The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has reached a new, horrific pitch. But even after Hamas’s surprise attack on 7 October, massacring more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and taking nearly 200 hostage – and the inevitable, lethal Israeli response – a challenge confronts writers on this topic. Put simply, the underlying conflict is stuck in a deadlock that has come to seem permanent: how, then, to write a book that does not repeat scores of previous accounts, that does not itself sound like a stuck record?
Nathan Thrall, a former official of the International Crisis Group, has found an answer. Despite his résumé, he has not written an analysis or policy document, still less a 10-point peace plan, but rather a compelling work of nonfiction, a book that is by turns deeply affecting and, in its concluding chapters, as tense as a thriller.
It takes a single episode and, by gathering the testimony of everyone involved, even tangentially, it constructs not only a meticulously detailed account of that one event but perhaps the clearest picture yet of the reality of daily life in the occupied territories.
The incident in question is not a Palestinian terror attack, an Israeli raid or an armed clash between the two peoples. Instead, it is a road accident on a rain-sodden day in February 2012: a collision on a West Bank highway between a truck and a bus full of excited Palestinian five-year-olds on a school outing. Seven people were killed: one teacher and six children.
It is an unexpected but shrewd choice of topic, one that disarms the reader of prior assumptions. Had the book focused on a bombing or battle, it would have allowed too many to decide the identity of the villain on the first page, if not before. But Thrall has a subtler tale to tell. He does it by burrowing deep into the stories of those whose lives were upended on that morning, starting with the Abed Salama of the title – whose son, Milad, was on the bus. Pages and pages are given to the (gripping) story of the secret romance that once flowered between Abed and a childhood sweetheart, the daughter of a rival family, and how that love was thwarted in an act of cruelty that would not be out of place in a Shakespeare tragedy. Such storytelling is in itself a radical act, for it insists on humanising those who are so often discussed – especially at times of intense violence, like now – solely as constituent parts of a category: “Palestinians.”
Thrall supplies the backstories of the drivers of the colliding vehicles, the first medic on the scene, even the architect of Israel’s “separation barrier” – who we learn is the descendant of a family mostly extinguished in the Holocaust – and of many more. Bit by bit, the players in the drama acquire three dimensions. In the process, sometimes even in passing, we see the mechanics of occupation up close: how the natural pool and spring of a Palestinian village is turned into an Israeli nature reserve, which then charges admission to the residents of the Palestinian village while granting free entry to Israeli settlers; the beatings administered to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails; the labyrinth of forms, permits and checkpoints that Palestinians have to navigate simply to live.
Not that Palestinians themselves escape Thrall’s scrutiny. We encounter informants and collaborators; we learn that Abed has to travel to the mosques of East Jerusalem if he is to hear a sermon unneutered by the censors of the sulta, the Palestinian Authority; we see that, when it comes to marriage and the family, Palestinian women live under traditional expectations, and rules, that are repressive if not crushingly misogynistic.
Still, Thrall’s narrative drive leads to only one place. He shows that the fatal accident was not merely the product of terrible weather and an act of gross negligence by the truck driver. He points instead to “the true origins of the calamity”. He names among other elements: “the separation wall and the permit system that forced a kindergarten class to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah”; the checkpoints “used to stem Palestinian movement and ease settler traffic at rush hour”; and “the absence of emergency services on one side of the separation wall”. All this was “bound to lead to tragedy”.
The culprit, in other words, is the occupation, a 56-year political project that is exacting a terrible human cost. This is not news, but Thrall’s achievement is to make us see it – and feel its injustice – afresh.
• A Day in the Life of Abed Salama 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.
