Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan Books, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Nathan Thrall (NH): The idea of this book, which tells the story of a tragic accident that took the lives of six Palestinian kindergartners and their teacher, was to put the reader viscerally in the shoes of men, women, and children forced to live under an Israeli system of ethnic domination, and to explain that system through the eyes of both Palestinians and Israelis.
In 2022-23, I was a Writing Fellow at Bard College, where I taught the world’s first course on apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Teaching that class affirmed for me how valuable it can be to learn about this very complex and multilayered system of control not through abstraction and statistics and the language of international humanitarian law but concretely, through human, intimate stories. Like the story of a man who cannot pass through a checkpoint to search for his son. Or a mother powerless to protect her child from occupying soldiers who come to take him from his bed in the middle of the night. Or a permit system that compels a man to seek out a marriage partner who could help him acquire the right color ID card and keep his job. Or a municipal policy of deliberate neglect, leaving a neighborhood’s inhabitants with barely any services—without sidewalks or playgrounds or lanes on their dilapidated roads, forced to burn their trash in the street at night and to wait in long lines at checkpoints to go to their jobs and hospitals and churches and mosques and to schools so impoverished and overcrowded that they have to operate in double shifts.
These were some of the stories that I felt would convey the reality of apartheid far better than any history or analysis. Not only could they describe Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in a clearer and more comprehensible way, they could also instill something more important, which is an emotional sense of the reality of apartheid, a gut-wrenching feeling of urgency around ending this deep injustice.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NH: The book operates on three levels. It is a work of narrative nonfiction whose spine is the story of a terrible bus accident involving a group of Palestinian kindergartners. It is also a history of Israel/Palestine told through the lives and family histories of the Palestinian and Jewish characters, from the dawn of Zionism to the Nakba to the present. And it is a forensic investigation into Israel’s intricate system of ethnic domination.
It was important to me that the book would read like a nonfiction novel. I wanted people to understand the deep history of the place and the mechanisms of Israeli domination, but to learn them though the narrative, without didacticism. To tell a single story that weaves together such segregated communities required finding some sort of incident that brought them into collision. But I wanted that incident to be something fairly commonplace, like a road accident. Because it is through the everyday that one can see how a system really works, and can then understand that the real problem is not a particular leader or policymaker or policy or political party but rather the system itself. A narrative of a more rare or extraordinary incident, like a major invasion or bombing, could be dismissed too easily as an exception—the result of one misguided decision, one bad apple in the Israeli army, one particularly ideological political leader.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NH: The book is a major departure from my previous writing, which was historical and analytical. My 2017 book, The Only Language They Understand, which has just been re-released in paperback, was a work of history and argument, showing that every Israeli territorial withdrawal was compelled through violence or political or economic pressure. It also showed how the Palestine Liberation Organization was compelled through military force and political arm twisting to compromise on its initial principles and eventually accept the idea of a Palestinian state on a mere twenty-two percent of the homeland. Contrary to what both parties claim—the Israelis. that “terrorism doesn’t work,” and the Palestinians, that they will never compromise on their national constants—the use of force has driven major concessions for each.
Over the years working on this issue, I came to feel that speaking to my usual audience of experts, analysts, policymakers, and politicians was not going to bring about change. Because even when people in positions of power are privately convinced that, say, the United States needs to cut off arms sales to Israel, they will never act on it unless there is a major shift in public opinion. So I came to the conclusion that I should be focusing my efforts on reaching a broader audience.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NH: This book was written with the aim of being of value to both people who know a great deal about Palestine and people who cannot point to it on a map. It is a tricky thing to try to write for both of those groups at the same time, but a rich narrative can allow one to do that. Narrative demands that a reader understand why the events are unfolding in the way that they are, what obstacles the characters face, what viewpoints and histories and ideologies drive and limit the decisions they make.
This is a book that I hope can be handed to any friend or colleague or relative, no matter how little or how much they know about Palestine, with the idea that they will come away from it with a profound understanding of the injustice being perpetrated. I hope it can be useful in courses not just on the Middle East and colonialism but also in first-year seminars and classes on creative writing, current affairs, journalism, US foreign policy, and social justice.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NH: I have been so consumed with the book that I have barely had time to start exploring my next project. But I know that it will be another work of narrative nonfiction set in Palestine/Israel.
J: On tour for this book with Abed Salama after October 7, you had twenty-five percent of your events canceled and the ads for it were pulled from National Public Radio. Since then, the book has been named a Best of the Year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist, and more than fifteen other publications, and now it has won the Pulitzer Prize. Has the reception to the book changed since it was first published?
NH: I received the news about the Pulitzer just after giving a talk in Berlin last May. The following day, I had an event scheduled in Frankfurt, but it had been canceled at the last moment—without any explanation or indication that the organizers had even read the book—and we had to find a new venue. I am about to return to Germany, this time for the release of the German edition of the book, and I am hoping that there will now be greater openness to it. I hope the same for the United States, where I will be doing a campus tour in October 2024 and February 2025. It would be wonderful if the critical reception helps embolden faculty to assign it.
That said, the discussion in Germany and in so many other places is still highly constricted. The conventional wisdom among leading liberal commentators continues to be based on positing a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated: “the tragedy of two peoples with equal rights to the same piece of land”—and the justness of giving one of them seventy-eight percent of it. In the United States, at the Democratic National Convention, the Harris/Waltz campaign refused to bring a Palestinian speaker on stage. As much progress as we have seen in public awareness and understanding over the past ten months, there is still a very long way to go.
Read an excerpt from the book in The Guardian.