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

Saar Tzur managed to cooperate effectively with Ibrahim Salama despite bitter tensions between their two communities. For months, Tzur’s troops had been under attack by stones and Molotov cocktails, and after failing to deter them through force, he simply asked Ibrahim to intervene on his behalf, and it worked. In his opinion, the construction of the wall also made things easier, especially as his sector had been a favored route for suicide bombers during the height of the Second Intifada, and Israeli casualties had plummeted since the wall’s construction: “The separation barrier was the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history. At the time of the accident, it was in its tenth year of being built, and the cost had reached nearly $3 billion, more than twice the price of the National Water Carrier” (132). Colonel Dany Tirza was responsible for building it, having spent years designing maps after the Oslo Accords. His family was among the settlers of the West Bank who saw the land as a Biblical inheritance, even if they were not themselves religious. After a Brooklyn-based settler massacred worshippers at a Hebron mosque, the army pushed for strict separation between settlers and Palestinians, without completely undermining the peace process.