Not far from the monstrous checkpoint at Qalandia – the main gateway through which the Israeli military controls the passage of human beings between Ramallah and Jerusalem – is a small, outdoor, stonecutters’ workshop, one of hundreds scattered throughout the West Bank. Whatever may be happening at the checkpoint, at least one worker can usually be seen standing in the stone-cutters’ yard, his face, hair and clothes caked with the same white dust that covers the high concrete wall and the watchtower, where it mixes with the black smoke and char from burning tyres and the molotov cocktails that local youths, on particularly bad days, hurl at the checkpoint and barrier that confine them.

When visitors to the region write about stones, they tend to focus on the ones that Palestinian youth fling at armed and armoured soldiers. And on the more deadly projectiles the soldiers shoot back. It’s easy to get lost in that melee. Andrew Ross is neither distracted nor enthralled by such emblematic scenes. He is more interested in the stone-cutter who usually remains outside the photo’s frame. Through him and others like him, Ross examines the unseen structures of expropriation and exploitation that undergird the occupation as effectively as all those walls and guns.

Stone Men can be dry, lithic even, but it consistently provides insights into the troubled and troubling relationships between Israelis and Palestinians that are hard to come by elsewhere. Above all, it is a history of labour. Palestine sits on reserves of high-quality limestone valued at $20bn, and the business of quarrying, cutting and dressing it provides more private sector jobs than any other industry in the West Bank. Given that Palestinians and Israelis alike attribute mythic import to the land, focusing on the stone that is quarried from it – and the power relations at stake in turning it into homes on both sides of the Green Line – allows Ross to demystify the conflict while exposing the profoundly unequal ground on which Israel has been built. It’s a secret no one likes to talk about that most of that country, the West Bank settlements and even the security barrier itself, have been built by Palestinians, and with materials pulled from the very bones of the land they have lost.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israeli forces at the Qalandia checkpoint, 2017. Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images

Ross begins in the early years of the British Mandate, with the Zionist push – through boycotts, harassment and violence – to create a self-sufficient economy free of “Arab labour”. This strategy would shape even the architecture. The quarries were owned by Palestinians, and recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Europe were not skilled in working local stone. Much of Tel Aviv was built with concrete and silicate blocks that let Jewish builders avoid reliance on Palestinian workers. These materials would also allow them to construct a brand new modernist city distinct – and segregated – from its ancient neighbour, Palestinian Jaffa, which was built of weathered stone. In 1948, Jaffa would be cleansed of 97% of its Arab population. Entire districts were later bulldozed. The famous Bauhaus-style core of Tel Aviv would later be called the “White City” – the name referred to the colour of the silicate bricks and stuccoed concrete with which it was built. In the decades that followed the foundation of Israel, Arab labour would cease to be regarded as a threat to Jewish autonomy. Many thousands of homes had to be built on the recently conquered territory. Its previous occupants would be employed, at bargain wages, to construct the new state. Penned in by movement restrictions and excluded from most other occupations, they had few other options: Palestinians in Israel were subject to military law until 1966. Similar conditions would create an exploitable class of workers in the lands occupied after the 1967 war. By then, pale limestone – branded as “Jerusalem stone” though most of it is quarried from the West Bank hills – would become the dominant material used to build Israeli communities, serving an ideological function as well as a practical one, conveying an image of homogeneous unity and of ancient ties to the land.

Ross does not spare the Palestinian elites. He includes a section on the Ramallah-area housing development Rawabi that is among the most comprehensive and in-depth I have read. Marketed to affluent Palestinian professionals, Rawabi was built in cooperation with Israeli contractors on land confiscated by the Palestinian Authority from local villagers. Ross’s discussion allows him to trace the webs of complicity that have allowed a small class of wealthy Palestinians to profit from their compatriots’ dispossession.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blocks of limestone. Photograph: Gennadiy Iotkovskiy/Alamy

The most painful sections of Stone Men – and the ones in which I most wished he would slow down and allow his interlocutors to emerge with more nuance and detail – draw on his interviews with Palestinian workers. One of them built homes in a settlement constructed on land taken from the village in which he lived. He was able to endure the racist taunts of the settlers, he tells Ross, but reached his limit when a settler tried to hire him to build a home on land that had belonged to his own family. “I could not do it,” he says. Another of Ross’s sources, whom he identifies only as Samir, had worked for years on construction sites in Israel, saving for a home of his own, only to watch the house he had built be demolished by Israeli soldiers clearing land for the path of the security fence. Later, unable to find other work, he took a job building the barrier. Childhood friends threw stones at him while he worked.

Stories like that, and the other tales of humiliation and resistance that Ross recounts, accomplish more than entire libraries of abstract argument. Still, he repeatedly advances the contention that, in any prospective “final status” agreement, the work Palestinians have done building Israel should be taken into account, “that Palestinians have earned civil and political rights through their cumulative labour”. It is an unfortunate argument, employing a logic that Ross acknowledges has been used frequently by “settler-colonialists … to justify their expropriation of land from indigenous people”, that rights to land are gained only through its “improvement”. Contingent on denying the validity of any pre-Zionist Palestinian presence in the region, it repeats the historical erasure that Ross, in all but a few paragraphs of this volume, documents with such insight and dedication.

• Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine is published by Granta. Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel is published by Verso (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.