PALESTINIANS: THE TEXTURE OF INJUSTICE

Perceptions are formed and shaped by experience.  Nathan Thrall’s A Day in The Life of Abed Salama (Penguin 2023) offers a vivid vision of the world of Abed Salama, a Palestinian father from a traditional village, close to East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.  In the words of Alex Preston of The Observer, this book “speaks with truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history”.

Unlike other Europeans most British people have no historical memory of Occupation.  Most of us – Irish immigrants excepted – don’t have that spontaneous sympathy based on historic experience of political domination.   South Africans have it, derived from apartheid, passionately enough to take a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
 
The conflict over land between Israelis and Palestinians produces two powerful and contrasting emotional responses. The first is sympathy for Israel rooted in the horror of the Holocaust and a European history of Christian pogroms inherited by post-war generations.  The second is sympathy for the plight of Palestinians confronted with the might of a US-supported Jewish State blocking their right to self-determination and punishing attempts to achieve it.

Emotion can open the mind to empathy and imagination, or to  hatred.   Consider the emotional impact of the savage Hamas attack of 7th October and the taking of hostages on the many Jewish people for whom the state of Israel is a powerful symbol of safety.  Consider the emotional impact as the texture of a Palestinian society is torn asunder, Gaza a killing ground, casualties in the West Bank growing daily.  Which is uppermost in the minds of people in Britain, in many cases, will depend on who is winning the propaganda war  accompanying the actual conflict, or simply their personal identity.

The BBC tries hard to maintain balance between these two perspectives, encouraging the listener or viewer to imagine both, better to understand what the conflict is about and how it might end.  (Though only the simplistic story of good allies, some-going-too-far, versus bad terrorists, all-beyond-the-pale, appears admissible to its critics.)  Whilst TV images of grieving Palestinians in extremis, filmed in a bombed-out wasteland, or Hamas footage of the 7 October massacre of Jews, can elicit a range of emotions, empathy is not necessarily the most powerful of them.  A focus on the present, on news, without historic context does not help understanding.

The Life of Abed Salama was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2023.  Thrall, an accomplished writer, is a contributor to several upmarket US and British periodicals. A Jewish American living in Jerusalem, he also lived for a while in Gaza working from 2010 to 2020 for International Alert (an NGO dedicated to “solving the root causes of conflict across divides”) leading its Arab Israeli Project.
  
Thrall’s narrative pivots around a 2012 bus crash north of Jerusalem that killed a teacher and six children, several horribly burnt, one of whom, Milad, is the son of Abed Salama. Thrall knew Abed well and his story is knitted into the history of Israeli Occupation in a matter- of- fact way, Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) roadblocks, checkpoints and boundary walls taken entirely for granted. 

The much-delayed appearance of firefighters and ambulances at the scene of the accident reminded me of entering Israel from Jordan by the Allenby Bridge in the early 1990s.   I emerged opposite a large military control tower.  After time in South African-occupied Namibia in the 1980s I recognised an occupied territory.  And waiting by the bridge I watched with surprise a Palestinian ambulance transferring a patient to an Israeli one. All of this would have been wallpaper for Thrall.
 
For a Palestinian, transport and the geography of Jewish settlements add hours to travel time and complexity compared with the experience of an Israeli citizen.  There are three West Bank zones each with their different rules plus Palestinians’ different coloured identity cards, determining where you can and can’t go.  The movement of people and goods, both essential to economic development are strictly controlled and obstructed.

The office of the Quartet Representative (UN, US, EU and Russia) was created in November 2015 to develop the institutions and economy of the Palestinian territories. The movement of Palestinians living in Gaza, and of goods, was especially restricted requiring a perpetual  struggle with the Israeli authorities to keep open Gaza’s border crossings.  The much publicised tunnels were dug to allow the import and export of  goods sustaining the vestiges of an economy .   They also served as the means to import weapons and as arsenals.
 
Thrall is comfortable with cultural difference between Arab and Western societies. Muslim prayer, piety and practice structure time and daily life.   And honour, a prime virtue, is paramount.  The Palestinian dramatis personae in his book mainly belong to two large extended families who do not intermarry. Marriages themselves are strongly influenced by family interests and parental guidance, not romance. Abed himself as a young man had fallen in love with Ghazl a member of the Hamdan family, he a Salama, a Romeo and Juliet story.
   
Abed’s membership of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) also had implications for personal relationships. Imprisoned for a while because of his DFLP activities, like many, Abed was contemptuous of Fatah and its role in policing the scattered Area B zones on behalf of the Israelis. On the other hand,  Abed’s first cousin, Ibrahim Salama became head of the Palestinian Interior Ministry for Jerusalem.  And he maintained reciprocal, supportive relationship with his Israeli counterparts.  The bond with Dany Tirza and Colonel Saar Tzur, provides the reader many  insights.  Also unexpected, on the Jewish side of the divide is early Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European Jews)  discrimination against Mizrahi, Moroccan Jews, officially led by Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion.

Thrall is not writing to make political points, daily life makes the points for him.  In the first  intifada (1987-1993), Abed was detained for his participation: “The plainclothes captains of Israel’s intelligence service, the Shabak, tortured him in the usual method, known as shabih ....hands shackled to a pipe high above him so that only his toes touched the ground, pulling his limbs as if on a vertical rack”.   Written like remedial instructions from  a physiotherapist.  Everyday stuff. 

The Life of Abed Salama describes what is happening on the ground, the relentless expropriation of Palestinian land, destruction of property and exclusion of more and more Palestinians from areas claimed by Jews.  Thrall’s big picture is of cycles of violence, people somehow getting used to it, while others by their violent actions ensure that peace eludes the peacemakers.   Update and add in Muslim and Jewish religious extremists in power on each side, to account for the contemporary catastrophe.
 
Thrall’s book captures the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of a Palestinian community under occupation.  Its disciplined prose conveys a deep empathy which many readers will share.  It offers no solutions to an intractable problem.  But as much as any words can, it may help some readers to beware of importing a tragic conflict from the Middle East to communities in Britain.

See TheArticle 22/10/2024