What a bus accident can tell us about the occupation

From its first sentence, readers of “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” are alerted to the ways in which a tragic accident involving a Palestinian school bus changed the lives of dozens of families forever. It is evening and doting father Abed is out buying sweets for his son Milad's kindergarten trip; less than 24 hours later, he is desperately searching the surrounding hospitals for the five-year-old, all hope that his child has survived fading fast. 

The accident outlined in Thrall’s book, which has just been published in German for the first time, occurred in February 2012. The Palestinian children were on a day-trip to a playground in the West Bank. The bus was travelling from Anata, a community in East Jerusalem which is surrounded by a high wall and which has been partially annexed by Israel since 1967. Although the residents of Anata pay taxes in Jerusalem, they receive little in the way of public services and their infrastructure is dangerously dilapidated. Playgrounds – like so much else – are only available in the West Bank or in the other part of Jerusalem, the part beyond the wall. 

A labyrinthine system of Israeli checkpoints regulates traffic between the West Bank and Greater Jerusalem, with Palestinians routinely turned back due to factors such as age, gender or place of birth. When the kindergarten children in Nathan Thrall's book were turned back, their bus took a detour to a playground in the West Bank, along a poorly maintained, unsafe road. Caught in bad weather, the bus collided with a truck, overturned and caught fire. Six children and a teacher died. 

Not just a tragic accident

What initially appears to be an ordinary – albeit tragic – accident, one scarcely worthy of international attention given the scale of the crisis in Israel/Palestine, is revealed to be much more than a simple interplay of unfortunate coincidence and human error. Thrall outlines the structural reasons for the disaster: Israel's deliberate infrastructural underdevelopment of East Jerusalem, the increasing restriction of free movement for Palestinians through the so-called ‘separation barrier’ and checkpoints, the resulting daily harassment and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. In short: the effects of an Israeli occupation that has been ongoing since 1967. 

For Thrall, the tragedy is a prism through which the consequences of the occupation come into clearer focus. Yet his narrative style, at once gripping and empathic, is anything but dry. Over seven chapters, Thrall sensitively characterises a diverse range of Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli protagonists all of whom are in some way involved in what happened. Flashbacks illuminate personal histories, social relationships, and emotional lives. Each seems accessible, their feelings coherent, their actions comprehensible. At the same time, the book describes how the structures in which these local people are embedded contributed to the bus accident. Events unfold with the suspense of a crime novel. 

No one is simply good or evil

Nathan Thrall, a Jewish American author and resident of Jerusalem, is known for his analytical history essays and for books such as “The Only Language They Understand”. He was an analyst for many years, including as project director of the independent think tank, International Crisis Group, where he focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the situation of Palestinians continued to deteriorate due to increased settlement construction and growing right-wing extremism in the Jewish-Israeli population, Thrall realised that a purely analytic approach was not always suited to the task of making injustice in the region palpable. This latest book communicates with readers emotionally, without clouding Thrall's underlying historical-analytical perspective. 

After news of the bus accident reached Thrall, he began to seek out and talk to survivors and family members, including Abed Salama and his family. These encounters led to an essay in the New York Review of Books in 2021, also titled “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama”. The harrowing essay received a great deal of attention resulting in Thrall’s decision to expand his research into a book. 

In the book, both Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli characters are allowed nuance and ambiguity. Even Abed Salama is not the perfect victim; Thrall shows him replicating the patriarchal tendencies of his own up-bringing, at times with an eye to his own self-interest. Thrall's view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is less about good or bad people – there are (a)moral actors on both sides – and more about structural issues of justice and injustice. His book makes crystal clear the consequences of the occupation and the suffering it causes. 

The book was too sensitive for German publishers

Thrall’s closely-observed descriptions of living conditions in the region allows readers to intellectually grasp and emotionally empathise with the extent of the structural injustice of the Israeli occupation: the fear of Palestinian mothers watching their underage children disappear into Israeli prisons; the Kafkaesque and humiliating bureaucracy of life under occupation; the powerlessness felt in the face of continuous policies aimed at displacing Palestinians. 

Named one of the best books of 2023 by the New Yorker, the Economist and the Financial Times, none of Germany’s major or mid-sized publishers were willing to publish a German translation of the book. In an email, Thrall explained to Qantara that many of the publishers he approached openly admitted that the book was too politically sensitive for them. In the end, the modest, Bielefeld-based publishing house, Pendragon, accepted the book despite warnings from colleagues, journalists and media insiders that the book would attract little interest in Germany or could trigger a shitstorm. 

Günther Butkus, Pendragon’s publisher, emphasised to Qantara that he was unwilling to bury the ideals of artistic freedom and freedom of speech out of a kind of preemptive obedience: "What kind of times are we living in, if books are silenced simply because some people, often without any real knowledge of the subject matter, are against them?” The fact that “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction confirms Pendragon's decision to publish the book, and should be an incentive for a German-speaking audience to read it. 

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is at once a book of introductory reading, and an invaluable source of information for those looking to deepen their knowledge of everyday life in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under occupation, a way of life rarely delineated in Germany. It is a shocking read, and therefore also an appeal to its audience: to stand up for justice in Israel/Palestine, for an end to the occupation and for compliance with international law, including with regard to allied nations. 

Nathan Thrall: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama 
Translated from English by Lucien Deprijck 
336 pages, 26 EUR 
Pendragon Verlag, Bielefeld 2024 

© Qantara.de