Aisha,a young Palestinian schoolteacher leads a peaceful protest in the West Bank and battles extremists on both sides of the barrier wall.
Wall of Dust is a novel of human spirituality, reminiscent of The Alchemist, though much grittier. It is a story of the pain of loss and the struggle to recover hope. Aisha, a Palestinian schoolteacher, becomes deranged after most of her class is accidentally killed by a missile fired from an Israeli gunship. She embarks on a strange ritual, throwing stones at the “security barrier,” the eight-meter tall concrete wall that separates much of the West Bank from Israel. She shouts the name of each dead child and hurls a stone at the concrete monolith. She is soon joined by others and the ritual becomes a mass protest. At several points she might be stopped, or worse, but she is helped in small but significant ways by several other characters, Israeli and Palestinian. Each character has also experienced loss—a family estrangement, a crisis of faith, a simple loss of hope—that guides their actions. A sniper misses a shot, a teacher comforts, a stranger embraces, a father forgives, an Islamist relents. The chain of these events reaches its climax when a section of the wall collapses, with each character receiving a personal revelation into what it means for them.