Israelis call it a security fence—Palestinians call it proof of apartheid. The Land of the Settlers: Chapter 3 follows the Israeli government’s construction of a fence surrounding the nation’s major cities, creating a physical barrier between the already politically and emotionally divided Israelis and Palestinians.

“A tall fence does not necessarily make good neighbors,” an Israeli explains, “But a tall fence keeps neighbors alive.” His is just one side of a very heated debate.

Chaim Yavin, “Israel’s Walter Cronkite,” set out with a hand-held camera and interviewed average Israeli and Palestinian citizens, resulting in a controversial, five-part documentary series that takes an in-depth and uncomfortable look at the conflict in Israel. Chapter 3 takes us directly to the construction sites where the fence is being built to capture interviews with people who live on both sides of it. While most Israelis argue that the fence will prevent future violence, many Palestinians believe that the oppression and prejudice it embodies will only encourage terrorism. Traveling throughout Israel, Yavin collects painful stories and deep-seeded bitterness from both Israelis and Palestinians, building his case for the necessity of making peace.

Chapter 3 begins with an interview of an Israeli woman whose husband and two sons were murdered by a suicide bomber. She tells the story from her balcony, where she can see the restaurant in which it happened. When Yavin asks her opinion of the fence, she says her heart “curdles.” “Why wasn’t it built earlier?” she asks. “Why did I have to pay such a dear price so that we could wise up later?” It’s hard not to sympathize with a woman who can no longer pack her boys’ lunches and has to go home to an empty apartment.

But the documentary raises the question as to whether the fence is in fact being built for security purposes or, rather, for political motives. Instead of running along the green line, Israel’s official border with Palestine, the fence extends into Palestinian land, which one Palestinian argues is a “robbery of land and resources.” An Israeli official, nicknamed “the father of the fence,” explains that they extended the boundary in order to make sure that guards have enough time to stop a person from crossing. But the parallel to the Berlin Wall — which imprisoned East Berliners in communist East Germany — remains, and is continuously mentioned.

One of the more shocking moments in the documentary comes when a group of peaceful demonstrators gather to protest the fence. Israeli soldiers begin to fire on them. They aim their bullets at the protestors’ feet, hitting no one, but panic and screams fill the air as everyone runs and stumbles to find safety.

The footage itself is shocking, but The Land of the Settlers met with great controversy in Israel for another reason, as well—Yavin’s reputation as “Mr. Television,” the face of the Israeli media. Yavin, the first anchorman on Israel’s Channel 1 news, which he helped create, has become the nation’s leading newsman and media figure, granting him the a forementioned nickname. He’d been covering the conflict in Israel for decades; but, until THE LAND OF THE SETTLERS aired, he had kept his politics to himself.

In The Land of the Settlers, however, Yavin depicts Israelis so unfavorably that even his own station refused to air the series. When it was shown, on another station, just before the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, it met with heatedly mixed reviews. Soon after, Yavin published an op-ed in The Boston Globe in which he, a settler himself, wrote bluntly, “If we want peace, we have to dismantle the settlements.”

A pivotal moment in the this chapter of the series comes when an angry Palestinian man, finishing a tirade against Israelis, yells, “You’re different from us! You are not like us!” The mad man’s words have a strange, profound resonance as the viewer realizes that he’s right — and wrong. Israelis and Palestinians, competing for the same small stretch of land, have come to see each other as “the other,” with little acknowledgment of what they have in common.

Yavin suggests it’s the Israelis fault: instead of trying to enact the “true Jewish and universal values: justice, equality, culture, education, and human rights” by working with the Palestinians, he says, Israel built a fence.