Nathan Thrall, "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama"

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Nathan Thrall, "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy" (2023)

 

유태인 미국 작가/essayst/journalist Nathan Thrall의 이 책은, 요새 재미있게 읽은 두 권 소설보다도 더, 일단 읽기 시작하니 내려놓기 어려웠다. 거의 다 읽은 Robert Reich의 비소설 "The System"도 제쳐놓고 이 책을 먼저 다 읽은 이유다. 이스라엘의 팔레스타인 점령 실태를, 일상에서의 압박/피압박의 실상을 읽을 수 있는 책을 찾았었는데, 제대로 찾은 거다. '강도' 국가'란 말이 떠오르긴 처음이다. 강도 만난 자의 이웃은 누구인가. (본문에서 좀 길게 인용할 텐데, 이스라엘이 팔레스타인인들을 '작은 섬들에 가두듯' '벽'을 세운 것도 처음 읽었다.) 

 

"It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palesteine. Thrall's evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliation of the life under the oocupation is nothing short of hartbreaking."  -- Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight

(책 겉표지 뒤에서)

 

뉴욕 타임즈 서평

 

아래는 위 서평에서:

 

"Not long after the accident, young Israelis responded to the news in a slew of Facebook posts and comments: “It’s just a bus full of Palestinians. No big deal. Too bad more didn’t die,” read one. “Great! Fewer terrorists!!!” read another. The Israeli television reporter Arik Weiss tracked down some of the commentators, who turned out to be teenagers. “How the hell did we get here?” he wondered.

 

This glimpse at the deadly cynicism of the young (and by now, grown-up) people who will become Israel’s soldiers and leaders is the larger tragedy the book encompasses. One way to start to answer Weiss’s question is to examine the apartheid system that intentionally divides Israelis and Palestinians, as Thrall does so convincingly in this grim narrative. It is, unfortunately, a reality that the U.S. government is not yet willing to address."

 

위에 서평에서 인용한 첫 구절의 teenagers 얘기는 책의 Epilogue에 나오는데, 나는 뉴욕 타임즈 칼럼니스트 Bret Stephens를 떠올렸다. 유태인인 B. Stephens가, 말하자면, 하마스 테러 이후 이스라엘군에 의한 (현재 22,000여) 가자 시민의 학살은 책임이 하마스에게 있다고, 테러리스트나 할 말을, 한 게 또 기억 나서다. 같은 유태계 미국인인 저자 Nathan Thrall이나 "(이스라엘에 의한 팔레스타인) 점령 아래서의 삶의 일상적인 굴욕"을 언급한 Adam Hochschild와는 참 대조가 된다.

 

아래는 본문에서 (link는 내가):

 

    In facr, Oslo had furthered Israel's goal of holding on to maximal land with minimal Palestinians on it. The agreements had fractured the West Bank ito 165 islands of limited self-government, each one surrounded by a sea of Israeli control. (p. 55) [아래 (p. 137) 인용 참조]

 

Most of the tens of thousands of Naqab Bedouin had been forcibly displaced in 1948, fleeing  to the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring countries.... In total, around 85 percent of the population was removed. Those who remained in the Naqab were corralled into a reservation, the siyaaj, or fence, while their land was confiscated. Along with the majority of Israel's Palestinian citizens, they lived for eighteen years under the rule of a military government, which imposed curfews, travel restrictions, a ban on political parties, detention without trial, and closed security zones. (p. 71)

 

[T]he UN voted to partition Palestein in November 1947. The decision triggered a civil war that culminated in the Nakba, the mass expulsion and flight of more than 80 percent of Palestinians from the territory that became Israel.

    In 1948, several months into the civil war and just days before Passover, the British Mandatory forces governing the country began to withdraw from Haifa. As the British departed, Jewish paramilitary units lunched an attack on the Paletinian parts of the city.... Heifa fell in a day.

   ... The Jews "were continually shooting down on all Arabs moved both in Wadi Nisnas and the old city," a British intelligence officer reported. "This included completely indiscriminate and revolting machinegun fire, mortar fire and sniping on womwn and children sheltering in churches and attempting to get out." Much of the city was ethnically cleansed by the time Passover began.... Empty Palestinian homes were quickly given to new Jewish immigrants to ensure that the original owners couls not return. (p. 80)

 

In 2010, settlement quarries transferred 94 percent of their natural stone product to Israel.... The remaining 6 percent went to West bank settlements, Palestinian construction, and the Civil Administration.

    International law prohibits an occupying power from plundering the resources of the occupied. Pillage is a war crime. But the court [Israel's High Court of Justice] ruled unanimously that the state was permitted to exploit the West Bank's natural resources. (p. 124)

 

    In February 1994, a Brooklyn-born religious settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in Hebron. Significantly, he chose to do it on Purim, the holiday commemorating the biblical story of the Jews of Persia foiling a plot to destroy them and then killing "all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter, and destruction." ... Goldstein ... took his rifle, and entered the Ibrahimi Mosque during the dawn prayers, Wearing noise-reducing headphones, he fired 111 rounds at the rows of Palestinians kneeling in supplication.... His tombstone, in a Kiryat Arba municipal park, became a shrine and pilgrimage site. Its inscription reads: He GAVE HIS SOUL FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL, ITS TORAH, AND LAND -- CLEAN HANDS AND A PURE HEART.

    In response, the army accelerated its push for seperation.... Hebron was a city of 120,000 Palestinians with 450 Jewish settlers at its center, protected at all times by three army battalions and the Israeli police.... After the Goldstein massacre, the Jews of Hebron roamed free while its victims, the Palestinians, were subjeted to day and night curfews, home raids, new checkpoints, the closure of a main market and several mosques, and prohibition from travel on the sterile roads.

    The Purim bloodshed had consequences well beyond Hebron, leading, as it did, to the first bus suicide bombing, claimed by Hamas in retaliation. (p. 136)

 

    The most important maps of the Oslo process, including the one that carved the West Bank into three areas .... Drawn up in 1995, the maps designated different levels of Palestinian self-governance: in Area A, the urban zones, the PA had the greatest degree of autonomy, with jurisdiction over internal security; Area B applied to mid-size towns and villages, where Israel wished to remain fully in charge of security but found it more convenient to let the Palestinians run their own affairs; and Area C, under direct Israeli administeration, was for everything else: open land within, around, and between Palestinian villages; agricultural regions; national parks; Israeli military bases and firing zones; Jewish settlements, settler roads, and settlement industrial zones. Area C was not just the largest part of the West Bank -- 73 percent in ... original maps -- it was the only contiguous one, an ocean of Israeli control surrounding 165 islands of Area A r B.... "You've turned our autonomy into  a prison for us," the lead Palestinian negotiator, Abu Ala, said. (p. 137)

 

Dany [Tirza] was charged with building the full separation wall just after March 2002, the bloodiest month of the Second Intifada. He refused to elevate the uprising by using that name, instead referring to it as the "Palestinian Terror Attack."... "As long as there is occupation, there will be a resistence," a Hamas political leader declared. "So we say it clearly: Occupation should be stopped and then there will be something else." (p. 141)

 

Everyone knew how quickly Israeli forces would descend on a West Bank road the moment a kid started to throwing stones. Yet the soldiers at the check point, the troops at Rama base, the fire truck at the settements nearby, they had all done nothing, letting the bus burn for more than half an hour.

    Arik[위, 서평에서 인용한 첫 구절의] noted that some of the posts came from students in Givat Shaul, the Jerusalem neighborhood that encompasses Deir Yassin, which was the site of the notorious massacre by prestate Jewish paramilitary forces. Abed felt he was being goaded. "We have extremists in our society," he replied. "And you do, too." (p. 209)

 

 

 

 

파괴된 가자 (사진: ~2/5/2024 뉴욕 타임즈에서)