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

In March 2002, the Second Intifada was at its bloody height, including a suicide attack on Passover that killed over 30 Israelis. Dany, who was in charge of constructing a security barrier, had assumed that the uprising would come and go quickly and initially relied on checkpoints to stop the infiltration of militants into Israeli cities, but this proved insufficient. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided on the need for a separation barrier and was mainly deciding on where exactly to place it. Too narrow a boundary would look like a concession to terrorism, and too broad a barrier would draw international condemnation. Ultimately, it surrounded more than 80% of settlers in the West Bank, until “it formed a giant scar across the land” (145).

Ibrahim Salama had been a champion of the peace process for many years. He had been a longtime member of Fatah, and he endured imprisonment and solitary confinement during the First Intifada. During his confinement, “he began to question his old beliefs, concluding that there was no military solution to the conflict” (148). He would work for the PLO as they, in turn, worked for the Israeli government, confident that the settlement project in the West Bank was a problem that both parties were dedicated to solving.

The Adam settlement was one of the few Jewish settlements populated by Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, generally poorer and of a lesser social status than the Ashkenazis from Eastern Europe. Many Mizrahi suffered great persecution at the hands of the Ashkenazi-dominated government, and once Beber Vanunu glimpsed the settlement communities popping up outside Jerusalem, he committed to building a similar one for his fellow Mizrahi. The government would have preferred that he build a site deeper into the West Bank as part of a strategy to divide and weaken Palestinian communities there, but Beber insisted on building a settlement at Jaba, which he informally called Adam after a Mizrahi officer killed in Lebanon. Beber wanted to be respectful of his Palestinian neighbors, and so when the crash happened near the territory of the settlement, “he got people involved in making a large banner offering condolences from the community of Adam to the families of the children” (153).

During the Second Intifada, Ibrahim Salama struggled to maintain peace between Palestinians and settlers, but this was a fiendishly difficult task. He tried to work with the Economic Cooperation Foundation because he believed that their work “saved lives on both sides” (155), and he worked closely with members of Jewish settlers to urge restraint on both sides. He became close friends with Adi Shepter, a leader of the Anatot settlement, and during one of the tensest moments of the Second Intifada, with the IDF placing Arafat’s headquarters under siege, Adi had Ibrahim’s car pulled over, only to hug him when he emerged.

The most difficult part of the security barrier was around Jerusalem, and the problem was distilled to “how to include as few Palestinians as possible on the Israeli side without conceding an inch of territory” (158). They could exclude Palestinian neighborhoods, but that would risk invalidating the Israeli claim on the territory. They could include the entire area Israel had annexed in 1967, but including so many Palestinians would be extremely complicated. The third option was to keep as much of Jerusalem as possible while cutting off the most densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods, which remained a formal part of Jerusalem even as they found themselves physically excluded and under-serviced. Dany considered depriving the people on the other side of Jerusalem residency, but the government refused to do so for fear that it would concede that territory permanently.

Ibrahim Salama became head of the Interior Ministry for a region with very little access to public services such as ambulances, fire trucks, or police. At the same time, they were excluded from bringing in Palestinian services since the area remained under Israeli jurisdiction. The economy was fragile, and the educational system bordered on non-functionality. With few opportunities, many kids succumbed to drugs:

[T]he most popular was ‘Nice’: marijuana, tobacco, or other herbs covered in chemicals-pesticides, acetone, ether, rat poison—that gave off a high. From there the kids moved on to heroin, which was sold openly in the streets of the camp. The addicts were getting younger and younger, and so were the teens hospitalized for overdoses (163).

Among the unregulated private schools in the region was one that sent a group of kindergarteners on an illegally registered bus to visit an amusement park.