Palestinian writer and architect Suad Amiry's book Nothing to Lose But Your Life: An 18-Hour Journey with Murad (2010) chronicles the trials and tribulations of a group of Palestinian workers as they attempt to cross from the Palestinian territory of the West Bank into Israel in order to work illegally. Ten hours into their dangerous journey, they finally reach ‘the wall’, also known as the ‘separation barrier’ or the ‘security fence’, which was built by Israel to separate Palestinian-controlled regions of the West Bank from Israeli-administered territories. Upon arrival at the wall, Amiry's narrative, up until this point a largely matter-of-fact journalistic narrative interspersed with some gallows humour, takes an abrupt turn towards the fantastical. Amiry, narrating the story in first person, stands at the wall, looks left and sees London, to the right Zurich, and as she looks up the ‘eight-metre-high concrete wall’ she says she can see ‘the tops of Berlin's buildings’. She writes of a hallucinatory dream, ‘Animals’ nightmare’, in which the animal dolls from her childhood come alive and tell the story of the wall's destruction. She describes goats eating produce that Palestinian farmers are banned from selling, a mole with paws bloodied from trying to dig into the asphalt, a lizard that turns grey to blend in with the concrete, and an uprooted ancient olive tree that speaks to her. An ‘activist fox‘ asks her to sign a petition to Al Gore – to whom he has turned after receiving an unhelpful response from God – that decries the construction of this ‘monster‘ wall and the environmental destruction that it has brought.

The journey does not end here. Amiry then turns to a daydream in which murals on the West Bank wall, famously drawn by the international graffiti artist Banksy, come alive. Many of Banksy's murals depict people climbing over, looking through or tearing down the wall, and in Amiry's story she takes a seat in a mural of a living room. She writes, ‘I looked out of the window carved into that wall and saw an alpine landscape.