In the days since the attacks by Hamas in southern Israel, Nathan Thrall, an American journalist and former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, has found himself lodged anxiously between worry for his wife and daughters at home in Jerusalem, and awareness that, as the tour to promote his new book continues, every public appearance is now more than usually fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding.
“[Events] have made it harder for me to speak,” he says, when we meet in London. “Many people who’ve read A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tell me they find it prescient; they regard it as a necessary book. But for some others, there’s this feeling that I’m bringing a message of nuance. I’m telling them about the lives of Jews and Palestinians in a situation that is clearly unjust, and [they feel] we can’t talk about an injustice in the face of atrocity.
“It’s a very raw moment: almost a post 9/11 moment in the degree to which people are afraid to express sympathy for the Palestinians, and I don’t yet know which attitude of the two is going to prevail.”
Thrall’s book owes its title to a man he now regards as a friend: Abed Salama, who lives in Anata, a town in the West Bank near Jerusalem that is almost encircled by the Israeli separation barrier. In 2012, Salama’s five-year-old son Milad was killed, the bus on which he was travelling for a school trip having crashed. In his book, Thrall describes the many iniquities Salama must, as a Palestinian, endure in the hours and days following the accident, beginning with the impossibility of travelling to the hospital in which Milad might be lying.
But Thrall uses the tragedy to tell the stories of many others, too. Among them are Eldad Benshtein, an Israeli settler who attended the crash as a paramedic; and Dany Tirza who, as the leader of the Israel Defence Force’s strategic planning in the West Bank, effectively mapped out the separation wall, deciding precisely where it would be built.
Thrall deploys their experiences to illuminate what he calls the “system” – a repressive structure he regards as unsustainable, but does not expect to change soon, whatever happens in Gaza: “This is the greatest challenge it has ever faced. One cannot overstate the shock Israelis felt at seeing footage of armed men moving through a town like Sderot. It’s something out of their nightmares, an utter reversal of every notion they have about Gaza being sealed off; about it being a problem that they don’t have to think about except during periodic escalations.
“But this war won’t end with equality for Jews and Palestinians. There will continue to be a regime of forced control, whether Israel is present in Gaza, or it manages to find proxies in the Palestinian Authority that can help it control Gaza, or it just decides to leave Hamas in place. [Meanwhile] it has to flatten Gaza in order to satisfy its own public; to give them an answer to the question of how it can credibly claim this will never happen again.”
Thrall doesn’t rule out the possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will survive the crisis: “He should be scared, but I think it’s quite good for him that he has formed a national unity government. All the failures from now on will be shared.”
The Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, have never been so gravely threatened as now, a rival organisation having defied Israel in a way it never has. “Hamas has shown itself willing to sacrifice territorial control of Gaza for a higher goal, which is the leadership of the national movement,” he says. Yet the actions of Hamas will deliver no great victory. “The world has a record of being able to ignore the Palestinians. Gaza will be in ruins, many lives will have been lost, they will have failed utterly.”
Thrall first made contact with Salama through a friend. “I live two kilometres from Amata. I would pass it on a weekly basis, hardly paying it any mind that this ghetto sits beneath the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; that you can look down from the beautiful, manicured grounds of the campus on to the checkpoints and the lines of people trying to get through them.” Winning Salama’s trust was relatively straightforward; he was desperate to speak to someone about his son, and refers now to Thrall as “the man who made him cry” (he means this as praise). But Israelis in the book were also happy to talk, suspicion falling away once they met him: “I knew the only way it would succeed was if people felt it was an honest depiction; if everybody looked human, real people with explicable motives, loves, jealousies and ambitions.”
All the same, such work is difficult. To be a Jewish critic of Israel is also, sometimes, to be very lonely. “My mom is a typical Soviet Jewish émigré to the United States,” he says. “She has a tribal attachment to Israel. She cannot bear to read anything I write.” Thrall has lived in the country for 12 years. Does he plan to stay on? He does, it’s complicated. “I feel a moral responsibility to do what I can. I feel that responsibility as an American whose tax dollars give nearly four billion a year to Israel; I feel it as a Jew, because the Israeli government claims to be acting in the name of the Jewish people; and I feel it as a human being who lives in Jerusalem and has deep friendships with Palestinians.
“But … the level of brutality I’ve seen not just since Saturday, but on Saturday, makes me heartsick. I have three daughters who were born in this society, and I worry that I’m doing them a terrible disservice by raising them in this place, and that, if something should happen to them, it would be my fault.”
