERMANENT PARTS OF THE JEWISH STATE. THIS ARTICLE SUGGESTS THAT ALTHOUGH NOW THE THOUGHT MAY SEEM UNIMAGINABLE, THE SAME PRINCIPLE APPLIES TO EXPANDED EAST JERUSALEM. IT ARGUES THAT OPENING THE PROBLEM OF JERUSALEM UP TO RATIONAL DISCUSSION IS NOW CRUCIAL. THE FETISH OF "UNITED JERUSALEM" IS ONLY ONE OF PARTS OF THE ISRAELI "NATIONAL CONSENSUS" THAT HAS NOT YET SUCCUMBED TO THE WEIGHT OF FACT AND CIRCUMSTANCE. THE ARTICLE CONCLUDES THAT FOR BOTH JEWS AND ARABS, REDEFINING JERUSALEM CAN EASE THE PAIN OF SHARING IT.

Based on field research conducted by the author in 2008, the book consists of a careful examination of graffiti written on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the Israel-built "separation wall"; and interviews with people about the graffiti. This shows how different sides of the conflict view the conflict itself and details the various ways that graffiti can represent political strife.

The following pages are based on the last six months of 1948 which the writer spent in England, France and Italy. During this period Marshall aid had begun to bear certain fruit. On the other hand the international situation, already bad at the opening of the period, had deteriorated cumulatively as time passed. The Berlin deadlock, a symbol of the will of East and West, continued as before; and not even the beginning of a solution was reached at the United Nations assembly in Paris in die autumn. All over Europe people were preoccupied widi the economic crisis; but also by the direat of a new war. A military committee composed of Great Britain, France and Benelux was formed in the autumn under the chairmanship of Marshal Montgomery. There remained problems about this committee's effectiveness as well as about the extent to which other proposals for Western union were practicable at present. While in each country in Western Europe common people and politicians are talking more about union than ever before, in practice separatist tendencies in each shrunken western nation are still at work and travel to, or independent contact with, neighboring countries is a far more difficult business today than it was in 1939.