A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall

Author:Nathan Thrall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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THE SEPARATION BARRIER was the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history. At the time of the accident, it was in its tenth year of being built, and the cost had reached nearly $3 billion, more than twice the price of the National Water Carrier. Its architect was Dany Tirza, a colonel in the reserves who headed the IDF’s strategic planning in the West Bank for thirteen years. He had taken part in nearly all the territorial negotiations with the Palestinians, preparing the maps for everything from Oslo’s delineation of Palestinian autonomous zones to Israel’s later proposals for a final agreement. Yasser Arafat called him Abu Kharita, father of the map. Dany was sure that Arafat really meant Abu Kharta, father of bullshit.

On the day of the Jaba crash, he was fifty-three years old and the head of the governing body of his settlement, Kfar Adumim. Built on land confiscated from Anata, it was established in 1979, ten years before Dany moved there. He remembered it as barren in its early years, with fewer than a hundred families and not a tree in sight. Now it was a green oasis, filled with flowers, palms, red-roofed villas, and swimming pools, and home to more than 3,400 Jewish Israelis, some of them second- and third-generation settlers. It had also expanded to create two adjoining settlements, Allon and Nofei Prat, which, with a wink, were referred to as “neighborhoods” of Kfar Adumim as a way for Israel to deny it was building new settlements.

Dany had moved to the West Bank because he wanted to be a pioneer, settling parts of the Land of Israel, just as his grandfather had done. Born in Galicia at the turn of the century, Dany’s grandfather was a member of the Marxist-Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. His haredi family rejected Zionism and most of them perished in the Holocaust. Throughout his life, Dany’s grandfather would tell his descendants that his family had died because they refused to listen to him.

Not that he had preached moving to Palestine as a safe haven for Jews. There were better places to go to flee anti-Jewish hatred. Palestine was the destination for just the tiniest fraction of emigrating Jews, a vanguard of ideologically committed Zionists. Early Zionist leaders resented the notion that they chose Palestine out of desperation rather than the idealism of creating a new nation, a new Jew, in their historic homeland. “We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape,” wrote David Ben-Gurion, born in the Kingdom of Poland in 1886. “For many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication.”

Dany’s grandfather arrived in Palestine in 1919, when the Jewish population was less than 10 percent. When he stepped off the ship, he vowed never to leave and he held to his commitment. Despite not having very good Hebrew, he swore to speak no other language. Like many Zionist pioneers, he was fiercely anti-religious, and his son, Dany’s father, had no bar mitzvah. His antipathy toward

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