A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: a timely study of Palestine in miniature from the ground up

I began reading “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” on the evening of 6 October. Early the following morning, I switched on the BBC News and heard reports of the fusillade of rockets and land incursions launched from Gaza at 06.30 that day.

Nathan Thrall’s latest book is not a story about Gaza but it is about Palestine and specifically about an encircled enclave of the West Bank abutting the walls or fences of East Jerusalem and of a local tragedy affecting Abed Salama and his family. It is a study of Palestine in miniature from the ground up and resonates with the history of Arab-Israeli relations since 1948.

Thrall relates an extraordinary and often very moving story. His past work as an American journalist and director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, makes him a notably experienced and informed observer. He lives in Jerusalem and the incident he relates occurred on the other side of the separation wall near his home. He provides a deeply granular depiction of a terrible traffic accident and its aftermath. His pen is always cool though his tone is sometimes bitter. He is rarely explicitly critical of the local Israeli and Palestinian authorities. But he doesn’t need to be: the reverberations of the traffic accident and of the fire which caused the death of Abed’s son require no amplification. Drawing on interviews with all the key players – with only a few names changed to protect certain individuals – Thrall crafts a deeply poignant account.

At its heart, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is precisely what the title says. The evening before the fateful day, Abed’s five-year-old son, Milad, is excited to be preparing for a day trip and picnic with the rest of his kindergarten class. Abed had taken his son to a local shop to buy treats to add to his lunchbox for the upcoming trip. In the morning his mother, Haifa, was worried by the grey skies and heavy rainfall, especially as the journey would take Milad and his kindergarten friends along a notoriously hazardous road, prone to flooding and with no lighting because of Israeli security concerns. Though the story opens out in later chapters to describe land disputes and seizures, arranged marriages and resultant new births, disputes between Fatah supporters and Islamists, and the impact of newly arrived Jewish settlers, the reader is drawn back inexorably to Milad’s traffic accident as the prism through which action and reflection is focussed. 

An articulated lorry driven by a careless and dangerous driver collided with an old and poorly maintained bus carrying Milad and his friends. A gasoline-fuelled fire rapidly engulfed the bus. The occupants of nearby vehicles got out to help. A doctor with an UNRWA medical team on the way north approached the bus and helped deal with the casualties as the fire on the bus took hold. One man showed great courage by smashing a window to gain access to the interior of the bus and repeatedly went back in to pull children out to safety. But many of the youngsters suffered terrible burns and some did not survive their injuries. Abed and other relatives struggled to reach the crash scene. Emergency responders were slow to arrive in part because of hold-ups at Israeli-policed crossing points from East Jerusalem; and the best emergency and specialist hospitals were on the ‘wrong’ side of the separation wall and difficult to access.

Melded skilfully into the story of the Salama family and the traffic accident are echoes from the First (1987-1993) and Second (2000-2005) Intifadas or Palestinian uprisings and the frustrations still felt at the perceived failures of outside efforts to resolve core Palestinian-Israeli disputes. It was the last and most ambitious of these efforts which resulted in the Oslo Accord in 1993. The Accord reflected principles on interim self-government agreed between the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). It was intended to lead eventually to a two-state solution; but in Thralls’ view the agreement gradually gave way in practice to a new kind of status-quo, one which reinforced the lines of separation between Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, on one occasion, the Deputy Israeli Defence Minister is reported to have told the US Ambassador privately that the transit routes denied to Palestinians were “apartheid roads”. 

Thrall makes the devising and geographical delineation of the separation line from 2002 onwards an important theme of his narrative. The increasingly embedded division of communities behind encircling fences and walls provides a constant reference point for the restrictions on the daily lives of the Palestinian families and individuals he portrays. And in Thrall’s account, it was precisely those various restrictions which contributed to the human impact of the traffic accident. His criticism extends not just to the Israeli authorities but also to the Palestinian Authority (PA) which as a result of the Oslo Accord had been given administrative responsibility for defined areas of the West Bank. The PA had not pressed for improved roads or better traffic regulation in the area travelled by the kindergarten buses; but, as Thrall acidly comments, when it came to photo opportunities at the hospital where the injured children were taken, PA leaders pushed themselves forward.

After agonising efforts to find Milad, Abed was told his horribly burned young son was in the hospital morgue. Only residual clothing and his backpack identified him. In the funeral which followed, Salama’s relatives and friends hustled around him to prevent him seeing Milad’s charred remains in his coffin.

Thrall’s signal achievement in “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is to depict the stoic dignity of those affected by a local tragedy whilst using the same incident to quietly highlight failures of governance across Israel-Palestine and to underline the larger political tragedy of which they are a part.      

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall, Allen Lane, £25

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