AHEAD OF HIS appearance at the International Literature Festival Dublin in Merrion Square Park this Sunday, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama’, Nathan Thrall, told The Journal how he went about telling the story of life under Israeli occupation, and how the book scared off some publishers who feared printing it would do them reputational harm.
Nathan Thrall is an American author, journalist and essayist. ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story’ is his second book on the subject of Israel and Palestine but as he explains, this one differs in style and perspective to his previous work.
The book is centred around the tragic story of a school bus crash in 2012 that killed Abed Salama’s son Milad. Abed is a Palestinian telecom worker from Jerusalem who, upon hearing the news of the crash, has to navigate the many restrictions on movement put in place by the Israeli occupation in order to find his son.
From this one event, Thrall unspools the personal and family histories of the ordinary people impacted by it in intimate, often heartbreaking detail, weaving them together to create a deeply personal account of life under Israeli occupation and domination – from bureaucratic absurdities to state sanctioned brutality.
“The constraint that I put on myself with this book was to tell the history through the eyes of the characters, through the personal and family histories of the characters,” he says over a video call from his home in Jerusalem.
Rather than writing a historical text, Thrall says he wanted the book to feel more like a novel.
“What a lot of narrative non-fiction does is there’s the thesis, there is the big historical take of the author, and they pepper it with characters and interviews that just make it more interesting, give more flavour to the to the narrative, illustrate certain points, but it’s a very instrumental use of certain characters to fit in with an overall argument.”
But getting to the point where he was comfortable enough to tell people’s stories from such a close perspective meant hours of interviews and establishing trust.
Thrall says he knew from the outset that he wanted to write about the bus crash and that he would probably have come across Abed anyway. But it turned out they had a family friend in common who put them together.
Thrall spent countless hours with Abed, having conversations that he says moved beyond the formality of an interview.
“I think we saw one another more than we saw anyone else outside of our families.”
“It was you know, talking about life together, and his life and Palestinian history through his life, and his mourning. I mean, he also did not feel like he had anyone to talk to about his grief. People were afraid to upset him, even very close people to him and his family.”
While he may be in the title, Abed is not the only subject of the book whose personal life and family history is relayed in intimate detail. Another main character is Huda Dahbour, a doctor who happened upon the scene of the flaming school bus and helped to treat the burnt children.
“I got lucky with how much trust many of these people bestowed on me. I think part of what happened with people opening up to me with this book is that many people who were grieving were just longing to talk about their feelings” Thrall says.
Complementing the events of these people’s lives are incidental descriptions of the physical reminders all around them of their dispossession and oppression.
Almost in passing, Thrall makes reference to olive groves and farmland that once belonged to Abed’s family, or to the walls that hem in his ghettoised hometown of Anata in Jerusalem.
Take this passage from the prologue, in which Adeb and Milad head to the shop to buy snacks ahead of the five-year-old’s school trip.
“On a street with no sidewalks, they inched their way between the parked cars and stalled traffic. A matrix of cables and string lights hung overhead, dwarfed by the looming tower blocks that rose four, five, even six times higher than the separation barrier, the twenty-six-foot-tall concrete wall that encircled Anata.”
The book has won accolades from some of the English-speaking world’s most prestigious news publications, whose coverage of Israel and Palestine Thrall has himself criticised.
“There are many tropes that are deeply, deeply embedded and I’ve considered it part of my work to try and undo some of those myths and give people a more accurate understanding of this place. That said, there are many journalists writing for Western publications whose work I do admire.”
The praise for the book from publications like the New York Times and Financial Times, he believes, shows that there is room for a diversity of opinion on the conflict among mainstream media organisations despite the faults he finds in their coverage.
“Ultimately, I’m trying to reach a mainstream audience. I’m not writing for a narrow audience. I’m not trying to preach to the converted.
“It’s very much a goal of my writing to write in a simple and accessible way that could have some chance of convincing someone who has been indoctrinated in a different way, or someone who just knows nothing about Israel-Palestine and has only been indoctrinated in the most kind of indirect way. It’s just, you know, the air you breathe if you grew up in the United States.
“So I have to say that despite those criticisms, I did take satisfaction in the fact that I was reaching those kinds of people.”
The reception for the book has not all been positive though, especially since it was published just days before the Hamas attack on Israel in October, which led Israel to respond by besieging, bombarding and invaded the Gaza Strip.
In Israel, the main reason why the book has not received a backlash is that it has not been translated into Hebrew, Thrall explains.
“I think there is a Hebrew-speaking audience for the book,” he says. But Hebrew publishers “don’t want to touch it”.
“There is an Israeli left that does want to talk about occupation and there’s all kinds of gradations within that” but as he says, “they’re not particularly motivated to do something about the occupation.”
“The far-left, the anti-occupation left is tiny but they do have a voice and you can have those conversations.”
“The aim of telling the story is to be able to reach those Israelis who don’t want to talk about occupation or who want to just immediately dismiss it saying, ‘Look, we have no choice and it’s the Palestinians fault that it continues this way.”
Israel is not the only country where publishers have been wary of printing the book.
The aversion to discussions about Israeli occupation and other crimes is perhaps at its most extreme in the country responsible for the horrors of the Holocaust – Germany.
“And what that has meant in practice is censoring voices that are critical of Israel, that are offering entirely legitimate criticisms of Israel,” Thrall says.
“In the German case, they said explicitly, we love this book and we could never publish this because of accusations of antisemitism and reputational costs and just the political climate in Germany.”
A speaking event in Frankfurt that Thrall was due to attend in early May was cancelled, without explanation, just days before it was to take place. The event was eventually moved to a different venue.
In the UK, another event was called off by the police, which Thrall presumes was mostly down to unfortunate timing as the scheduled date was 12 October, five days after the Hamas attack.
“Now, this is the week after October 7th and there was a hysteria in the UK at the time and I wasn’t the only one.”
A Palestinian music event at the Southwark Cathedral in London, which was set to take place on 11 October, was called off due to safety concerns.
“So it was really anything with Palestine in the title was being shut down that week. I assume that would not happen today.”
All told, Thrall estimates that about 25% of the events he was due to attend to discuss the book were called off, either by the police or more often by the hosts themselves.
A major countervailing force in debates over the situation in Israel and Palestine has come in the form of sustained protests by university students in Europe as well as the United States, which have challenged elite opinion, government policies and media narratives.
“I’m inspired by the student protests. I also know that as soon as this war is declared over, those crowds are going to disappear. Israel-Palestine is not going to be on the front pages of the newspaper. People are going to become accustomed once again to the system of domination that is the subject of my book.
“And I think that system has a very long shelf life and so I both want to applaud the actions of young people and I don’t want to understate their impact, I think it’s a lasting change, but it’s also incremental and it’s very, very far from actually bringing about an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians.”
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