COMMENTARY ON A DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABED SALAMA BY NATHAN THRALL
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall is a difficult book to read. The central event is a tragic school bus accident in East Jerusalem in 2012 in which several children burned to death. It was entirely preventable, except that, given all the political and oppressive circumstances, it was not. This is a useful book for anyone who finds the strife between Israelis and Palestinians confusing. It uncovers the many vectors in which the actions of various individuals and political actors coalesced into this particular disaster. The sum of the book reveals a profoundly entrenched and willful dysfunction that first foments violence and then resorts to violence in response. The author, Nathan Thrall, is uniquely positioned to know and understand the problems in Israel. He lived in Gaza while a member of the International Crisis Group (a think tank that works on preventing global conflicts) and was director of the group’s Arab-Israeli Project (2010-20).
The book opens when the father of one of the children, Abed Salama, learns about an accident involving the bus used for a school trip and that his son had been on that bus. We learn that the accident took place on a winding and dangerous road without any guardrails because it was not one of Israel’s “sterile roads,” a deliberate Israeli infrastructure creation. From there, the author, Nathan Thrall, widens the scope of the investigation to color it with the historical context of life in East Jerusalem. This shifting focus takes in the tragic consequences of the accident but also the individual and political decisions that led to it. After the Oslo Accords (1993-5) led to the partitioning of Israel and after the Second Intifada in 2000, Israelis designed a road system to reduce any contact of Israelis with Palestinians via “sterile roads” (roads prohibited to Palestinian vehicles). These roads, also called “apartheid roads,” were designed with deliberate impediments like “checkpoints, roadblocks, bypass roads, and above all, fences and walls.” This road system not only severely impedes Palestinians’ mobility as they try to get to work, or shop, or worship, it limits any emergency response to accidents or medical assistance to victims.
Even though this book is nonfiction, the grim narrative reads like a novel with a series of vignettes that illustrate how both Israelis and Palestinians are hampered by their own internal cultural conflicts and bigotry. Palestinians who return from abroad from study or business are labeled “returnees” and are disparaged by the “insiders” who had stayed through the hard times. A rampant misogyny also divides Palestinian citizens by misplacing frustration and anger onto women for the tragic results of political actions. In the book, a husband and his entire family excoriated and punished the mother of one of the dead children because she had allowed him to go to school that day.
The Jewish people in Israel share the same dysfunctional tendency among their own. Ashkenazi Jews who came to Israel from Europe have tended to treat non-Ashkenazi Jews as second-class citizens. Mizrahi Jews from North African countries who followed the call of Zionism in the 50s and 60s were put into camps and labeled “primitive” and "backward.” At a cabinet meeting Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion suggested building outhouses instead of proper bathrooms for their use since “‘These people do not know how to make hygienic use of a toilet in the home.” Even more astonishing are the actions of strict Hasidic Jews who deliberately isolate themselves from any non-Hasidic Jew, and only speak Yiddish instead of the national language, Hebrew. Surprisingly, Thrall notes, Hasidic Jews are actually anti-Zionist because the laws of Israel are secular. This fragmentation in both groups makes one wonder how any kind of coming together for a peaceful resolution could occur at all.
At times, the book’s thread is hard to follow, especially because Thrall restarts the day of the tragedy from various vantage points, moving from Abed Salama searching for his son to the experience of other parents that day to historical elements that set up the conditions for the tragedy. Nonetheless, the reader will come away with a greater understanding of a tremendously complicated and seemingly intractable situation.