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Stone Men:The Palestinians Who Built Israel
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The story of Palestine’s stonemasons and the building of Israel
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“They demolish our houses while we build theirs.” This is how a Palestinian stonemason, in line at a checkpoint outside a Jerusalem suburb, described his life to Andrew Ross. Palestinian “stone men”, utilizing some of the best quality dolomitic limestone deposits in the world and drawing on generations of artisanal knowledge, have built almost every state in the Middle East except their own. Today the business of quarrying, cutting, fabrication, and dressing is Palestine’s largest employer and generator of revenue, supplying the construction industry in Israel, along with other Middle East countries and even more overseas.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews in Palestine and Israel, Ross’s engrossing, surprising, and gracefully written story of this fascinating, ancient trade shows how the stones of Palestine, and Palestinian labor, have been used to build out the state of Israel—in the process, constructing “facts on the ground”--even while the industry is central to Palestinians’ own efforts to erect bulwarks against the Occupation. For decades, the hands that built Israel’s houses, schools, offices, bridges, and even its separation barriers have been Palestinian. Looking at the Palestine-Israel conflict in a new light, this book asks how this record of achievement and labor can be recognized.
Reviews
Meet 'Michelangelo of Beit Fajjar' and the other Palestinian stone-masons whose superb craft has fashioned Israel's famous 'white cities.' Their hidden labor is the starting point for Ross's brilliantly original exploration of how dispossession and exploitation continue to define the relationship of Israeli and Palestinian societies. This is radical journalism at its best - and I mean Pulitzer-Prize-quality best.
When a writer as original and committed as Andrew Ross turns his attention to Palestine, we know we are up for a unique set of observations. Ross uses the stone quarries of palestine to weave a story that brings together geology, politics, military occupation, water, and environment. It is a story that is at once specific in its attention to details of matter and place and expansive as it takes us across the tragic history of this late manifestation of colonial domination.
Andrew Ross sheds a brilliant light on what he calls the 'sweat equity' of Palestinian laborers who were deprived by Israel's system of occupation and apartheid of their land and livelihood and pushed as a result to build Israeli housing and infrastructure to survive and to resist ethnic cleansing.
Ross enriches us not just with a meticulously-researched dose of history and a logical argument for a post-colonial reality of ethical co-existence in historic Palestine. He takes us on a perspicacious journey of human stories, ethical arguments and socioeconomic realities, consciously refraining from speaking on behalf of Palestinians or depicting us as pitiful victims, as many well-meaning white academics still do, and thus contributing to understanding what justice in this land truly means and entails.
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Just when you thought that there was no other way to amplify the atrocity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, along comes Andrew Ross with Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel. Here is a refreshingly clear picture of the labour that it takes to produce and reproduce Israeli society and the Israeli occupation. Ordinary Palestinians who break and lay the stones tell Andrew Ross their stories, and he offers them to us as a gift of their resilience
Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations -
“Poignant, poetic, and illuminating, this book exposes a chief paradox of Israeli settler colonialism: that skilled Palestinian laborers built modern Israel—its homes, offices, shopping malls, prisons, border walls—while their own homes were demolished or seized. This is history, sensitive and somber, written in stone.”
Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams -
Cultural differences, labor relations, religious certainty, a knotted history of violence, political dominance, and cruel economic policies—all figure prominently in this account of the stone and building industries in Israel. Ross (Social and Cultural Analysis/New York Univ.; Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, 2011, etc.), a contributor to the Nation, the New York Times, and Artforum, delivers a deeply researched, passionate, pro-proletariat view of his topic. Based on interviews with businessmen, laborers, Palestinians, Israelis, and others, the text rehearses the long history of stonework in the region. The author exposes what he sees as the exploitation of Palestinian stoneworkers and points out the difficulties of those workers (getting through checkpoints each day takes hours) and how many of them are torn by the necessity to make money by building the homes of those whom they view as occupiers. He notes, as well, the lack of civil rights for the workers—and for any other benefits besides a salary, which is, as he describes, often barely adequate to sustain life. From the beginning, Ross pulls no punches, decrying the Israeli employers' "discrimination, degradation, and exploitation." Repeatedly, he shines light on the dark side of economic power: the deals, the political connections, the anti-union efforts. The author visited many building sites and talked with hundreds of workers, often standing in line with them at clogged checkpoints. He reports that many told him "they no longer had any dreams or hopes." Ross also offers details about the stone deposits in the area (and a map—Bethlehem is one important site), talks about the recent "Separation Wall" (with a nod to the issues regarding a border wall in the United States), and does not see much hope. A sturdy and depressing study in which the author's pro-worker sympathies and empathies are clear—as are his condemnations of Israel's (and employers') policies.
Kirkus