Nathan Thrall is an American journalist who has been based in Jerusalem for 20 years. His book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tells the story of a 2012 school bus crash in which six Palestinian children died – including the five-year-old son of Abed Salama. Thrall’s story unravelled how the Israeli government’s policies, the infrastructure of “apartheid roads” and the everyday bureaucratic humiliations of Palestinian communities created and exacerbated the tragedy. The book, which was awarded this year’s Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction, was published in the week of the horrific 7 October Hamas attacks that triggered the Gaza war.
I was reading an interview you did with the Observer immediately after 7 October, when publicity events for your book had been cancelled in London. You were saying nobody wanted to hear context and nuance about those horrors. Has that changed since then?
I think it has changed. But it’s been a bifurcated response. You have an older generation who, if anything, have moved to the right since 7 October and don’t want to hear. And then there is, of course, this awakening among young people who may not have had much knowledge of Israel and Palestine prior to then.
At the time, you were also predicting that Israel would flatten Gaza to prove that this won’t happen again. Has the scale and brutality of that response surprised even you?
I have to say: no. The moment that we saw that Palestinians had crossed the border from Gaza, which was just an unthinkable occurrence for Israelis, it was clear we were going to see a war on a different scale. One Israeli I know who had served in the military said to me: “We’ll be lucky if there are fewer than 50,000 dead at the end of this.”
Are you still able to see Abed, whose story your book tells?
It is quite easy for me to get to Abed, but very difficult for him to come to me. In July, I had the first book talk that I gave in Jerusalem. We tried to get Abed a permit in order to be able to visit, but we couldn’t. Instead, I read out a statement from him about the bitter irony of us being two kilometres [1.25 miles] away from his home on the other side of the wall, but him being unable to be present to talk about his life.
Obviously, the situation has got worse in his village now…
In the immediate aftermath of 7 October, they closed down the entire walled enclave of about 130,000 people. It takes no more than four soldiers to do this. They have one checkpoint at the top and another at the exit from the enclave. That total strangulation didn’t last very long. But [with the world watching Gaza] there has been a huge surge in violence in the West Bank from the army and from settlers.
The success of the book must be gratifying for Abed. But clearly that is set against the tragedy of his son and current fears…
Throughout the writing of the book, I had this tension. Abed would have tears in his eyes often when I spoke to him and I would apologise. And every single time, he would shut me down and say: “Don’t apologise, I like crying over it. Because I feel closer to my son by talking about him.”
In the past, you have said it’s lonely, as a Jew, being a critic of Israel in Jerusalem. Has it become much lonelier?
Yes. The kinds of dehumanisation that I describe in the book with people here, for example, celebrating the deaths of [Palestinian] children, are entirely mainstream now.
How have reports of campus sit-ins in the US and Europe been viewed?
The student uprisings have been disproportionately covered. The way I make sense of it is this: for Israelis, the idea of Israel is that it is a safe haven for Jews. After 7 October, that idea faced a severe blow. And I think, ideologically, the protests were used to rebuild that idea – it was like: “Look at Harvard and Yale, it’s even worse for Jews there.”
Have you been a target of abuse?
I get emails from crazy people, but I’ve been facing that for years.
You mentioned that your mother in the US does not read your work – is that still the case?
I don’t know. I saw the book by her bedstand last fall. But she never told me if she read it.
Can you empathise with her position?
I understand she feels a very strong sense of Jewish nationalism. It pains her deeply to think of me as someone who’s betraying our people.
How do you see events unfolding?
It’s certainly the case that the Israeli military establishment doesn’t want to stay in Gaza for several years – but also that a withdrawal from Gaza is now something that the Netanyahu government cannot do. Because it will collapse.
We cling to this idea that the arc of history tends towards liberty and democracy. Have you been shaken out of that feeling?
I have been pessimistic about this place for a long time. If you look at the trajectory of what has happened here, it is a story of increasing Israeli expansion and Palestinian constriction into smaller spaces. If you just project forward, we are headed towards a fate like that of the Native Americans for the Palestinians.
I guess if there’s one thing that your book proves, it is that the biggest threat to that outcome, to authoritarian governments everywhere, is the power of an individual human story…
Thank you for saying that. I came to this project out of a kind of despair. I found that all of the analytical and historical writing that I was doing wasn’t making a dent in what was happening. I really felt that the only chance that we had for a major shift in public opinion was through powerful individual stories. I am working on others.
• A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story by Nathan Thrall is published by Penguin (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
