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

by Nathan Thrall

Hardcover, 2023

Status

Available

Call number

956.05

Publication

Metropolitan Books (2023), 272 pages

Description

"Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos-the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the Jewish-Palestinian struggle that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member arubabookwoman

Abed Salamas's 5 year old son Milad is excited that his class is going on a school picnic. But because they are West Bank Palestinians, their bus can't use the roads with the most direct route to the picnic site, and the bus itself is old and decrepit. Tragically, while the bus was en route,

stalled near a check point, it was struck by a rogue dump truck, overturned and burst into flames. And because the West Bank is divided into Zones A, B, and C, each under different governmental authorities, there were major delays in dispatching fire fighters and ambulances, even though the disaster itself was in view of a check point. Many children died, including some who were initially transported to the hospital in Ramallah that was open to Palestinians, rather than to the better equipped hospital in Jerusalem. Getting to the Jerusalem hospital required special permits and passing through checkpoints which caused a lot of delays and through which many Palestinians could not pass.

This was a tragic book, and I learned a lot from it. I had some vague knowledge about the Oslo Agreements, and believed that the West Bank was to be allocated to the Palestinians. But I have also heard over the years about the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, many of which have been encouraged by the Netanyahu government. In fact, the way the West Bank is set up, most Palestinians are crowed into urban "islets" widely separated by wide open spaces where the Israeli settlements are being built. And beyond that, Israel is building a wall to physically isolate the Palestinians from Israel and from the Israeli controlled areas of the West Bank. (Wonder if that's where Trump got his wall idea). This book, while it contains a lot of valuable information (and was written by an Israeli journalist) taught me I need to do a lot more reading on this subject.

Highly recommended.

4 stars

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