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.
