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

Rahwan Tawam received a call from his uncle asking if he would like to drive a school bus for children taking a class trip. He was hesitant to drive in the bad weather but agreed when his uncle brought the bus directly to him. After driving through Israeli checkpoints, they picked up the children, but before arriving at another checkpoint, Rahwan felt a massive blow and passed out. Video surveillance recorded the chaotic scene of people desperately trying to rescue those inside the bus, or at least cover the bodies, wondering why help had not yet arrived, as the area was under total Israeli rule. Without help from the authorities, Palestinian paramedics had to travel a long and complex route to the crash site, and by the time they arrived, there was little they could do other than make sure they brought any Jewish or Palestinian victims to their properly designated hospitals.

Eldad Benshtein, a Russian immigrant, is the first Israeli paramedic on the scene, arriving with no knowledge that a school bus or children were involved in the accident. He watches as Palestinian firefighters douse the flames. Meanwhile, Huda’s coworker Salem is screaming at the rescue workers for arriving so late, calling them “child killers” (114), and gets into an altercation with an Israeli soldier. He suffers a terrible beating, and in the months that follow, “he suffered from memory lapses after the accident, and blamed them on the beating he got from the soldiers. In truth, he was grateful for the bouts of amnesia. They were the only thing keeping him from going insane” (115).

Eldad returns from the scene of the accident to Jerusalem, and after being tasked with transferring children from one unit to another, he is overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the horror. His wife sees him on television, looking distraught and lost. One of the last helpers to arrive is Dubi Weissenstern, part of an ultra-Orthodox unit charged with preparing the dead for burial. They were among the rare Orthodox Jews who cooperated with the Israeli state, which most Orthodox viewed as a secular betrayal of Jewish law. Shaken by once having found the body of a friend who took his own life, he feels compelled to do his duty but likely would be severely distressed at the sight of corpses. At the crash site, Dubi and his colleagues comb for body parts, but Dubi refrains from talking to any of the families, unwilling to tell either the truth or a more comforting lie.

Color Saar Tzur is a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stationed at a checkpoint near the crash site. He arrives at the scene as various Israeli and Palestinian authorities are fighting over who is in charge, and he is joined by Abed’s cousin Ibrahim Salama, head of the Palestinian Interior Ministry for Jerusalem. Ibrahim “liked to say he was a fox: he could bring someone out to sea and back without realizing they were wet” (122). Ibrahim dismisses the Palestinian officers, and Saar accepts his request to let the Palestinian Authority take control of the site and for parents to travel freely regardless of checkpoints.

Ashraf Qayqas had driven the truck that crashed into the bus. He drove for a concrete factory that gathered up resources within the West Bank for use within Israel, allegedly a violation of international law. At the time of the accident, he was driving twice the speed limit in bad weather, and he was not a well-trained or experienced driver in the first place. At the moment of the crash, “the impact caused a short circuit in the bus’s fuse box, igniting a fire that was fanned by the day’s strong winds” (126).

Radwan Tawan emerges from a coma to find that he had no legs and severely impacted speech. He endures months of agonizing physical therapy, fending off swindlers pretending to help while seeking financial advantage. Thrall writes,

Radwan would spend the rest of his days confined to his home in Jaba, his wife wheeling him from room to room, the explosions from the limestone quarry sounding in the background as he watched the dust settle on the fig and olive trees in his front yard (128).