The Architecture of Occupation
On Nathan Thrall's "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy"
Fatality is a word with two primary meanings; the first, and more commonly used, describes a death, typically by accident. The second and rarer meaning is an occurrence (not exclusively a death) that is destined to happen by some combination of circumstances and situation. In Conrad’s Nostromo: “It was a fatality. A thing that could not be helped.” Nathan Thrall’s A Day In the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, which was just awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, is a book about fatality in both senses of the word. The titular tragedy of the book is a highway bus crash that kills six Palestinian kindergartners and a teacher on a field trip, and the attendant organizational mishaps of the emergency response to the crash. But in Thrall’s reconstruction of the day-to-day lives of all the people and families involved with the crash, another narrative emerges: beyond any individual person, the conditions in the West Bank had been set up by the Israeli government to facilitate such an accident. It is not a question of if but when these children would be killed, given the infrastructure of occupation that surrounded them; those lucky enough to survive will likely be imprisoned, either in an actual prison or within the labyrinth of walls and zones in the West Bank. Thrall writes of his title character, after a stint in an Israeli prison:
Upon his release, Abed received a new ID card, colored green to identify him as a former prisoner. Standard West Bank ID cards were orange, but ex-detainees were given green ones for different lengths of time, depending on how long they had served and for what. Abed’s was for six months. It was an effective means of constraining him even after he had finished his sentence. He was turned away at checkpoints whenever he showed the green ID. Sometimes he was treated roughly or beaten. He gave up trying to leave Anata, resigning himself to another six month stretch.
After a couple years, the standard ID becomes green, which Abed thinks “fitting; every Palestinian was a sort of prisoner, from the youngest child to the PA president, who also needed Israel’s permission to come and go.”
The title of the book – adapted from a 2021 New York Review of Books article of the same name – evokes Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, though Thrall does not keep the scope of his book as narrow as Solzhenitsyn. Thrall instead telescopes into the backstories of nearly every person involved with the crash, whether they’re anguished parents, ambulance drivers, nearby settlers, the man who literally drew up the post-Oslo map of the West Bank, or the haredi who ritually collect the dead for burial. Thrall alternates these deep dives with Abed Salama’s attempts to find his son’s body in the aftermath of the crash, which involves navigating the physical and bureaucratic infrastructure of Israel’s occupation: diversionary roundabout roads slammed with traffic, checkpoints requiring certain kinds of IDs, underfunded hospitals with limited communicative ability, the agonizing wait for the army or government to make an administrative decision on your particular case. Thrall pays particular attention to the gradations in relationships among the Palestinians based on how much they cooperate with the Israelis; there are those who simply work construction on the other side of the wall to make a living, those who try to curry favors to ease day-to-day life in their community, those who become part of the machine, and all the gray spaces in-between. It’s in these examinations where Thrall is perhaps most Solzhenitsyn-ian, probing the jail economies of those who have to try to survive and persist amid a pervasive inimical architecture.
Faced with the immensity of the tragedy, Thrall walks a delicate line between cool, reserved reportage and the fiery passion that such a tragedy necessarily evokes. He is not a polemicist making bold claims but a careful collector of facts, laying them out with the precision, not so much narrativizing as objectivizing a long series of events. The cruelty of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is displayed in acts both big (a wall cutting through an ancestral neighborhood) and small (while imprisoned, Abed and his fellow inmates are forced to listen to ballads that remind them of home). Even in moments where one might be heartened by a common humanity that binds people beyond any conflict – the recognition of the desperation of a parent searching for their possibly deceased child – there is a lingering occupational menace. A guard at an Israeli hospital calls a child’s remains “charcoal,” and Israeli teens gleefully celebrate the accident; when confronted by a left-wing reporter, one says: “Don’t give me that bullshit that everyone’s a human being.”
As Israel’s assault on Gaza has continued and intensified, there has been a lot of centrist pleading for some kind a return to ‘normalcy’; if only the fighting would stop on both sides, Palestinians and Israelis could progress towards a lasting peace on stable ground. Thrall’s book, for all its many virtues, is at its best illustrating the current impossibility of such a return to ‘stability.’ The people of Gaza, god willing, will be allowed to return and rebuild their homes, but the Palestinians in Gaza and those in the West Bank will still, ceasefire or no, be imprisoned, living under an insidious and slow program designed to immiserate them. Thrall’s other principal achievement, amid the systemic reconstruction, is the depth he gives to his subjects, showing in their backstories slices of Palestinian life that are typically ignored by Western media. Abed has an intense Romeo-and-Juliet style romance with his neighbor in Anata, Ghazl, and the dissolution of their relationship haunts him throughout his life; in the small small world of their community, they can’t help but continue to orbit each other, each meeting charged with a mix of tension and regret, all culminating in a shared moment of grief after the death of Abed’s son: “the bitterness was gone, trivial in the face of Abed’s grief.” Outside and around the tragedy, and within their political situation, these are people trying to live as normal a life as possible, with their own hopes, foibles, loves, and familial dramas. If that sounds obvious, well, it’s Thrall’s persistence in highlighting and expanding these moments that stick out, as if he has to not only give stakes to his subjects but also remind his audience that there is more to them than their oppression, their tragedy, and even beyond their incredible persistence. These are intensely individual lives, ones that must remain precious; as an Israeli Supreme Court Justice writes in denying an appeal to the driver of the truck that caused the bus accident: “Every person is a world and its entirety.” If only his government agreed, if only, if only.
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