Nathan Thrall is a Jewish American journalist based in Jerusalem. The author of a fine if somewhat academic analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, and a former senior analyst at the NGO International Crisis Group, Thrall writes regularly for international publications including the New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. It was in this latter publication that, in 2021, he published an astonishing 20,000-word article titled A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. It told, in clear-eyed, unsentimental prose, the story of a terrible accident in the West Bank. On a poorly maintained stretch of highway, a bus carrying Palestinian schoolchildren overturned, killing or injuring many of those on board. Thrall used this tragedy as a route into the greater and more complex tragedy of Israel and Palestine, looking at the numerous and horrifying iniquities that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank are forced to endure.
Thrall has now expanded that article into a long and powerful book of reportage, delving deeper into the lives of Salama and his family, looking at the chain of events that led to Milad, Salama’s son, being on the bus. Rather than arranging it chronologically, Thrall has his narrative oscillate around the accident, with the bus crash at its dark heart. Everything seems to be leading towards that moment: the traumatic repetition of a horror that could so easily have been avoided.
One of the things that struck me when I read the original essay, which is more apparent still in the book, is the way that politics seeps into every aspect of the lives of those in Palestine. This may seem obvious, but it hits with the force of a revelation that not only the bus crash, but any number of the indignities and setbacks that Salama and his family have to endure could, with better politicians, a few small tweaks to history, have been avoided. Here, Thrall goes deeper into Salama’s personal life, explaining without censure or exculpation the poor treatment of a number of young women; the childhood sweetheart abandoned after a family feud, a miserable marriage and a divorce that was in part driven by the need to secure the papers required to pass through checkpoints. Israel’s dominance of Palestinian lives is presented as absolute and totalising – what Michel Foucault called biopower: populations treated as problems to be solved by technologies of discipline and control.
In the essay, Thrall concentrated only on Salama’s life. Here, he branches out into other stories, brought together by the accident – although, of course, one of the book’s clear underlying messages is that this tragedy was not an accident, but rather the result of a deliberate policy of apartheid in which the Israelis sought to make every aspect of Palestinian life more difficult and dangerous. A particularly moving story is that of one of the first doctors to arrive on the scene, an endocrinologist from Ramallah called Huda Dahbour. She, with the help of one of the teachers on the bus and a Hebronite onlooker, saved several of the children. The carnage takes her back to previous atrocities, including the Israeli bombing of the PLO’s Tunisian headquarters, when she was tasked with retrieving body parts. You feel how horror becomes the fabric of life, how fear and outrage deaden into numbed acceptance.
When I filed this review (the original version of which appeared in the print edition of the Observer on 8 October 2023), I referred to Thrall’s book as appearing in a dark period in Israel’s history, with Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners seeking to strip the legal system of any semblance of independence, to neuter the press and silence critics. Now, after Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israeli civilians and the response from the Israeli government, life on both sides of the divide looks unimaginably bleaker. It feels hard to recommend reading material against such a backdrop, but a book such as A Day in the Life of Abed Salama brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this. Like Colum McCann’s extraordinary novel Apeirogon, Thrall looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance. At a time when facts have become weapons in this seemingly endless conflict, this is a book that speaks with deep and authentic truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history.
• A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story by Nathan Thrall is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The final paragraph of this article was updated prior to its online publication on 12 October 2023 to reflect the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel, which happened after this review had gone to press for the Observer’s 8 October 2023 printed edition
