From luxury wine estates to squalid and violent informal settlements, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world.
But "it will be centuries before men are truly at home in this country", Murray once wrote, and his work has embodied some of the difficulties and conflicts arising from the violent history of white settlement - the tensions between the rural and the urban, and issues of inheritance (whether of language, literature or land).
In this sprawling megacity, one that is regularly embroiled in violent disputes about informal settlements and where public spaces often require an entrance fee, such a peaceful, inclusive cultural reappropriation is a small but radical act.
Debate in Mexico about Mr. Fox's campaign for a seat on the Security Council has been equally intense, with opponents worried that Mexico would be called to send help to police settlements of violent conflicts.
A conflict is followed by a period of unfruitful peace talks, continued Israeli settlements, a violent act of some kind, Hamas shooting rockets into Israel and then a deadly Israeli offensive into Gaza leading to civilian casualties and global outrage against Israel.
Like Al-atrash, Amro – of the non-violent Youth Against Settlements group – has also been arrested and charged by an Israeli military court.
And if western military intervention had somehow toppled him without a settlement in place, violent chaos in the Syrian quicksand would still have ensued.
Work to shut down the UK's largest illegal travellers' settlement, which resulted in violent clashes, was completed in November.
Not all settlements in the West Bank are violent, and not all settlers are extremists, but the settlements on both sides of the separation wall are growing on a monthly basis.
More than six decades after the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the idea is dying thanks to relentless Israeli settlement-building and the violent irredentism of Hamas and others.
