The article below appears in the January/February 2024 edition of Against the Current (ATC). The author, Alan Wald, is an editor of that publication and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace since 2016. ATC is a journal sponsored by the organization Solidarity. Wald is also professor emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Wald begins his essay as a review of the recently published book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall. From that starting point, he addresses some of the most urgent political issues arising from Israel’s increasingly genocidal assault on Gaza in response to the gruesome October 7 attack led by Hamas.

Wald writes: “Yes, antisemitism of the past was horrific, and new manifestations remain a real threat in the world that must be opposed; but the foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different. The Holocaust was about a marginalized, powerless group facing an all-powerful army and state violence; today it is the Palestinians who are stateless and the Israelis who have the advanced military that places the Palestinians under siege and occupation.”

Wald’s article echoes some important observations made by Marxist scholars Isaac Deutscher and George Novack more than 50 years ago and amplifies them in light of decades of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since, as well as the ongoing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel.^[1]

Of particular interest is the section discussing “The Right of Resistance” of oppressed peoples. Wald explains, “Radicals know that the right of armed struggle, which the Palestinians surely have, does not translate into ‘anything goes.’ Palestinian resistance is necessary, and a willingness to fight back should be championed. Nevertheless, robotically approving what Hamas did after its stunning breakout from the imprisonment of Gaza is as insupportable as endorsing the Hamas suicide bombings of buses during the Second intifada of 2000-2005.”

Wald’s article will be of interest to anyone opposed to the current horror unfolding each day in Gaza as well as those interested in learning more about the history of the issues posed today.

The article is republished by permission of the author. The original appeared here. The introduction, additional sub-headings, additional photos and captions, and footnotes are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing the essay in two parts, the first of which follows.

(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found here.)

By Alan Wald

For those readers unfamiliar with the universe of suffering that structures Palestinian life on the West Bank, prepare yourself for a journey into a human-made political hell as you plunge into the pages of Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama The term “West Bank” refers to a land-locked area the size of Delaware near the Mediterranean Sea that has been militarily commanded by the Israeli state ever since it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 “Six Day War.”

From that time on, the three million Palestinian residents of the West Bank have endured a subjugation that circumscribes their everyday lives through laws governing the right to movement and regulating everything from where one can live to what personal identification cards one can hold; families who reside just a mile away from each other are separated by checkpoints and partitions.

Added to this is an ever-tightening control of Palestinian quotidian existence through violent night raids, arrests, shootings, air strikes, military dividing lines, torching of fields, vandalization of property, and the building of more and more Israeli settlements. Due to the alteration of demographics and transferring of populations, these settlements are considered illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and many declarations of the United Nations Security Council.

By now we have all the ingredients for a pressure cooker destined to explode, and it is impossible to predict what will happen in the coming weeks and months in connection with the situation in Gaza. There is an uptick in settler violence with hundreds of Palestinians being killed and fear of a wider war.

Most people have only a hazy picture of the West Bank, which came under partial civil control of the Palestinian National Authority (run by Fatah, a nationalist and social democratic political party) in certain areas (those known as “A” and “B”) following the 1993-95 Oslo Accords. The landscape consists of 165 “islands” of Palestinian towns and refugee camps surrounded by a contiguous area of 230 Israeli “settlements;” the latter include armed Jewish supremacists fanatically devoted to a complete takeover of what they insist are their ancient biblical homelands of “Judea” and “Samaria.”

In the new millennium, Israel built a barrier, which they call the “Separation Fence” and that Palestinians have named a “Wall of Apartheid;” it is now 440 miles long cutting through, encircling, and imprisoning the Palestinian territory under occupation. Two sets of rules exist: one for the settlers, who are treated with all the rights of full Israeli citizens, and another for the Palestinians, who face a draconian array of protocols for the occupied.

The situation has many similarities to the Gaza strip, although Israel has controlled all access to Gaza through a blockade since 2005 and Hamas (a spin-off of the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood) has governed it since 2007.

Abandon All Hope

After the wall was built, Palestinians have had to spend hours waiting at barriers to get from Bethlehem to East Jerusalem, a part of occupied Palestine with 361,700 Palestinians and 234,000 Israeli Jewish settlers, just six miles away.

This bureaucratic nightmare is in the context of an Israeli state of 9.73 million inhabitants (73.5% Jewish) that is an economic success, the world’s leading start-up nation with a GDP per capita surpassing France and the UK. It is a wealthy, nuclear-armed military super-power sitting right next to five million dispossessed and stateless Palestinians who exist in abject poverty and hopelessness.

As we near the end of the sixth decade of this illegal West Bank occupation, one might well expect to see “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” inscribed on any entrance gate of what amounts to nothing less than Israel’s grotesque enactment of Foucault’s “biopolitics.” Foucault used this term to describe how states exercise control over a subjugated, large population through institutions that regulate individual bodies and aggregate them into groups, which must be managed.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see Nathan Thrall’s non-fiction narrative as simply a trauma dump. There are, after all, moments of family and comradely affection, joyful cultural celebrations, and actions of resistance.

True, your guide through numerous Dantean circles of dread and distress in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama won’t be the poet Virgil of The Divine Comedy. Thrall, the Jewish American writer, however, is a skilled journalist and author of the acclaimed The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (2017).

He is also the former director of the Arab-Israeli Project of the left-leaning global think tank, the International Crisis Group. Through his 250 pages of well-crafted and often understated prose, one descends to the fiendish center of a realm of many hurts and humiliations, but the narrative is rooted in compelling and enlightening family backstories.

The method is to present granular and nuanced biographical portraits of Palestinians and Jews alike that are recreated with an eye for complexities and contradictions on all sides. Perhaps it’s an approach that can reach people who otherwise seem to have fingers in their ears, or respond with knee-jerk defensiveness in a self-righteous manner, when one raises even the mildest critique of the brutality of the Israeli state.

The Heart of the Story

At the heart of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is the account of a terrible bus accident that was not simply “an accident,” but closer to a predictable outcome due to a history of inequality and discrimination. The calamitous event happened in 2012, resulting in the death and maiming of dozens of Palestinian children who were on a school trip, including Milad Salama, the five-year-old son of Abed and Haifa Salama.

The bus itself was illegally registered, twenty-seven years old, and its route was on neglected, congested roads consigned to Palestinians and inferior to those used by settlers — ones termed “bypass roads” or “apartheid roads.” Those used by Milad’s bus were devoid of lighting, any kind of police presence, or even a barrier separating the lane of oncoming traffic.

After being hit by a trailer truck, the aging vehicle flipped and burst into flames. Still, no Israeli or Palestinian rescue personnel showed up in time to assist and save lives: “When a Palestinian ambulance finally arrived, most of the injured children had already been evacuated [in the private cars of Palestinian passers-by] …. The bus was still crackling with flames and there was much shouting and commotion. Not a single firefighter, police officer, or soldier had come.” (101)

According to Thrall, the death of Milad and six others was the likely result of these and other socio-economic circumstances faced by the Palestinian population of Anata, a West Bank town of the Salama family that was mostly encircled by a separation barrier.

Obstacles to the rescue include partitions that did not allow the Palestinian Authority access to the road where the accident took place; an Israeli police force that habitually ignored Palestinians in distress; the system of special passes that prevented Palestinian parents from traveling to the diverse hospitals in different zones where the children had been driven by other Palestinians in their own cars; and much more.

Nevertheless, the ambitions of the book go far beyond the origins of the horrific event to slowly unravel a larger history of this architecture of separation; one that ultimately stems from the Nakba. This was the “catastrophe” of mass dispossession and displacement of Palestinians by the Jewish fighters in the 1948 war, followed by the all-important denial of the “right of return” that ensued.

After the death of Milad, the first sixty-seven pages retrospectively flesh out the daily lives of Abed, Haifa, and more than a dozen other Palestinians to create a fuller picture that achieves an uncommon depth of perception and understanding.

Thrall puts the reader at eye level and uses real names of all but a few individuals. This allows us to see how specific features of ethnic oppression by design render far worse what are ordinary problems of humanity: the thwarting of romantic love, unrealized ambition, jealousy, local rivalries, problematic local customs, and health.

As the book progresses to the occurrence of the “accident” and what follows, Thrall uses this technique to implicitly expose the lies that make up the elaborate myths now sustaining the pro-Israel state of mind in the United States. Full documentation for his claims is presented at the end of the volume in the section called “Sources.”

For example, the narrative of Huda Dahbour, the mother of another victim, Hadi, and a doctor employed by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, provides a harrowing description of the Nakba experienced by her family:

“Through Arabic radio broadcasts and vans equipped with loudspeakers, the Jewish forces blared instructions to evacuate immediately. The conquering battalion had been ordered to firebomb ‘all objectives that can be set alight’ and ‘kill every Arab encountered.’ Barrels stuffed with kerosene-soaked rags and fitted with ignition devices were sent hurtling downhill into the Palestinian areas….Much of the city was ethnically cleansed by the time Passover began.” (89)

Mizrahim and Ashkenazi

Then there is a history of the Adam settlement, near Anek’s Anata, which had been created on the West Bank for poor Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and Sephardic) Jews by the Israeli government and tax-payer-funded World Zionist Organization. In contrast to the miserable conditions of the Palestinians of Anata, who mostly live in a walled ghetto, the residents of Adam had spacious single-family villas with yards and bucolic views.

But the tale told through the life of founder Beber Vanunu, is far from idyllic. While a small proportion of Israeli Jews have a long history in Palestine (11% of the population was Jewish by the 1920s), over 50% of the present Israeli population is of Middle Eastern and North African descent who were frequently refugees from Arab persecution, and even expulsion from their native countries.

Beber himself was born in Casablanca in 1952, and his family relocated from Morocco to Israel two years later. There they found themselves in a densely-packed transit camp, fenced-in and guarded by police, without running water and adequate sanitation:

“Israel’s elite treated the Mizrahim with contempt…Parents of more than a thousand Mizrahi children accused the government of falsely reporting their babies’ deaths and then secretly handing them to Ashkenazi [of European background] parents wishing to adopt….Israeli officials had justified the deceit on the grounds that the Mizrahim were ‘backward’ and the abductions were in ‘the best interests of the children’” (150).

After leaving the camps, some of Beber’s relatives moved into houses stolen from Palestinians, while he lived with nine others in a single room in a crime-and-drug ridden Jerusalem tenement. Then came a period of activism in the Israeli Black Panthers, a Mizrahi radical group inspired by the African American Black Panther Party, that protested ethnic and class discrimination. It also evidenced some sympathy with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a secular national movement founded in 1964 to represent the Palestinian people.

Beber subsequently developed a proposal to establish a Mizrahi settlement on the West Bank land that officially belonged to the Palestinian village of Jaba. In a dubious effort to establish good relations with their neighbors, villagers from Jaba were given jobs as domestic workers and laborers (not as professionals) as the illegal settlement continued to expand Eastward. At the time of the bus accident Beber offered condolences by posting a large banner expressing sympathy at the Jaba checkpoint.

Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors had settled in Central and Eastern Europe and comprise close to one-third of the Israeli population, are partially represented by the story of Dany Tirza. Dany, former head of the Israeli Defense Force’s strategic planning for the West Bank (the IDF Rainbow Administration), and then architect of the separation barrier, was at the time of the bus crash the leader of the Jewish settlement built on land confiscated from Anata. He had been born in Galicia (then in Western Ukraine) into a family divided between various political and religious loyalties.

Those committed to Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Judaism, and who rejected Zionism, died in the Holocaust; those aligned with his grandfather, a Marxist-Zionist of Hashomer Hatzair, moved to Palestine and thrived. His family history reminds us that contemporary Zionism cannot be understood without considering the murder of Jews from the time even before the Czarist pogroms to the German concentration camps with their industrial genocide.

That is, Zionism was not born of ancient Judaism of the Middle East, but of European Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern and Central Europe in the context of its competing racial and ethnic nationalisms.

Memory of Antisemitic Attacks

This memory of antisemitic attacks and extermination was built into the Zionist DNA of the hundreds of thousands of survivors who poured into the majority Arab, multi-religious Palestine from Europe with the dream of turning it into a nationalist Jewish state. It has now been passed on to their descendants, especially after allusions to the Holocaust became a major rhetorical tool for the Zionist government in the 1980s as it tried to depict the resistance of the indigenous population as the reincarnation of Europe’s demonic, antisemitic past.

The accurate invocation of this earlier victimization of Jews was now used to rationalize the Israeli state’s post-1948 role as the victimizer of Palestinians.

Other stories fill in the picture from many angles. References to the ill effects of the Oslo Accords are peppered throughout the narrative. Early on, we are told: “In fact, Oslo had furthered Israel’s goal of holding on to maximal land with minimal Palestinians on it.” (55)

Later, Thrall explains: “…the lives of the insiders [local Palestinians] only got worse after Oslo. On top of greater restrictions on movement, employment plummeted as Israel replaced Palestinian laborers with foreign workers, recruited mostly from Asia….The figures close to [Yasir] Arafat pocketed tens of millions of dollars of public money, much of it funneled through a Tel Aviv bank account, and some even profited from the building of [Jewish] settlements.” (91)

Thrall concludes by reporting that, for a long while after the bus accident, Abed and his family closed themselves off from any social interaction. Their nearest relations rarely saw them. Then, seven months following the funeral of Milad, Abed deleted all videos of his son, as well as practically all photos. The community itself was traumatized; every Palestinian in the area knew where they were on the day that the “Jaba bus accident” happened.

Yet this trauma was also felt in circumstances of growing repression where most Palestinians, including children, who are arrested for any number of small infractions, are judged in military courts. They are then handed lengthy sentences in what critics call sham military trials as many Palestinians are deprived of defense lawyers and due process.

Israeli citizens, of course, are tried in civil courts, highlighting the two-tier justice system. Still, throughout these interpolations of personal history and political context, Thrall is less focused on ultimate solutions than lived realities.

Feats of Omission

In following Thrall’s process of rendering these lives in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, I continually felt provoked to pursue the question raised at the outset of this review.

How does one reach those of our fellow citizens who are still deluded into thinking of the Israeli state as a democratic model of “Jewish self-determination”? Their nationalist bias prevents them from seeing this state form as a callous apartheid regime dedicated to supplanting the Arab population with a settler colonial presence through a familiar process, even if different in specifics.

Thrall doesn’t say it explicitly, but any informed reader can see the ugly parallels to white supremacist South Africa in the Occupied Territories, and to the Jim Crow system of the U.S. South within the infamous “Green Line” that has defined the Israeli state’s internationally recognized borders (supposedly temporarily) since 1949. As Edward Said and others have pointed out, this is not simply a conflict of two national minorities but also a “unique colonialism.”

How does one break through the feats of historical omission in the wide-spread pro-Israeli propaganda that perpetuates a fictional Israeli past? A falsification that omits the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population to proclaim instead the miraculous 1948 founding of a moral and peace-loving state, above all beleaguered by a Nazi-like antisemitism among Arabs.

This constant invocation of Hitler is a willful mischaracterization of complex issues to score political points, but the upshot in practice is to make Palestinians pay the price for fascist crimes they did not perpetrate. It promotes the premise that the ongoing crisis must be contained by force without being resolved by justice; that Israel, threatened by another Holocaust, has the right to do anything to survive.

The resulting mentality seems like a puzzle without a solution to those of us with a socialist-international perspective: How can people whose ancestors were so hideously oppressed by the Nazis be so oblivious to human rights and lives? How can one understand their moral universe? It seems a painful and brain-stretching paradox, suggesting that one is not dealing with reason.

Yes, antisemitism of the past was horrific, and new manifestations remain a real threat in the world that must be opposed; but the foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different. The Holocaust was about a marginalized, powerless group facing an all-powerful army and state violence; today it is the Palestinians who are stateless and the Israelis who have the advanced military that places the Palestinians under siege and occupation.

Moreover, anyone with access to maps can see that creeping annexation has been unfolding for generations along with a continuum of violent destruction against what was the majority indigenous population.

Shocking October 7 Attack by Hamas

The issue of educating the public about Zionist expansion and apartheid has achieved only greater urgency following the brutally shocking October 7 attack by Hamas that Israel declares to have included 70% civilians among the approximately 1200 people slain. Uncertainty remains about some details of the massacre; claims of beheadings by Hamas are in dispute but evidence for horrific rapes and despicable sexual torture by Hamas or other factions seem credible according to New York Times reporting on December 5.

Whatever is ultimately concluded, the assault on civilians was an atrocity, and then was immediately followed by a far bloodier revenge fest of the Israeli state that has crossed a death toll of 15,500 and displaced 1.8 million Palestinians (80% of Gaza) as I write.

Marxists certainly do not have a shared world-outlook with Hamas, but for pro-Israel partisans to denounce Hamas for committing war crimes against humanity and then turn around and endorse Israel’s committing the same crimes tenfold is enough to make any hypocrisy meter zoom to the max. In neither case can one evade confronting the issue of killing civilians.

It makes no difference whether this reality of annihilating families is dodged under the declaration that those attacked in Israel were all “occupiers” (including perhaps two dozen workers and agricultural students from Thailand, Naipaul, and the Philippines, along with Bedouins), or that those being murdered in Gaza are not the intended targets because they are being used by Hamas as “human shields.” This is just clever phrasemaking in both instances.

Civilian deaths are civilian deaths, whether from hand-grenades thrown into shelters or 2000-pound bombs dropped on a city and refugee camps. Intentionally targeting civilians to frighten a population is a definition of “terrorism,” regardless of whether it is carried out by those who are desperate and who have few options, or by the mightiest state in the region. That does not mean, of course, that any Palestinian who fights back is a “terrorist.”

One needs to explain the context of settler-colonialism that brought about this kind of ruthless conduct by a group, and emphasize that violent oppression produces violent reaction when non-violent efforts are harshly crushed and delegitimized. Nevertheless, clarification is not the same as backing specific behavior that any socialist ought to abhor.

The ghastly asymmetry on the side of Israeli violence is obvious, but the killing of Jewish babies in the name of “resistance” and “liberation” is not what we stand for. Nor does the fact that Zionist cruelty set the stage for ferocious retaliation — which is seen in most colonial rebellions — mean that Palestinians allied with Hamas lack human agency.

It is condescending and paternalistic to describe Hamas as not at all responsible for October 7, as merely Pavlovian vectors of a rage induced by Israel. That there is evidence that the rule of Hamas in Gaza was propped up by the Israeli state, and not supported by most Palestinians, is a critical part of the picture.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found here.)

NOTES

[1] In a 1967 interview with New Left Review, Deutscher explained, “Paradoxically and grotesquely, the Israelis appear now in the role of the Prussians of the Middle East. They have now won three wars against their Arab neighbours. Just so did the Prussians a century ago defeat all their neighbours within a few years, the Danes, the Austrians, and the French. The succession of victories bred in them an absolute confidence in their own efficiency, a blind reliance on the force of their arms, chauvinistic arrogance, and contempt for other peoples. I fear that a similar degeneration — for degeneration it is — may be taking place in the political character of Israel.”

Readers can find more on Deutscher’s and Novack’s views in the World-Outlook article “How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism.” World-Outlook has obtained permission from New Left Review to reprint the 1967 Deutscher interview. It will appear in the coming weeks.

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