Love and loss in Palestine

Nathan Thrall's book exemplifies the opposing views of the Israel-Hamas war, representing one end and acknowledging Palestinian resilience in the face of unrelenting tragedy

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story

Author: Nathan Thrall

Publisher: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books

Pages: 255

Price: Rs 1,599

Israel has been plundering Palestinian land for aeons. Since October 7, 2023, in which Hamas—a Palestinian Sunni Islamist group, which is also considered a terrorist group — attacked Israeli communities along Israel’s southern fence with Gaza, killing at least 1,139 people and taking 252 hostages, Israel’s counter reaction has been disproportionate. As of May 14, 2024, more than 35,000 people have been killed, the United Nations (UN) says half a million Gazans have been forced to flee and 80 per cent of healthcare centres in Gaza have been destroyed. 

Yet when student organisations in the US and Europe are organising protests and raising slogans to “Free Palestine”, they are labelled “anti-Semitic”, particularly by allies of the Israeli state. This ugly aspect is reflected in two confusing literary occurrences. First, a giant literary figure’s loosely argued, unconvincing two-sideism. Yes, I’m referring to Zadie Smith’s  New Yorker essay “War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus” (May 5). Second, the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting was awarded to the staff of The New York Times for their “wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza.”

Since Ms Smith and NYT refuse to call a genocide a genocide, it’s best to turn to the interesting choice on the part of the Pulitzer Prize committee to award in the General Non-Fiction category Jerusalem-based Jewish journalist Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story. In the US edition, published by Metropolitan Books, the subtitle was different though: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, making one wonder if the mention of Palestine in the subtitle would have invited resistance.

Mr Thrall writes that this book was born out of an article he wrote for The New York Review of Books with the same title. It was a report on Dahiyat a-Salaam-based Abed Salama’s search for his five-year-old son who was on a picnic-bound bus that met with an accident. Had Israel not created obscure entry-exit rules for Palestinians in the region and had their rescue teams been deployed in a timely manner, the children who died in the bus that caught fire could have been saved.

Mr Thrall’s reporting reads like fiction, for it has all the elements of an intergenerational saga set against the backdrop of the Palestinian people’s struggle to claim their land. The book effectively draws a parallel between Salama’s life and the shifting political gears in political history.

In the Prologue, for instance, the author notes that when Salama heard of the accident and that children’s burned bodies were being identified, he, shockingly, first thought of his ex-wife: “Am I being punished for what I did to Asmahan?” Salama had married Asmahan in 1993 after a fallout with the love of his life, Ghazl.  That was the year “Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, which brought an end to the intifada and led to the formation of the Palestinian Authority, the  sulta, with its limited self-governing powers in the most heavily populated pockets of Gaza and the West Bank.”

Compromise rarely leads to an assured future, however. Salama couldn’t find happiness in his marital life and the couple eventually separated. Later, Salama married Haifa. It was their son, Milad Salama, who died in the accident.

How is all this linked to Israeli control, you may ask? There’s a colour-coded Israeli ID system that divides Palestinians. It came in response to the Second Intifada and the creation of a separation barrier — a wall, the construction of which was the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history. Its architect, Dany Tirza’s story is featured in the book. The wall isolates East Jerusalem from the West, making it impossible for Palestinians to access certain parts of the geography without a permit.

These connections with how Israeli occupation impacts  everyday lives helps Mr Thrall’s reportage go beyond the personal story. Huda Dahbour, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) doctor, who is introduced to the reader in the second part, exemplifies this. Ms Dahbour worked for UNRWA’s “Jerusalem headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah until Israel made it impossible for her to enter the city. Now she treats patients in a mobile clinic in the West Bank.” Her team helped rescue a dozen children in the accident.

Engrossing and thought-provoking, this book was a result of Mr Thrall’s engagement with the story for over three years. But one doesn’t need that much time to realise what’s happening in Palestine. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes in “The Futility and Immorality of Partition in Palestine” in On Palestine  (Penguin, 2015), co-authored with Noam Chomsky, “Zionism has done, and continues to do, whatever it can to divide the Palestinian people and guide all of them to a dead end.”

Will stakeholders in this long-running tragedy rely on Ms Smith’s unscrupulous use of language that transfers power to the oppressor? Or will they acknowledge Palestinian’s resilience and mobilisation in the face of unrelenting tragedy — of which Mr Thrall’s book is but a sneak peek? The answer will certainly determine the trajectory of human rights in the decades to come.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. On Instagram/X: @writerly_life