A Day in the Life of Abed Salama — a story of Palestinian pain

On the first page of Nathan Thrall’s book, Abed Salama leads his five-year-old son Milad though crowded alleyways under a “matrix of cables and wires and string lights”.

Anyone who drives or walks in the West Bank outside Jerusalem will come away with images of tangles, lattices and labyrinths, great and small — from the makeshift knots of utility lines in Palestinian neighbourhoods to the strategic web of fences, walls, roads and checkpoints that slice and dice the territory captured from Jordan in the war of 1967 and occupied by Israel.

This landscape of separation, formally embedded in the soil and scree of the Judaean Hills by the 1993-95 Oslo Accords, shapes every act and event in Thrall’s meticulous but heartfelt account of a school bus crash and its agonising aftermath. Geography may be destiny. On this stony earth, however, history, politics and power fix the facts on the ground.

Thrall, an American Jewish journalist and researcher from California, lives in Jerusalem and formerly directed the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group; A Day in the Life of Abed Salama owes its origin to a long article for the New York Review of Books in 2021. It treats a fatal accident on the Jaba road, north of Jerusalem, in February 2012, and its tragic outcomes, as a microcosm of West Bank life under occupation and a window into what Thrall calls “a hidden universe of suffering that touched nearly every Palestinian home”.

The West Bank’s architecture of segregation hampered communications and delayed emergency responses

The author writes coolly, carefully, without rhetoric or invective. He does not claim neutrality — the daily humiliations of Israeli occupation thud like a drumbeat on every page — but he avoids arm-twisting reportage or cartoonish history. No one portrayed here lacks humanity or complexity.

His dozens of interviewees range from Abed Salama’s extended family (a labyrinth in itself) to Jewish first responders from nearby settlements and Colonel Dany Tirza, the principal designer of the West Bank’s cross-hatched cartography of division. Yasser Arafat dubbed him Abu Kharita, “father of the map”. Tirza suspected Arafat really meant Abu Kharta — “father of bullshit”.

The officer — whose perspective Thrall lets us share — believed that “peace was on the horizon” when, in the mid-1990s, he devised this patchwork of unequally resourced fragments. Later, after the terror bombings of civilians in the second intifada (which began in 2000) meant that “nowhere felt safe”, he planned the more drastic “separation barrier” of concrete walls or multi-layered fences that now snakes around the hills.

On that wet winter morning in February 2012, a jack-knifing trailer truck on an Israeli-controlled (“Area C”) highway north of Jerusalem flipped an old bus carrying Palestinian pupils from a private elementary school, Nour al-Huda, to a local play centre. Fire soon engulfed the bus. Six children and a teacher were killed; many more injured.

Thrall tracks Abed Salama’s increasingly frantic search for news of Milad over the next 24 hours. His narrative, mostly written with the brisk urgency and immediacy of a “non-fiction novel”, periodically pauses to tell the backstories of Abed’s relatives, his community in Anata, and the lives — Jewish and Palestinian alike — of the paramedics, doctors, soldiers, settlers and bureaucrats swept into the horror.

The West Bank’s architecture of segregation hampered communications and delayed emergency responses. Lines on the ground, as well as lines in the mind, sowed confusion across the bewildering jigsaw of Palestinian-administered enclaves, fully occupied land and greater Jerusalem. Although stationed nearby, Israeli ambulances crawled through checkpoints; Eldad Benshtein, a Moscow-born paramedic from a settlement, beat them to the scene. At the crash site, an army colonel, Saar Tzur, ceded control of the rescue operation to a Palestinian official, Ibrahim Salama (a cousin of Abed’s).

Saar Tzur had suspended the colour-coded ID card regime that limits many Palestinians’ movements around Jerusalem. But parents still drove through a fog of mixed messages and misleading directions in search of the hospital that might hold their injured or dying child.

Thrall’s portraits of the rescuers and healers stretch from the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency) doctor Huda Dahbour, raised in camps after her family’s forced flight from Haifa, to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish volunteers who attend attack sites to ensure k’vod hamet (respect for the dead) and Livnat Wieder, a lead social worker at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital. She compiled lists of the missing with her veteran nurse colleague, Khalid Khoury.

If Thrall’s quietly heartbreaking chronicle yields few reasons for hope, we do catch glimpses of a kinder world. Morocco-born Beber Vanunu, a settler from the historically underprivileged Mizrahi community of Middle Eastern and north African Jews, got his neighbours to make a banner of condolence that they posted near the Jaba Road checkpoint.

Thrall seems to envisage readers being unused to encountering Palestinians as everyday flesh-and-blood

Before and during this galloping narrative of hope and dread, Thrall paints a group portrait of the Salama clan, its friends and foes. The politics of occupation and protest — especially choices about co-operation with Israeli authorities — either seal the bonds or widen the rifts of a kinship network within what remains, in some respects, the “18th-century preindustrial village” of Anata.

Clan faultlines drive Abed and his first love Ghazl — a daughter of the rival Hamdans — apart. This Romeo and Juliet tale, and the pall it casts over Abed’s marriages first to Asmahan, then Milad’s mother Haifa, sometimes has a novelette-ish flavour — as when blushing Ghazl passes her rejected suitor, “her cheeks turning so pink he could see them change colour even as she drove by”. Thrall seems to envisage a readership unused to encountering Palestinians as everyday flesh-and-blood. Sometimes he overcompensates.

No such schmaltz softens the desperate hunt for information as Abed and other parents navigate the West Bank maze to discover their children’s fate. Some find relief; others, the worst news imaginable. In the wake of the crash, fresh misfortune aggravates family disputes bred by the long emotional attrition of occupation, or by simmering tensions between tradition-minded husbands and change-seeking wives. At one appalling moment, a resentful father wants to force his spouse to view their son’s charred body: “She sent him on the trip — she should see the result”. The accident, concludes Thrall, “crushed every family, each in its own way”.

At any time, this scrupulous, salutary work would strike readers hard. Just now, it arrives in a cultural landscape shredded by assumptions that sympathy and understanding run only down a single route. Speaking recently to the New York Jewish paper Forward, Thrall himself voiced a fear that the sickening Hamas atrocities of October 7 may “overwhelm exactly the kind of people I hoped to reach with the book”. In the aftermath of the attacks, he had a launch event at London’s Conway Hall cancelled.

Yet not a word of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama encourages one-eyed compassion or selective truth-telling — even if Thrall locates “the true origins of the calamity” on Jaba road in the occupation and its systemic inequalities. “No one was held to account” for injustice pounded with steel and concrete into the West Bank soil. But the reckless truck driver did receive a jail sentence. Rejecting his appeal, Israeli Supreme Court justice Neal Hendel made a comment that might echo far beyond the pages of this book. Every death is an immeasurable disaster, he ruled, because “every person is a world and its entirety”.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall, Allen Lane £25/ Metropolitan Books $29.99, 272 pages

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