Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (New Texts Out Now)

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Aug 28, 2024 Palestine-Israel
Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (New Texts Out Now)

Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nathan Thrall

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.
... 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.

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.
Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.