One morning in February 2012, a 5-year-old named Milad packed up the sweets he’d received the night before in his tiny backpack, kissed his mother goodbye and got on a bus for a school field trip. Not long after, Milad’s father, Abed, received a phone call from his nephew. “Did Milad go on the outing today?” the nephew asked. “There was an accident with a school bus near Jaba.”
As Abed approached the accident site, he found the road closed to cars, so he abandoned the Jeep he’d borrowed from a cousin and kept going on foot. He eventually saw the bus, lying on its side and terribly burned, but there were no children anywhere. Abed didn’t know this yet, but most had been taken by witnesses at the scene of the accident who volunteered their own vehicles and delivered the injured passengers to a hospital; a few others were put into ambulances, which arrived shamefully late. Abed didn’t know which hospital his son was taken to, if he was even taken to a hospital, or who had taken him.
So begins “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” by journalist Nathan Thrall, formerly of the International Crisis Group and the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.” The book grew out of a 2021 article Thrall wrote for the New York Review of Books and, as the title suggests, chronicles the long day and night following the school bus accident as Abed attempts to find Milad and determine whether he is alive.
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The horror a parent might feel at being unable to locate their child, who may be severely injured or worse, is hard enough to imagine for a reader who hasn’t been through it. What made Abed’s particular terror and uncertainty a great deal worse were the draconian, labyrinthine and Kafkaesque routes he would have to navigate merely to find his boy. As a Palestinian man living in the occupied territories of the West Bank, the roads he could take were circuitous and slow; the hospitals he might visit depended on the color of his ID card; and the empathy shown him as a panicked parent might well depend on whom he was asking for help and what side of the separation wall (dividing areas where Palestinians live in the West Bank from those that Jews have settled with the support of the Israeli government) he was on.
Unlike the article it arose from, Thrall’s book goes deep into Abed Salama’s life before the accident, tracking his upbringing and young adulthood in Anata, which in his youth was a vast landscape “dotted with olive and fig trees and open fields of wheat and lentils.” By 2012, much of Abed’s family land in and around Anata had been annexed, stolen and settled by Israeli Jews as well as an Israel Defense Forces base, and the land’s remaining olive groves were no longer under Salama’s control.
Abed, his family and the bus accident are the central threads that tie the book together. In addition to the Salama family, readers learn about several other parents who had harrowing journeys before finding their children, dead or alive. Thrall also profiles some of the rescue workers — both Palestinian and Jewish — as well as people who, deliberately or not, had a hand in causing the accident. One of them is Dany Tirza, head of the IDF Rainbow Administration (a falsely cheerful name for what Thrall describes as “the strategic and spatial planning unit of the IDF division for Judea and Samaria — the biblical name for the West Bank”) and the architect of the separation wall.
While the wall might not be the first obvious culprit for an accident that occurred on a wet, rainy day and involved a semitrailer driven by an undertrained driver who plowed into the school bus, the book is intent on examining the systemic issues as well as the specific human errors that led to the tragedy. Even as blame was being thrown around in the accident’s aftermath, Thrall explains that “no one pointed to the separation wall and the permit system that forced a kindergarten class to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah rather than driving to the playgrounds of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stone’s throw away.”
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” is an important book, and one that closely examines the intricacies of injustice perpetrated on the Palestinian population by the Israeli government, its systems and plenty of its Jewish citizens. Yet it does so at an almost clinical remove. When an IDF colonel orders his troops to take precautions by shooting the youths throwing stones and molotov cocktails only in the knees, Thrall does not comment on the brutality of this choice. In describing the grief of a parent who has just seen his dead son, Thrall writes, “He came out screaming and hitting himself in the head.” The image is vivid, but the language surrounding it is not.
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It is difficult, at times, to grasp the sheer horror of what Israeli annexation and strategy have done to Palestinian people and lands when there is no real pathos coming from the author’s narration. Dispassionate reporting won’t protect the book from the political pushback it will receive from Zionists and their supporters. Still, it’s clear that Thrall cares deeply about the topic; in his acknowledgments, he writes of how his three daughters have grown up near the wall that segregates them from the children in the book: “Although that segregation seems unlikely to end in my lifetime,” he writes, “I wrote the book in the hope that it can be dismantled in theirs.” Indeed, there is no debating the realities Thrall lays out of the incredibly unequal divisions of power in the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ilana Masad is a critic and the author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.”
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
By Nathan Thrall
Metropolitan. 272 pp. $29.99
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