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

As a young man in the 1980s, Abed Salama seemed destined to marry a local girl named Ghazl. They were from the two most prominent families in Anata, the Salamas and the Hamdans. As children, they lived a rustic existence, with farms dotting the landscape and people of all ages busying about with their daily chores. After Israel conquered the town after the 1967 Six-Day War, the new government “used a range of policies to Judaize” (10) the area. The town was broken up by military checkpoints and bases for Jewish settlers, cutting off its Arab inhabitants from resources and transportation. The people of the town had little choice but to seek work and other opportunities in the city of Jerusalem, which required more contact with Israeli ways of life. Over time, traditional social structures, based largely on familial ties, began to break down, as the Israeli military was the true authority, and its presence was ubiquitous and often violent.

Abed was in love with Ghazl, writing her secret letters and finding time to talk in secret via pay phone. He would watch her on her balcony from his sister’s house nearby. Their subtle courtship blossomed with the outbreak of the First Intifada in December 1987, a massive series of protests against Israeli rule following a truck accident that killed four Palestinian workers. As part of its crackdown, the Israeli government shuttered all the Palestinian universities, stopping Abed’s education, and so instead, he followed his brother-in-law Abu Wissam into the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Most of the family belonged to Fatah, a rival PLO faction, but Abed “had watched its leaders compromise on nearly every principle, then compromise on the compromises, to the point that, after the intifada, they found themselves working as Israel’s enforcers” (16). Abed became an effective local official for the DFLP, distributing materials called bayanaat, which helped coordinate resistance to Israeli authorities. Eventually, Abu Wissam was arrested, and Abed took over the local DFLP chapter while also caring for his sister and her young son. In his leadership role, he started to clash with other Palestinians, including drug dealers (who were often coerced into becoming informants). Infighting among the various PLO factions was also intense, and Abed got into a feud with one of his cousins, where he suffered a knife wound.

After the fight, Ghazl came to visit Abed in secret, returning a necklace he had been wearing with an abbreviated version of her name but had lost in the fight. Ghazl “pulled the necklace out of her pocket, placed it in Abed’s palm, and for a heart-stopping moment held her delicate fingers against his hand. It was the only time they touched” (26).

Israeli security forces arrested Abed in 1989, and he was shipped from detention center to detention center, subject to frequent beatings and other forms of torture. Eventually settled in a prison called Naqab in the Negev Desert, the many thousands of prisoners included members of PLO factions as well as the following:

journalists, attorneys, physicians, professors, students, trade unionists, civil society leaders, advocates of nonviolence, and members of Israeli-PLO dialogue groups, which were illegal. Unlike Abed, most were not told the reason for their imprisonment (30).

Undergoing a makeshift education with the other prisoners and trying to endure the pain and humiliation of life in prison, Abed wondered if Ghazl was still thinking about him as much as he was thinking about her.

After his release, Abed had a new identity card marking him as an ex-prisoner, leading to frequent trouble when he tried to pass through checkpoints, which had grown ever more elaborate since the outbreak of the Intifada. Before long, all Palestinians would have the same green for their identity cards, and “Abed thought it fitting; every Palestinian was a sort of prisoner, from the youngest child to the PA president, who also needed Israel’s permission to come and go” (33). He resumed his work with the DFLP and hoped to start a family with Ghazl, and he asked her family for permission to marry her. However, his brother Wa’ed had gotten into severe trouble for buying explosives, plotting revenge for an Israeli who had carried out a mass shooting against Arabs. When Wa’ed went to prison, Wa’ed’s wife—Abed’s sister-in-law—Layla joined Abed as he proposed to Ghazl’s family and then relayed to Abed that Ghazl’s uncle had expressed reservations about the Salama family. Enraged, Abed broke off the proposal, and meeting with Ghazl a few days later, he told her, “You’re like a sister to me, I can’t marry you” (40).

Distraught from the breakup, Abed went to see his sister Naheel, who showed him a photo of her husband’s niece Asmahan (who also happened to be Ghazl’s cousin). Wanting to put the memory of Ghazl behind him, he agreed to visit the family, and less than two hours after learning who she was, Abed and Asmahan were engaged. Ghazl attended their engagement party, only to flee in tears, and she was then engaged a few weeks later. There was still a chance for Abed and Ghazl while they were both engaged but not yet married, and only years later did he learn that Layla had lied about Ghazl’s uncle’s insulting words against the Salamas. They both married within a year, but Ghazl remained bitterly angry at Abed for wrecking the life they had planned for so long.

Abed and Ghazl encountered one another again when Abed came to her office at the Department of School Health to inquire about a nephew. Seeing her reminded him that, while he was fond of Asmahan, he was not in love with her as he had been with Ghazl. He felt further guilty that his work schedule precluded him from seeing his wife very often, and while “she suffered it quietly, rarely complaining” (50), that agitated Abed even more. Abed began to consider taking a second wife, which was unusual but not strictly forbidden. Asmahan tried to assuage him by having more children, but they were all girls, and Abed found that even more frustrating. At the same time, Abed faced problems at work, especially as the Israelis began tightening their control over Jerusalem to maximize their bargaining position in the ongoing peace process. The safest way to maintain residency was to become an Israeli citizen, which for Palestinian Arabs could happen by marrying someone whose family had not fled Israel after its creation in 1948. However, Israeli law forbade polygamy, so Abed had to divorce Asmahan, but he also felt little affection for his new wife, Jameela.

As Abed mulled over what to do, the Second Intifada broke out in the fall of 2000. The Oslo Accords had ended the First Intifada with the promise of a Palestinian state, but instead, “the agreements had fractured the West Bank into 165 islands of limited self-government, each one surrounded by a sea of Israeli control” (55). Israeli responded to protest with brutal repression, and on one of the rare occasions they saw each other, Abed chastised Jameela for complimenting the uniform of an Israeli soldier. Jameela was then in a car crash, and Abed did not visit her for over a month. They divorced before their marriage was ever made official, so Abed did not receive his Israeli citizenship.

On a job to fix a telephone line, Abed encountered Haifa, who, as a girl, had helped him smuggle notes to Ghazl and was also a member of the DFLP. After visiting the house a few times, he decided that he wanted to take her as a second wife (he had since remarried Asmahan), but Haifa was strongly opposed to marrying someone who was already married. Her sister managed to convince her to accept despite her reservations. Their families met covertly to avoid the censure of the neighborhood, and they married hastily. Abed then brought family members with him to tell Asmahan, who had been unaware of the entire proceeding, later prompting a bitter argument with Asmahan’s father. Asmahan demanded a divorce, and so he was left with Haifa, to whom he “vowed to start anew. He would be a better husband, a better father, a better person. For the first time in his life, he started to pray” (65). Later on, Haifa became pregnant and went into labor early, and they negotiated a labyrinth of checkpoints on their way to the hospital. After bribing a guard with cigarettes, they finally made it and welcomed their first son, Adam. Three years later, they had a second boy, Milad.