Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.
David Shulman
On a stormy winter day in February 2012, a Palestinian bus carrying
schoolchildren on an outing collided with an Israeli trailer truck on
the notoriously dangerous Jaba‘ Road near the West Bank village of
A-Ram, not far from Ramallah. The bus burst into flames; six young
children and one teacher were killed and others were seriously injured.
Among the dead was Milad, the five-year-old son of Abed Salama, from the
town of Anata. Nathan Thrall has made the story of that accident and
that family the thread that binds together A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation.
No one wanted to kill those children
along with one of their teachers. Israeli
rescuers and soldiers who finally
reached the accident site did their best
to save the injured. But the central point
of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster,
like today’s ongoing violence in the
Palestinian territories in general, was
a predictable, even inevitable, outcome
of the occupation system in its quotidian
forms. It is a regime of state terror
whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian
land and, whenever possible, the
expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I
have seen this system in operation over
the course of the past twenty- odd year
Over the past several years the
human rights situation in the occupied
territories has continually worsened;
under the present extreme- right
government in Israel, state violence
against Palestinians has escalated
dramatically. In the first half of this
year alone, at least thirty- four Palestinian
children were killed by Israeli
fire. Some of them were allegedly
throwing stones at soldiers; others,
like Muhammad al- Tamimi, age three,
were killed for no intelligible reason.
Brutal military occupation generates
such casualties, just as it generates
resistance on the part of the occupied.
But the most telling change in the
West Bank is the rapid proliferation
of new settler “outposts” (ma’ahazim),
as they are called, usually inhabited by
young men and women imbued with
a messianic ideology, burning racist
hatred of Palestinians, and a proclivity
for extreme violence. We activists
encounter these settlers every week
(some of us almost every day) in the
territories. The outposts, theoretical
The army and the police invariably side
with the settlers, sometimes by passive
acquiescence in their attacks, sometimes
by actively taking part in them.
Lately, settler violence has taken the
form of large- scale predatory attacks
on Palestinian villages—what I, in the
light of my own family history, can only
call pogroms. (My granduncle was murdered
by Cossacks in Ukraine before
World War I.) On the night of February
26 in the northern West Bank, hundreds
of armed settlers descended on the village
of Hawara after two settlers were
shot dead that day by a Palestinian.
Palestinian houses were burned to the
ground, vehicles were torched, innocent
civilians were attacked, and one Palestinian
man—a gentle peace worker, as
it happened—was shot to death. A similar
outrage was perpetrated by Jewish
settlers in the village of Turmus‘ayya on
June 21. Such attacks, usually accompanied
by machine- gun fire, are now
common, though they may vary somewhat
in scale. Palestinian villagers in
Area C of the West Bank, where all the
Jewish settlements and outposts are
located, live in constant fear.
It is important to understand the
political program that underlies this
violence. Meir Blumkin, an activist who
The aim—openly espoused by government
officials such as the minister
of finance, Bezalel Smotrich—is to
pave the way for a second Nakba, or
catastrophe, as the exodus of Palestinians
from their lands in the course of
the 1948 war is referred to in Arabic.
If life for Palestinians in the territories
becomes unbearable, they will, the
settlers think, just go away—maybe to
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or some other
Arab country. This sick fantasy turns
up regularly on the settler websites.
However, no sane person believes
that Israel will be able to expel all
eight million or so Palestinians from
the land west of the Jordan River (including
the approximately two million
Arab citizens of Israel, a fifth of the
population of the state). What might
be possible, though, and is likely the
strategic plan thought up by sections
of the Israeli security system and pursued
by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government,
is to clear out all Area C’s
Palestinian inhabitants and to cluster
them in small, impoverished, and
discontinuous enclaves in Areas A,
under direct Palestinian rule, and B,
under mixed Palestinian- Israeli control.
Think of this as the Gazafication of
what is left of the Palestinian West
Bank. Area C would be officially, though
of course illegally, annexed to Israel.
De facto, this has already happened, as
anyone with direct experience of these
areas can testify. In effect, the second
Nakba is already underway.
It is happening slowly, piece by piece,
and largely under the radar. Here’s
an example. The beautiful village of
Ein Samiya, not far from Ramallah,
was for years subject to continuous
settler harassment. First the Civil
Administration issued a demolition
order for the village school—by far
the most impressive and important
building there. An array of European
sponsors had supplied the funds to
build it. The villagers went to court,
and on August 10, 2022, the Jerusalem
District Court decreed, unsurprisingly,
that the school could indeed be demolished.
In January the High Court
of Justice put a freeze on executing
this ruling; but on August 17, 2023, the
army destroyed the school.
Meanwhile, over recent months,
attacks by settlers intensified. They
frequently invaded the village, beat
and stoned its residents, and brought
their own sheep into the Palestinians’
fields, thereby destroying the growing
crops—in short, they routinely terrorized
their Palestinian neighbors. The
army and police, as usual, did nothing
to stop any of this. What finally broke
the villagers’ spirit came after a night
when armed settlers came into the village,
supposedly looking for sheep that
they claimed had been stolen. They
I was there on May 24, 2023.3 I saw
the last Palestinian trucks leaving
with the few possessions the villagers
could salvage. The entire village—
twenty- seven extended families, over
two hundred people—evacuated their
homes and moved to various sites in
the territories. Most of them are now
living on an arid hilltop in Area B. They
believe that there they may be spared
the constant raids by the settlers, but
I’m not so sure about that; only a few
miles away are outposts filled with
notoriously cruel settlers who pay no
heed to the invisible boundary between
Areas B and C. I’ve seen rather a lot
of heartbreaking scenes in the Palestinian
territories over the years, but
the flight from Ein Samiya was one of
the hardest to watch. It goes without
saying that the villagers’ lands have
now been appropriated by the settlers,
with the collusion of the army,
the police, the courts, and, not least,
the government.
The fate of Ein Samiya is shared by
many other Palestinian sites. In the
South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages
are in imminent danger of expulsion,
with the backing of the High Court
of Justice; the excuse is that they are
located within an arbitrarily imposed
training zone for the army. Al- Khan
al- Ahmar, slightly east of Jerusalem,
was on the verge of being destroyed—
the army bulldozers had already begun
their work—when the International
Criminal Court in The Hague declared
that a war crime was being committed.
That stopped the destruction for the
moment, though government ministers
have been demanding that the army
finish the job. The village of Ras al- Tin,
not far from Ein Samiya, was emptied
of most of its inhabitants after savage
acts by the army. (Among other things,
soldiers emptied and confiscated the
large water tanks that made life sustainable
in the stony desert hills.) Denying
water to Palestinian shepherds
in the Jordan Valley, where temperatures
in summer can pass 120 degrees
Fahrenheit, is a standard tactic employed
by the army. You can’t survive
there without water. These are random
names from a longer list.
In Thrall’s words, a “hidden universe
of suffering” touches “nearly every
Palestinian home.” There is no way to
justify any of it, unless one thinks that
ensuring eternal Jewish supremacy
over all of Palestine, and with it an
Israeli version of apartheid, is a worthy
objective. The moral foundation of
the State of Israel has been severely
compromised, perhaps beyond repair,
and exchanged for the horrific reality
of the occupation, which is further entrenched
with each passing hour.
To perpetuate that reality is, to
no small extent, the real rationale
of the antidemocratic legislation
limiting the power of the Supreme
Court that the Netanyahu government
pushed through the Knesset on July 24,
despite weeks of huge demonstrations
against it. Right- wing fanatics think,
with some reason, that the Supreme
Court is the last remaining obstacle
to the annexation of the territories
(although its record on Palestinian
matters is far from good). Hence the
attempt to undermine the court, indeed
to sabotage the state’s entire
legal system and thus to give the government
almost unlimited power to
do whatever it pleases. In the face of
overwhelming opposition to this move
from critical sectors of Israeli society
(notably the army, air force pilots in the
reserves, the major secret security organizations,
and the tech industry) and
from abroad, the legislation abolishes
the so- called reasonableness clause,
which gave the Supreme Court the authority
to overrule government decisions
on grounds that they are patently
unreasonable—for example, when the
prime minister appoints to a ministerial
position a politician repeatedly
convicted for taking bribes (this is not
a theoretical example).
The Supreme Court will pronounce
on the legality of the new law; major
figures in the government, including the
Speaker of the Knesset, have announced
in advance that they will not honor the
court’s decision if it invalidates the law,
and Netanyahu has more than hinted
that he, too, will defy the court. Israel is
in the throes of a constitutional crisis
(in the absence of a constitution), and
the threat to democracy, coming from
the government and the slim rightwing
majority in the Knesset, is without
precedent in the country’s history.
For Abed Salama and his family
and for many others who have suffered
unthinkable losses, there will
be no release from pain. As long as
the occupation continues on its selfdestructive
course, there will be many
more innocent victims like Milad. It
is obvious, though many refuse to see
it, that the only way Israel can survive
in the long run is to come to terms
with the Palestinian national movement—
that is, to make peace, an honest
and generous peace.
I am certain that some form of mutual
accord is still possible, though I
may not live to see it.Palestine is in
disarray, after decades of Israeli occupation
and the deliberate erosion of
Palestinian civil society and institutions
by Israel; but there are still serious
Palestinian partners for peace,
including some whom many of us have
known. (Some important figures, like
Marwan Barghouti, one of the leaders
of the second intifada, are in Israeli
jails.) On the grassroots level, in
the villages, most Palestinians want
what most Israelis want—a livable life,
without war. They also rightly want,
and some day will certainly achieve,
equality and an end to the current regime
of discrimination, oppression,
and constant threat. As my shepherd
friend Jamal likes to say, “We were
born to live in peace with one another.
We think that hell lies somewhere
beneath the earth, and heaven
lies above us. But in fact people create
their own hell on earth, when paradise,
right here, could be ours.” .
I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.
There is indeed something emblematic about the accident. The Jaba‘ Road is entirely within Area C, the 62 percent of the occupied West Bank that is under full Israeli control, where today there are close to two hundred settlements and settler outposts. Because of the nightmarish maze of roads in the Ramallah area—some of them closed altogether to Palestinians, others blocked by army checkpoints to keep Palestinians without special permits from entering Israel—rescuers were slow in reaching the site of the accident. They were also slow in evacuating the injured, many of them badly burned, to hospitals in Ramallah or inside Israel. Fire trucks, army medics, and ambulances were only a mile or two away in nearby Jewish settlements but failed to arrive quickly. Israeli ambulances coming from Jerusalem were held up for critical minutes at the checkpoints. Moreover, Palestinian neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Separation Barrier had (and some still have) almost no emergency or police services.
As one of the Palestinian rescuers at the site of the accident later formulated what had happened: “If it had been two Palestinian children throwing stones on the road, the army would have been there in no time. When Jews are in danger, Israel sends helicopters. But a burning bus full of Palestinian children….”
Thrall takes his readers through Abed Salama’s biography in the years preceding the tragedy and its aftermath. It’s a Palestinian life, in many ways typical: Salama’s passionate childhood romance and its failure to reach fulfillment because the prospective bride’s father was opposed; his participation in Palestinian politics and resistance on the village level, including his involvement with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; his consequent arrest and imprisonment; the torture followed by the much longer and harsher imprisonment of his older brother Wa’el, who had been recruited by Fatah to deliver hidden explosives; the many melodramas in his extended family, such as desperate attempts to find employment and occasional violent clashes between cousins and in-laws; his marriages; the birth of his children; and then, at the end, the desolation of a loss that could have been averted. Israelis, some of them from the higher echelons of the army and government, also appear in the story, their acts and decisions interwoven with those of Salama’s people. Hovering over this rich tapestry, moment by moment, as in any Palestinian biography, lurks the dark threat of mortal danger, endless insult, and despair.
One could read the book as a précis of
modern Palestinian history embedded
in the personal memories of many individuals,
each of them drawn in stark,
telling detail. To get to know them even
a little is a rare gift, far more useful
than the many standard, distanced histories
of Palestine. Critical junctures
such as the first and second intifadas,
the Oslo years of the early 1990s when
formal agreements between Israel and
the Palestine Liberation Organization
were signed, and the building of the
Separation Barrier between Israel and
the Palestinian West Bank come to life
through the experiences of these seemingly
ordinary—in some cases clearly
extraordinary—people. Thrall was a
regular visitor to the Salamas’ home
over a period of three years. He is the
right person to tell their story.
modern Palestinian history embedded
in the personal memories of many individuals,
each of them drawn in stark,
telling detail. To get to know them even
a little is a rare gift, far more useful
than the many standard, distanced histories
of Palestine. Critical junctures
such as the first and second intifadas,
the Oslo years of the early 1990s when
formal agreements between Israel and
the Palestine Liberation Organization
were signed, and the building of the
Separation Barrier between Israel and
the Palestinian West Bank come to life
through the experiences of these seemingly
ordinary—in some cases clearly
extraordinary—people. Thrall was a
regular visitor to the Salamas’ home
over a period of three years. He is the
right person to tell their story.
No one wanted to kill those children
along with one of their teachers. Israeli
rescuers and soldiers who finally
reached the accident site did their best
to save the injured. But the central point
of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster,
like today’s ongoing violence in the
Palestinian territories in general, was
a predictable, even inevitable, outcome
of the occupation system in its quotidian
forms. It is a regime of state terror
whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian
land and, whenever possible, the
expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I
have seen this system in operation over
the course of the past twenty- odd year
One of the mysteries attendant on
Israel’s decades- long occupation
of the Palestinian West Bank (and indirectly
of Gaza) is that relatively few
people know that reality for what it is.
Mainstream Israelis by and large don’t
want to know, though the West Bank
is only a few miles from the big Israeli
cities. Outside of Israel, an efficient
smokescreen created by the Israeli
government has largely hidden that
reality from the world. Those who do
know it well, from the inside, are Palestinians
living under the occupation
and human rights and peace activists,
both Israeli and Palestinian, who are
regularly present there.
Israel’s decades- long occupation
of the Palestinian West Bank (and indirectly
of Gaza) is that relatively few
people know that reality for what it is.
Mainstream Israelis by and large don’t
want to know, though the West Bank
is only a few miles from the big Israeli
cities. Outside of Israel, an efficient
smokescreen created by the Israeli
government has largely hidden that
reality from the world. Those who do
know it well, from the inside, are Palestinians
living under the occupation
and human rights and peace activists,
both Israeli and Palestinian, who are
regularly present there.
Over the past several years the
human rights situation in the occupied
territories has continually worsened;
under the present extreme- right
government in Israel, state violence
against Palestinians has escalated
dramatically. In the first half of this
year alone, at least thirty- four Palestinian
children were killed by Israeli
fire. Some of them were allegedly
throwing stones at soldiers; others,
like Muhammad al- Tamimi, age three,
were killed for no intelligible reason.
Brutal military occupation generates
such casualties, just as it generates
resistance on the part of the occupied.
But the most telling change in the
West Bank is the rapid proliferation
of new settler “outposts” (ma’ahazim),
as they are called, usually inhabited by
young men and women imbued with
a messianic ideology, burning racist
hatred of Palestinians, and a proclivity
for extreme violence. We activists
encounter these settlers every week
(some of us almost every day) in the
territories. The outposts, theoretical
ly illegal under Israeli law, have proved
to be an effective mechanism for taking
over large stretches of Palestinian
land; the settlers and their representatives
in the government have made no
attempt to conceal this explicit goal.
to be an effective mechanism for taking
over large stretches of Palestinian
land; the settlers and their representatives
in the government have made no
attempt to conceal this explicit goal.
The army and the police invariably side
with the settlers, sometimes by passive
acquiescence in their attacks, sometimes
by actively taking part in them.
Lately, settler violence has taken the
form of large- scale predatory attacks
on Palestinian villages—what I, in the
light of my own family history, can only
call pogroms. (My granduncle was murdered
by Cossacks in Ukraine before
World War I.) On the night of February
26 in the northern West Bank, hundreds
of armed settlers descended on the village
of Hawara after two settlers were
shot dead that day by a Palestinian.
Palestinian houses were burned to the
ground, vehicles were torched, innocent
civilians were attacked, and one Palestinian
man—a gentle peace worker, as
it happened—was shot to death. A similar
outrage was perpetrated by Jewish
settlers in the village of Turmus‘ayya on
June 21. Such attacks, usually accompanied
by machine- gun fire, are now
common, though they may vary somewhat
in scale. Palestinian villagers in
Area C of the West Bank, where all the
Jewish settlements and outposts are
located, live in constant fear.
It is important to understand the
political program that underlies this
violence. Meir Blumkin, an activist who
was in Turmus‘ayya during the attack,
summed it up on Facebook on June 24:
Palestine is on fire. Settler outposts
growing in number and
size in the West Bank on a daily
basis. Settlers storming into villages,
setting fires to homes and
cars, firing live ammunition. This
is how you pave the way to forced
expulsion. Permits, bulldozers,
arson, guns.
summed it up on Facebook on June 24:
Palestine is on fire. Settler outposts
growing in number and
size in the West Bank on a daily
basis. Settlers storming into villages,
setting fires to homes and
cars, firing live ammunition. This
is how you pave the way to forced
expulsion. Permits, bulldozers,
arson, guns.
The aim—openly espoused by government
officials such as the minister
of finance, Bezalel Smotrich—is to
pave the way for a second Nakba, or
catastrophe, as the exodus of Palestinians
from their lands in the course of
the 1948 war is referred to in Arabic.
If life for Palestinians in the territories
becomes unbearable, they will, the
settlers think, just go away—maybe to
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or some other
Arab country. This sick fantasy turns
up regularly on the settler websites.
However, no sane person believes
that Israel will be able to expel all
eight million or so Palestinians from
the land west of the Jordan River (including
the approximately two million
Arab citizens of Israel, a fifth of the
population of the state). What might
be possible, though, and is likely the
strategic plan thought up by sections
of the Israeli security system and pursued
by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government,
is to clear out all Area C’s
Palestinian inhabitants and to cluster
them in small, impoverished, and
discontinuous enclaves in Areas A,
under direct Palestinian rule, and B,
under mixed Palestinian- Israeli control.
Think of this as the Gazafication of
what is left of the Palestinian West
Bank. Area C would be officially, though
of course illegally, annexed to Israel.
De facto, this has already happened, as
anyone with direct experience of these
areas can testify. In effect, the second
Nakba is already underway.
It is happening slowly, piece by piece,
and largely under the radar. Here’s
an example. The beautiful village of
Ein Samiya, not far from Ramallah,
was for years subject to continuous
settler harassment. First the Civil
Administration issued a demolition
order for the village school—by far
the most impressive and important
building there. An array of European
sponsors had supplied the funds to
build it. The villagers went to court,
and on August 10, 2022, the Jerusalem
District Court decreed, unsurprisingly,
that the school could indeed be demolished.
In January the High Court
of Justice put a freeze on executing
this ruling; but on August 17, 2023, the
army destroyed the school.
Meanwhile, over recent months,
attacks by settlers intensified. They
frequently invaded the village, beat
and stoned its residents, and brought
their own sheep into the Palestinians’
fields, thereby destroying the growing
crops—in short, they routinely terrorized
their Palestinian neighbors. The
army and police, as usual, did nothing
to stop any of this. What finally broke
the villagers’ spirit came after a night
when armed settlers came into the village,
supposedly looking for sheep that
they claimed had been stolen. They
couldn’t find any. The next morning,
one of the villagers took his flock out
to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested
him, announced that the entire
flock—thirty- seven sheep—had
been stolen, and handed it over to the
settlers. Meanwhile, settlers blocked
the access roads to the village and
stoned Palestinians trying to reach
their homes. This went on for five consecutive
days.
one of the villagers took his flock out
to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested
him, announced that the entire
flock—thirty- seven sheep—had
been stolen, and handed it over to the
settlers. Meanwhile, settlers blocked
the access roads to the village and
stoned Palestinians trying to reach
their homes. This went on for five consecutive
days.
I was there on May 24, 2023.3 I saw
the last Palestinian trucks leaving
with the few possessions the villagers
could salvage. The entire village—
twenty- seven extended families, over
two hundred people—evacuated their
homes and moved to various sites in
the territories. Most of them are now
living on an arid hilltop in Area B. They
believe that there they may be spared
the constant raids by the settlers, but
I’m not so sure about that; only a few
miles away are outposts filled with
notoriously cruel settlers who pay no
heed to the invisible boundary between
Areas B and C. I’ve seen rather a lot
of heartbreaking scenes in the Palestinian
territories over the years, but
the flight from Ein Samiya was one of
the hardest to watch. It goes without
saying that the villagers’ lands have
now been appropriated by the settlers,
with the collusion of the army,
the police, the courts, and, not least,
the government.
The fate of Ein Samiya is shared by
many other Palestinian sites. In the
South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages
are in imminent danger of expulsion,
with the backing of the High Court
of Justice; the excuse is that they are
located within an arbitrarily imposed
training zone for the army. Al- Khan
al- Ahmar, slightly east of Jerusalem,
was on the verge of being destroyed—
the army bulldozers had already begun
their work—when the International
Criminal Court in The Hague declared
that a war crime was being committed.
That stopped the destruction for the
moment, though government ministers
have been demanding that the army
finish the job. The village of Ras al- Tin,
not far from Ein Samiya, was emptied
of most of its inhabitants after savage
acts by the army. (Among other things,
soldiers emptied and confiscated the
large water tanks that made life sustainable
in the stony desert hills.) Denying
water to Palestinian shepherds
in the Jordan Valley, where temperatures
in summer can pass 120 degrees
Fahrenheit, is a standard tactic employed
by the army. You can’t survive
there without water. These are random
names from a longer list.
In Thrall’s words, a “hidden universe
of suffering” touches “nearly every
Palestinian home.” There is no way to
justify any of it, unless one thinks that
ensuring eternal Jewish supremacy
over all of Palestine, and with it an
Israeli version of apartheid, is a worthy
objective. The moral foundation of
the State of Israel has been severely
compromised, perhaps beyond repair,
and exchanged for the horrific reality
of the occupation, which is further entrenched
with each passing hour.
To perpetuate that reality is, to
no small extent, the real rationale
of the antidemocratic legislation
limiting the power of the Supreme
Court that the Netanyahu government
pushed through the Knesset on July 24,
despite weeks of huge demonstrations
against it. Right- wing fanatics think,
with some reason, that the Supreme
Court is the last remaining obstacle
to the annexation of the territories
(although its record on Palestinian
matters is far from good). Hence the
attempt to undermine the court, indeed
to sabotage the state’s entire
legal system and thus to give the government
almost unlimited power to
do whatever it pleases. In the face of
overwhelming opposition to this move
from critical sectors of Israeli society
(notably the army, air force pilots in the
reserves, the major secret security organizations,
and the tech industry) and
from abroad, the legislation abolishes
the so- called reasonableness clause,
which gave the Supreme Court the authority
to overrule government decisions
on grounds that they are patently
unreasonable—for example, when the
prime minister appoints to a ministerial
position a politician repeatedly
convicted for taking bribes (this is not
a theoretical example).
The Supreme Court will pronounce
on the legality of the new law; major
figures in the government, including the
Speaker of the Knesset, have announced
in advance that they will not honor the
court’s decision if it invalidates the law,
and Netanyahu has more than hinted
that he, too, will defy the court. Israel is
in the throes of a constitutional crisis
(in the absence of a constitution), and
the threat to democracy, coming from
the government and the slim rightwing
majority in the Knesset, is without
precedent in the country’s history.
For Abed Salama and his family
and for many others who have suffered
unthinkable losses, there will
be no release from pain. As long as
the occupation continues on its selfdestructive
course, there will be many
more innocent victims like Milad. It
is obvious, though many refuse to see
it, that the only way Israel can survive
in the long run is to come to terms
with the Palestinian national movement—
that is, to make peace, an honest
and generous peace.
I am certain that some form of mutual
accord is still possible, though I
may not live to see it.Palestine is in
disarray, after decades of Israeli occupation
and the deliberate erosion of
Palestinian civil society and institutions
by Israel; but there are still serious
Palestinian partners for peace,
including some whom many of us have
known. (Some important figures, like
Marwan Barghouti, one of the leaders
of the second intifada, are in Israeli
jails.) On the grassroots level, in
the villages, most Palestinians want
what most Israelis want—a livable life,
without war. They also rightly want,
and some day will certainly achieve,
equality and an end to the current regime
of discrimination, oppression,
and constant threat. As my shepherd
friend Jamal likes to say, “We were
born to live in peace with one another.
We think that hell lies somewhere
beneath the earth, and heaven
lies above us. But in fact people create
their own hell on earth, when paradise,
right here, could be ours.” .
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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