Monumental report on death of Palestinian boy in ‘NYRB’ is a critique of Zionism’s racism

When journalists seek to convey the depth of the Palestinian situation we often latch on to Israeli killings that were in the headlines, atrocities in which the moral lines are stark. The astonishment of Nathan Thrall’s monumental piece in The New York Review of Books is that it involves a death few outside of East Jerusalem have heard of: a 5-year-old Palestinian boy was in a school bus crash in occupied territories in 2012, and his father spent a harrowing day searching ambulances, buses, and hospitals to find out whether his son was alive.

The saga of Abed Salama’s search for his son Milad has a primal power. But Thrall tells the story to convey one message to American readers: Palestinian lives are all but disposable in the Zionist vision of settling the land. The narrow twisting road on which Milad and six others were killed in Area C just outside East Jerusalem; the uninspected fire-trap bus; the Israeli quarry on occupied land served by the truck that smashed the bus; the Israeli emergency systems a few blocks away that blithely ignored Milad because he was Palestinian; the Palestinian emergency services that were ineffective and patchworked, reflecting bureaucratic Israeli borders protecting Jewish settlements– all of this is because Milad had the misfortune to live in a Bantustan (as even Ariel Sharon describes it here).

Thrall narrates his tale with detachment and precision, reminiscent of Hersey’s Hiroshima; but it is fueled by rage against the “founding values” of Zionism, which exalt Jewish settlement of biblical lands and assign Palestinians no humanity, and that rage builds in any reader of this story; so lots of my friends are passing his article around this week.

The story is important because of its source, the New York Review of Books, which has an elite audience and has been supportive of Zionism for decades with some small exceptions. And because all the humanity in this gripping story is Palestinian. The only Jewish characters are the Israeli leaders and judges and intellectuals Thrall quotes justifying ethnic cleansing and apartheid and the theft of Palestinian resources. The article includes long sections about Zionist ideology and history that come down to a simple truth, Zionism in application is racist. And the occupation has lasted 53 years because it is just a continuation of the project of pushing Palestinians out of lands east of the U.N. borders, a project the Labor Zionists started in 1948. One prime minister, Golda Meir, speaks openly of “getting rid” of Arabs; another, Levi Eshkol, of driving them out by “suffocation.”

Only American liberals deceive themselves about the reality.

During the 2020 presidential election campaign, Joe Biden repeatedly
said that “silence is complicity.” But Biden couldn’t have been thinking of Israel-Palestine, for in the case of Israel’s ethnic domination of the Palestinians, the US is not merely complicit for its silence; it is an accomplice.

It’s my job to hail significant changes in the mainstream discourse of Israel Palestine in the United States, and this piece is such a moment. It follows several such breaks in the last year, from B’Tselem’s report saying Israel maintains an apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy, to liberal Zionists Ian Lustick and Peter Beinart calling for one democratic state, to the warm reception of Susan Abulhawa’s anti-Zionist epic novel, “Against the Loveless World”, to the growing consensus inside the Democratic Party base for U.S. pressure on Israel not Palestinians (53 to 29 percent in Gallup’s latest poll).

The left is now driving the discussion inside the Democratic Party and it cannot be long before our politics finally begin to reflect those democratic ideals.

But there are walls to break down, and Thrall’s piece is a sledgehammer blow. This demolition of Zionist values is directed by an American Jew toward American Jews, in a publication that epitomizes Jewish intellectual life. The piece concludes savagely by contrasting Milad’s misfortune to the good luck of Thrall’s own daughter– “a Jewish girl living a life of privilege on the other side of the wall.”

Jonathan Ofir calls the article a “masterpiece.” Donald Johnson says, “Thrall just lays it all out. Totally demolishes the usual BS.”

Here are a few choice excerpts of the article, which you should read for yourself.

Liberal Zionists praise Israel as a “Jewish democracy,” but they supply cover to a policy of Bantustans:

For over half a century, Israel’s strategic dilemma has been its inability to erase the Palestinians, on one hand, and its unwillingness to grant them civil and political rights, on the other. Explaining his opposition to giving Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights as Palestinian citizens of Israel, Abba Eban said that there was a limit to the amount of arsenic the human body could absorb. Between the two poles of mass expulsion and political inclusion, the unhappy compromise Israel found was to fragment the Palestinian population, ensuring that its scattered pieces could not organize as one national collective.

It’s apartheid, as experienced by Nader Morrar, the paramedic who tries to save the children on the burning bus.

For Nader, there was no question but that he would take them back to Ramallah, though they were less than a mile from municipal Jerusalem, which had superior hospitals. Palestinian ambulances bringing patients to Jerusalem had to wait at the checkpoints for
unpredictable lengths of time before permission was granted, or denied, to carry the victim on a stretcher to an Israeli ambulance on the other side. Scores of people have died, according to Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and other human rights organizations, because the passage of Palestinian ambulances was prevented or
delayed.

Israeli settlements were all around the bus accident. But those authorities are indifferent.

A Palestinian Authority report on the accident notes that “Israeli ambulances and fire engines arrived late, after the end of fire and
rescue operations, and this despite the proximity of the accident site
to Israeli fire and rescue services, as the nearest Israeli ambulance,
emergency and fire station is only a minute and a half away.” The
accident site was seconds away from the Jaba checkpoint, manned by
Israeli soldiers, less than a two-minute drive to the settlement of
Adam, and several minutes from both the police station at the Sha’ar
Binyamin settlement industrial zone and rescue services at the
settlement of Kokhav Ya’akov.

The two state solution died a long time ago, and everyone is in on this, though Americans deceive themselves.

[In April 2013, Secretary of State John] Kerry had told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have some period of time—a year, a year-and-a-half to two years—or it’s over.”

[Then-settler leader Dani] Dayan agreed: “We are currently, to some extent, at a historical point in the conflict, for the first time since the Peel Commission in [19]36–[1937 that recommended partition,” he said. “The global community will realize that this issue”—a division of the land under Israel’s control—“should be taken off the table. It’s not going to happen. Not because the world doesn’t want this to be the solution, but because it understands that this isn’t the solution; it isn’t doable.”

Liberal Zionists in the U.S. effectively opposed annexation last year, calling it a threat to the two-state solution. But their Israeli allies are frankly racist.

The Zionist left’s primary objection to annexation is that it would harm the goal of having as few Palestinians as possible within the borders of the Jewish state. One of the groups illustrating this was The People Against Annexation, formed in 2020. It was handsomely funded by a board member of the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Stacy Schusterman, whose family foundation supports numerous Israel advocacy groups… The People Against Annexation was headed by the former Israel director of J Street, the Democratic Party-aligned pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, D.C. Among the ads produced by the organization was a poster demonizing Palestinians as Islamist terrorists…

[Liberal Zionist allies] Commanders for Israel’s Security… had previously run its own anti-annexation ad meant to sow fear of a loss of Jewish control. Placed on signs and billboards throughout the country and illustrated in the Palestinian national colors, it displayed a crowd of Palestinians waving flags and raising victory signs above the words, in Arabic, “Soon, We Will Be the Majority.” At the bottom, the ad listed a phone number, “For Hebrew.” When called, a recording stated: “Are you sick of these Palestinian billboards? We are too. But they will disappear in a matter of days. What will not disappear are the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank. They want to be a majority. And we are supposed to annex them? If we don’t separate from them we will be less Jewish and less secure. We must separate from Palestinians now!”…

Milad was killed by truckdriver, working a quarry that pillages Palestinians resources. Left Zionists are full partners in this crime.

Since 1994, Israel has not issued a single permit for Palestinian quarrying in Area C, which contains most of the land that can be mined. The World Bank estimates that the Palestinians lose $241 million per year from Israel’s refusal to grant quarry permits
to non-Israeli mining interests. Seven weeks before the accident, Israel’s High Court of Justice had ruled on the legality of the Kokhav HaShahar Quarry, as well as nine other settler quarries in the West Bank. International law is not ambiguous about whether an occupying power is permitted to plunder the resources of the occupied. The laws of occupation are designed to prevent the colonization or annexation of conquered territory. Pillage is a war crime. But Israel’s High Court, which has approved nearly every internationally prohibited policy that Israel has carried out in the occupied territories—including deportations, assassinations, widespread use of imprisonment without trial, home demolitions, land confiscation for Jewish settlement, and collective punishments like mass curfews, school closures, and withholding electricity from millions of people—ruled unanimously that Israel was permitted to exploit the West Bank’s natural resources. The reason given by the court’s president at the time, Dorit Beinisch, who is considered a liberal justice in Israel, was that international humanitarian law, which defines all occupations as temporary, had to be bent because of the much more enduring situation in the West Bank: “As has been held on many occasions under our rulings, the belligerent occupation of Israel in the Area has some unique characteristics, primarily the duration of the occupation period, which requires the adjustment of the law to the reality on the ground.”