A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

The school bus accident at the center of the narrative is intended to serve as one example, albeit an especially grisly one, of the harsh conditions facing Palestinians in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which remain under Israeli rule to this day (Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005). Small villages such as Anata struggle to maintain traditional ways of life as Israel expands its apparatus of control. Following the conquest of the territories in 1967, Israel had created a security architecture and networks of dependency so that Palestinians “drove cars on Israel’s multilane highways, bought food at its supermarket chains, and used Hebrew at its office towers, malls, and cinemas” (11). However, following the outbreak of the First Intifada, with its sudden upsurge of widespread resistance, Israel immediately began to clamp down, even as divisions among various Palestinian factions intensified. Young men, in particular, became universally suspect and subject to brutal repression, even for throwing stones or associating with those who did. The majority of an entire generation of males disappeared behind the wire for years at a time, leaving behind precarious families and returning to fraught job prospects as a Byzantine system of color-coded identification cards placed onerous restrictions on employment and movement. Before long, someone like Abed Salama could not even go to the mosque without having to worry about “Israel’s oversight or that of the sulta” (65)—the Palestinian authority set up by the peace process that acted more like a collaborationist regime than a fledgling Palestinian state.

The most severe manifestation of Israeli occupation is the security barrier, which began to come up during the Second Intifada. The wall proved to be one of many ways in which the peace process actually helped tighten Israeli rule rather than grant Palestinian independence. The boundaries that Arafat and others had painstakingly negotiated with the Israeli government served as a pretext for cutting off Arab peoples from Israeli cities—most notably Jerusalem—and subjecting their lands to a ludicrously complicated system of checkpoints, military bases, and segregated highways. The Palestinian areas were persistently under-resourced, and residents were exposed to the state more in the form of the police baton rather than the fire engine or ambulance. The latter is shown in how long it takes for emergency personnel to reach the scene. Nathan Thrall concludes that “children were killed on a road controlled by Israel and patrolled by Israel,” beset with “checkpoints [that] were used to stem Palestinian movement and ease settler traffic,” while the overarching aim of the government was to “reduce [the Palestinian presence] in greater Jerusalem” (217). Thrall’s conclusion is unmistakable—the conditions of the occupation killed those children.