(RNS) — On a stormy winter’s day on a precariously narrow road outside Jerusalem in 2012, an 18-wheeler collided with a Palestinian school bus and burst into flames.
Nearly a decade later, American journalist Nathan Thrall wrote a book that followed the travails of a man who went searching for his 5-year-old son who was on that bus.
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction last week, also tells a wider story of Israeli occupation and the separate and unequal lives of Salama and the villagers of Anata, a Palestinian town just beyond the separation wall in Jerusalem. It turns a lens on the political and bureaucratic effects of occupation: the separate schools, roads, fire and ambulance services, hospitals, and a maze of color-coded IDs that allow or prohibit access to those places and services.
Thrall, who was born in California to a family of Soviet Jewish emigrés, has lived for more than a dozen years in Jerusalem, where he previously headed the Israel-Palestine Program for the International Crisis Group.
As if writing about an intractable political situation were not enough, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” was published on Oct. 3, just four days before Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people. That scuttled several book tour events and forced Salama, who had been traveling with Thrall to the U.K. and the U.S., to return home.
When the Pulitzers were announced on May 6, Thrall was in Berlin. Once again he had to contend with cancellations from venue organizers too skittish to feature a writer on such a combustible subject.
Religion News Service spoke to Thrall on his experience as a Jewish journalist writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You were in Berlin when the Pulitzers were announced. What was the reception like for you?
I had just finished an event and was speaking to members of the audience and my editor called me and told me that I had won. The following day I had an event scheduled in Frankfurt. The host organization, the Union International Club, pulled out, giving us almost no notice. Fortunately there was an NGO that does work in the occupied territories and they very kindly offered to host the event.
Was there a reason given for the cancellation?
They gave no explanation and they gave no indication that they had even read the book. I was told there were members of the club’s board who objected to hosting me. The atmosphere in Germany is so restrictive of speech surrounding Israel-Palestine that the organization decided to just cancel it.
This sounds like a repeat of your earlier U.S. and U.K. book tour.
About a quarter of the events were canceled for different reasons. In one case, U.K. police shut down what was to be the largest event of our tour, a 400-seat venue in London called Conway Hall. In the week after Oct. 7, they were shutting down virtually anything with Palestinian in the title.
In the U.S., there was an event in Los Angeles where the host organization, called Writers Bloc, said they just didn’t feel that they could put this on at this time. Even the places that didn’t cancel, it was clear, they were quite frightened. I spoke at a synagogue where the leaders let me know they really felt quite uneasy, but they didn’t want to be among those groups that were canceling.
Nathan Thrall. (Photo by Judy Heiblum)
Did you feel shunned by the American Jewish community?
These were liberal Jewish institutions that were interested in hosting me prior to Oct. 7 and were very eager to have a conversation about Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. But after Oct. 7, they felt that they couldn’t. Any discussion of root causes was denounced as a form of justification of the killing of civilians on Oct. 7. People could not accept that there could be a clear denunciation of the killing of civilians no matter the identity of those doing the killing, and at the same time, a deep discussion of the long history preceding the violence of Oct. 7.
Has the book been translated into Hebrew?
No, it hasn’t. I’d very much like for it to be translated into Hebrew. But so far every Israeli Hebrew-language publisher has refused.
Why do you think Hebrew publishers are refusing it?
It might be a commercially driven reluctance, which is just the assumption that Israelis don’t want to look at the occupation of the West Bank.
And is that your feeling, too?
It’s definitely the case that most mainstream Israelis, probably don’t. But I think there is a large enough group of anti-occupation Israelis who are very interested in the story of the book.
Will the book appear in Arabic?
Yes. It hasn’t been published yet but there is an Arabic-language publisher.
What’s it like for Abed Salama and his village of Anata nowadays?
It’s been a very hard period for them. Obviously, they are not suffering in the way that people in Gaza are, but the restrictions on movement in the West Bank are greater than they’ve ever been. In addition, people are feeling choked economically. Nearly all of the 150,000 jobs (earmarked for Palestinians) in Israel and the settlements have dried up. Immediately after Oct. 7, Israeli employers refused to take (Palestinian) workers. Those salaries are much, much higher than the salaries in the West Bank.
There’s also been a real increase in violence from the army and from settlers and a huge spike in forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. On top of all that, Palestinians are feeling despair over the war in Gaza and many of them have relatives and friends in Gaza whom they obviously care deeply about.
Tell me a little bit about how this story came about. Were you in Israel in 2012 at the time of the bus crash?
Yes, I was actually on my way to Hebron when the accident occurred. It was all over the news in Arabic on the radio.
It was only years later when I wanted to tell a broader narrative of Israel-Palestine, that I came back to the accident and decided this would be a very good way to do it. The town of Anata has had every form of Israeli land confiscation applied to it. Parts of it have been annexed formally and turned into municipal East Jerusalem. Parts of it have been taken over for a large military base, parts of it for a nature reserve in the national parks system, part of it for large settlements, part of it for settler roads. So, the appeal was, in part, the location.
It was also the identity of the students on the bus. They came from families with both green West Bank IDs, and blue Jerusalem IDs. So for all of these reasons, I thought it would be a very good way to tell the broader story of the occupation.
I began looking for anyone who was connected to the accident and just tried to find every single firefighter, paramedic, doctor, witness, rescuer, bystander, parent, teacher, child. It happened that a close family friend knew a distant relative whose son passed away in that accident. She put me in touch with another relative who put me in touch with Abed. And so that’s what happened. I found Abed’s story incredibly moving from the minute he started speaking.
The book really portrays an apartheid system. Are you comfortable with that word?
So in my other writings, I have written about apartheid a great deal. But in the book itself, the word appears only once, in a quote from an Israeli deputy defense minister. The reason for that is that the book is not polemical in any way; it’s not didactic. I did not want to be preaching to the choir, and I did not want to turn off any potential reader. I think it’s a lot more powerful if somebody just puts themselves in the shoes of someone like Abed and understands viscerally what this system of domination looks like, than to state at the outset that these are the rhetorical terms that you must accept if you are going to continue to read about this man’s experience.
What do you want to do next?
The work I really want to be doing is reporting in Gaza. Like all journalists outside of Gaza, I’m not allowed into Gaza right now. The only journalists that are being permitted to come in are those who do very brief guided tours by the Israeli army. My real hope now is to find another book project.
My wife and I have great trepidation about what kind of future (my daughters) will have in this place. It looks quite bleak. At the same time, this is my work, and I feel an obligation to continue to do it.
