The Saudis have a second, more heavily fortified wall that ranges six hundred miles along their border with Iraq. “Ten-foot high steel pipes, filled with concrete” provide the frame for razor wire while tunnels burrow deep underground. The barrier rises across the desolate Empty Quarter, home of significant oil reserves. People are familiar with the walls Israel has erected in which “infrared night sensors, radar, seismic sensors for detecting underground activity, balloon-born cameras, and unmanned, remote-controlled Ford F-350 trucks, equipped with video cameras and machine guns, augment the wall’s concrete slabs and concertina wire.” Lesser known is Saudi Arabia’s effort, begun in 2003, to create a barrier across its eleven-hundred-mile border with Yemen. From the United States to the Middle East to Southern Europe and India, and nearly everywhere else, it seems, the pace, enormity, and sophistication of these walls is astounding. Focusing on the present, Frye embarks on an account of the spate of walls built since the Berlin Wall was torn down. This section begins and ends with an account of how the Malibu coastline transitioned from the single ownership of May Rindge in 1892 until 1926, when she grudgingly agreed to lease some properties after numerous shootings, sheep poisonings, and a Supreme Court decision that went against her. The epilogue “Love Your Neighbor, but Don’t Pull Down Your Hedge” covers the period from 1990 to the present. Even Shakespeare’s Juliet recognized that “these walls are high and hard to climb.”
As villages transitioned into cities, their walls grew with them, often into great defensive bulwarks.
Even today one finds fences around Maasai villages in Tanzania. Farmers settled and fortified their small villages. From ditches to sapling fences to berms to walls, the level of sophistication rose as people perceived an increasing need for protection from, literally, the barbarians at the gate.
“Few civilized people have even lived without them,” Frye emphasizes. Stringent, punitive immigration policies around the world seek to keep the perceived destroyers of “our culture out.” That is, we belong here you do not. Frye writes that walls can take the form of “protectionist economic policies,” a “great internet firewall,” razor wire with motion sensors, or concrete barriers. A “Selected Timeline” covers the subject matter in four geographical areas: Near East and Central Asia Europe China and the Americas. In Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, David Frye has written an encompassing and enlightening review of walls through the centuries, ranging from 2000 B.C.
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