Reviewed By KAY MATTHEWS
Abed Salama lives in Anata in the West Bank. Author Nathan Thrall, an American journalist, lives in Jerusalem. Thrall can travel wherever he wants in Israel. Salama, a Palestinian, has to have a permit—and he often finds himself with the wrong kind of permit—to travel outside the separation wall between the West Bank and Israel and can’t enter the city of Jerusalem. This is the story of the day his five-year old son Milad goes on a field trip with his school but never arrives at the theme park: the school bus is struck by semitrailer and bursts into flames. By the time Abed hears of the accident and arrives at the scene, all the children are gone, taken either to morgues or hospitals.
Why does it take so long for Abed to arrive at the scene of the accident? Why does it take so long to find where they’ve taken his son, if he’s alive, or his body, if he’s dead? The answers to these questions are woven into the fabric of Thrall’s deep dive into the complicated history, geography, politics, and culture of the West Bank and Israel.
Abed’s story begins in Dahiyat-a-Salaam, a neighborhood of Anata, once a rural village of olive trees and open fields governed by Jordan until the 1967 war when Israeli conquered the West Bank, annexed part of the town to Jerusalem, built a separation wall, and began seizing land for Israeli settlements with separated highways and military checkpoints. Anata found itself increasingly urbanized but culturally retained Palestinian social mores.
After the 1987 Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, and the repressive Israeli backlash, Abed joined the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a Marxist-Leninist faction of the PLO, in opposition to Fatah, another faction led by Yassar Arafat, which led to numerous confrontations. Abed ended up in prison for a short period of time—six months—and when released, was given an ID that identified him as a former prisoner that restricted his movements and largely confined him to Anata.
Abed goes on to marry, several times, and have children, which Thrall presents in its cultural context, very different from what Westerners are familiar with. With a growing family, Abed becomes more focused on work than the DFLP, but it’s impossible to live a normal life in the West Bank without a super awareness of the political situation. To more closely examine this Thrall introduces more characters, like Huda Dahbour, an endocrinologist and manager of a mobile health clinic run by UNRWA. She began working at UNRWA’s Jerusalem headquarters until Israel made it impossible for her to enter the city so she then opened her clinic in the West Bank.
Thrall describes the ridiculous route Huda and her clinic staff must travel to reach the Bedouin encampment, Khan al-Ahmar, a final location after years of displacement. This encampment was actually on Abed’s grandfather’s land who gave them permission to live there to make its expropriation by Israel more difficult. Huda traveled the Jaba road that had originally been built to allow Jewish settlers to travel to and from Jerusalem without having to enter Palestinian Ramallah. As Thrall describes it: “It was one of many such bypass roads, designed to reduce commute times for the settlers, give them a sense of safety, and create the illusion of a continuous Jewish presence from the city to the settlements. After Israel built new bypass roads, this one came to be used mostly by Palestinians.” It served 200,000 people with military checkpoints at both ends, which created terrible traffic jams, especially during rush hour (often called “death road”).
Jaba road is where the bus crashed. Huda and her staff arrived and with Salem, a neighbor, and other onlookers, began pulling children off the burning bus. Salem even climbed into the burning bus to get children out. Huda and staff head to Ramallah, where she assumes most of the children will be taken, and thus begins the horrific story of the aftermath. Although the crash occurred in Area C, the more than half of the West Bank that remained under total Israeli control—governed by its army, patrolled by its police, and within the jurisdiction of its emergency services—none of those services were first responders. By the time the first Palestinian paramedic was on the scene, most of the children had been taken in cars to various hospitals. Dead bodies were on the ground, but the paramedic loaded a teacher and the bus driver into his ambulance. His only option was to take them to Ramalla because checkpoints on the way to Jerusalem would waste valuable time.
Other characters who arrive at the accident site illuminate the incredibly complex relationships involved in the society: the first Israeli on the scene, head of its national emergency medical service; ZAKA, the ultra-Orthodox or haredi volunteer organization that collects dead bodies for burial (the haredi reject the creation of Israel as a Jewish religious state); the Israeli Defense Force (IDF); all trying to figure out who had authority at the crash site.
Thrall also devotes a section of the book to a man named Dany Tirza, a colonel in the reserves who was essentially the architect of the separation barrier, the wall, whose cost had reached $3 billion. His grandfather was a haredi born in Galicia, whose family had rejected Zionism and perished in the Holocaust. But his grandfather also rejected the idea of Palestine as a safe haven for Jews. Thrall quotes David Ben-Gurion, the first president of Israel: “We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape. For many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication.” This section also includes Ibrahim Salama, Abed’s cousin, who became a member of Fatah and supported the 1993 Oslo Accords that would supposedly lead to the creation of a Palestinian state until it became obvious that with the building of the separation wall that would never happen.
Many of the children were moved from the hospital in Ramallah to hospitals in Jerusalem that had more sophisticated medical services. By late afternoon most parents had found their children, but Abed and his wife Haifa didn’t find out about Milad until the next day. He died in the fire.
In the Epilogue, Thrall tells two stories of Israeli TV shows produced by Arik Weiss, who was considered a left-wing Israeli reporter. In the first show Weiss interviewed some of the young Israelis who had posted online comments celebrating the death of the kindergartners. Dismayed by what they said—“It’s just a bus full of Palestinians. No big deal. Too bad more didn’t die”—he wanted to find out why young Israelis, who were born after the Second Intifada and living in a time of relative peace, would be more racist than older generations. One high school student who faced the camera told Weiss, “Those little Palestinians could be the terrorist attacks of the future.” The second program shows Weiss meeting two settlers who live near the accident site. They had erected a sign on the road that offered condolences in Hebrew and Arabic. Weiss takes them to Abed’s home where they present him with $1,000 collected for grieving families. Weiss says in a voiceover: “A kilometer and a half separate the settlement of Anatot [where the settlers live] from the village of Anata. Five minutes’ drive, a totally different world.”
La Jicarita 
Great review Kay. I put it on hold at library — I want to read it.