“Nearly 20 minutes had passed since Huda and her staff had come across the burning bus … she and the UN nurses gently carried burned children to waiting volunteer cars…”
The drivers would take the burn victims to “the nearest accessible hospital. For most of them, that was Ramallah. The hospitals in Jerusalem were far better but only those with blue IDs could reach them.”
It goes on for hours and hours. Reading the book, it seems to go on for ever. In a mess of fractured communities, walls, barbed wire and checkpoints, people struggle to bring emergency burn victims to hospital, to find and notify their parents, to help the parents get to, and see, their children…
This is not Gaza post October 7th
It’s the aftermath of a catastrophic school-bus crash near Jerusalem a few years ago. As you follow the stories of all the people involved, you can see – there is no doubt – that long before October 2023, Israel’s apartheid regime was causing misery, oppression and death, all along its dreadful wall.
If one book could cure the “it all started on Oct 7th” mindset, it’s this one.
If you know anyone who’s still determined to see things that way, get them this book. If they won’t read it, read it yourself and tell them about it.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall
Because Hamas?
Incidentally, this book also tells the incidents that led up to the first bus suicide bombing by Hamas – an event which, although undeniably horrible and yes, as politicians are so fond of saying, inexcusable, takes on quite a different flavour when seen in context. Like so many reactions Palestinians have come up with over the years, when you see the whole story you find yourself thinking ‘yes, but what were they supposed to do?’
And you answer yourself — neither Israel nor the West have ever deemed any action by Palestinians legitimate except the one where they quietly get on with being attacked, displaced, confined, deprived and killed.
This is a book well worth reading, while we’re unpicking everything we ever thought we knew about Israel / Palestine. It shows that, just like people everywhere, there were more than a few Israelis and Palestinians who managed, against the odds, to be human, to create friendships and co-operation across the red lines, and it shows that it was always self-serving politicians and officials who stood in the way of that, and built up and fed on the ideas of othering and separation that can only lead to mutually assured destruction.
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Kay
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Kay Green 