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

The school bus accident at the center of the narrative is intended to serve as one example, albeit an especially grisly one, of the harsh conditions facing Palestinians in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which remain under Israeli rule to this day (Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005). Small villages such as Anata struggle to maintain traditional ways of life as Israel expands its apparatus of control. Following the conquest of the territories in 1967, Israel had created a security architecture and networks of dependency so that Palestinians “drove cars on Israel’s multilane highways, bought food at its supermarket chains, and used Hebrew at its office towers, malls, and cinemas” (11). However, following the outbreak of the First Intifada, with its sudden upsurge of widespread resistance, Israel immediately began to clamp down, even as divisions among various Palestinian factions intensified. Young men, in particular, became universally suspect and subject to brutal repression, even for throwing stones or associating with those who did. The majority of an entire generation of males disappeared behind the wire for years at a time, leaving behind precarious families and returning to fraught job prospects as a Byzantine system of color-coded identification cards placed onerous restrictions on employment and movement.