A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

One of the most persistent and challenging conflicts in global politics today, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians arguably dates back thousands of years, with respective claims to the land based on the Hebrew Bible and Islamic tradition. The more modern roots of the conflict began in the late 19th century when European Jews began fleeing persecution and sought refuge in their Biblical homeland. This movement led to an idea known as Zionism, the belief that Jews ought to return to Israel and found a modern nation-state. As the number of immigrants increased, they clashed with the Arab population who had constituted a majority for many centuries. Arabs and Jews had lived relatively peacefully for many years under the Ottoman Empire, but Ottoman rule was collapsing, and control of the area fell to the British in 1920, with the expectation that they would prepare the territory for self-determination. The British tried to maintain peace between the two communities but had little success, and in the aftermath of World War II, they decided to hand the issue over to the newly formed United Nations. The UN voted for the establishment of a state for both Jews and Arabs but could not enforce its own plans and failed to prevent the outbreak of war between the newly established State of Israel and its Arab neighbors in May 1948.

Israeli forces managed to prevail, expelling hundreds of thousands of Arabs into territories including the West Bank (of the Jordan River, then under Jordanian control) and the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coast (then under Egyptian control). In June 1967, Israel launched a preemptive assault and conquered both territories, as well as East Jerusalem, taking full control of the entire holy city. The Arab states had long committed themselves to the liberation of Palestine, but faced with Israel’s military superiority (backed by the United States), they began to waver, and Egypt was the first to break ranks and sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1978, which holds to the present day. The Palestine Liberation Organization had been struggling since the early 1960s to maintain pressure on Israel with guerrilla warfare and some spectacular acts of terrorism (including the shocking kidnapping and eventual murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany). However, internal divisions and relentless Israeli pressure pushed the PLO to the margins, with its leadership fleeing to distant Tunis in 1982. The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 proved that Palestinians themselves were capable of resisting Israeli occupation, forcing direct negotiations with the PLO and ultimately driving Israel out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, after which it fell under the control of the militant group Hamas. Yet peace has remained elusive as Israel expands Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and Hamas used its Gaza sanctuary to plan the attacks of October 7, 2023. Published just before that day, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama speaks to the enormous weight of history that weighs upon the people of the region and helps to explain, if not justify, how such violence can break out.