What You Are Getting Wrong About Israel, According to Nathan Thrall
The author of 'A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,' an examination of the cruelties of the occupation, doesn't think Israelis have gotten the message yet
This article was published originally at haaretz.com, on March 14, 2023
From a purely utilitarian point of view, having a publication date of October 3 was a mixed bag for Nathan Thrall.
On the one hand, the outbreak of the Gaza war four days later led about a quarter of the venues on his publicity tour for "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy" to cancel or postpone. He also heard of cases of media outlets holding off publishing reviews of the book, nervous perhaps that coverage of a book sympathetic to the Palestinians might offend some Jewish readers after the Hamas attack on southern Israel.
On the other hand, the return of the Palestinian issue to the headlines led other journalists seeking to make sense of the conflagration to seek out the American-born Thrall, who is a highly regarded analyst and writer on the conflict, and who has written at length about Gaza in the past. By year's end, "A Day in the Life" appeared on nearly a dozen "best books of 2023" lists, including those of such heavyweights as The New York Times and The Economist.
"A Day in the Life" is a meticulously reported work about the personal tragedy suffered by Abed Salama and his family in February 2012 when a school bus carrying their 5-year-old son was hit by an 18-wheel semitrailer on a wet and poorly maintained road north of Jerusalem. Milad and five other kindergarteners, as well as one teacher, died after the bus flipped over and burst into flames.
Thrall provides us with all of the information we need to understand that different circumstances could have led to a different outcome – many of them related to the fact that "unified" Jerusalem is anything but, and that in particular East Jerusalem is really a collection of enclaves whose residents have a variety of different legal statuses. These affect where they can live, where they can travel, even on what roads they are permitted to drive. For the more than 350,000 of them who are Palestinian, all of those things will invariably be inferior.
"A Day in the Life," however, is about much more than the injustices of occupation, and could not have been written if the author had not put in the time to earn the trust of many dozens of interviewees, both the major characters and minor ones. Through their stories, we also learn about what it's like to live in a still-traditional Muslim society being confronted by modernity and change.
Thrall's subjects live under difficult constraints, but they also have agency and bear responsibility for many of the bad things that befall them in life. Nonetheless, when things go wrong in a big way – when, say, your son's class trip to Kids Land in Ramallah ends with his school bus involved in an accident, and emergency crews are delayed because they have to drive a circuitous route to get to the scene – the reality of living under an indifferent military rule can be especially cruel. Which makes all the more gratifying the accounts of many decent people, Jews and Palestinians, who rise above both their own group affiliation and the rules governing them so as to reduce the suffering.
There is much that is painfully poignant here: The stories of the sister-in-law who years earlier told Abed an insulting lie, which he in his stubborn pride allowed to stand in the way of marrying the girl who was the love of his life; the Job-like bus driver, Radwan Tawam, coerced into driving on that rainy day, who later insisted that the rescuers extract the children from the burning wreckage before tending to him – and ended up having both legs amputated; the two Palestinian and Israel officials at the scene, the people whose job normally requires them to enforce the rules that control daily life in this little corner of the West Bank, who with minimal discussion decide to ignore the rules so as to expedite the rescue operation.
That even extends to the author's choice of an epigraph from philosopher Stanley Cavell, which asserts that, "we call certain events melancholy accidents when they are the inevitabilities of our projects, and we call other events necessities merely because we will not change our minds" – a line that takes on profound meaning in light of the narrative that follows.
I met with Nathan Thrall late last month, shortly before he departed on a two-week Australian book tour. I wanted not only to discuss his book but to hear his take on the situation. It's generally agreed that Israel is at a critical moment historically, and I was curious to know whether this keen Israel observer expected the country to take advantage of the crisis – actually two crises: last year's attempt by the Netanyahu government to subvert the country's judicial system; and the devastating war that erupted last autumn and continues to this day – to change course. Could it be that Israelis might be more capable today of contemplating these big issues and making some serious choices?
A tragic turn
Thrall, 44, received me graciously in the renovated apartment in Jerusalem's historic Musrara neighborhood that he shares with wife Judy Heiblum, an Israeli-American literary editor, and their three daughters, aged 7, 9 and 12.
He has a thick but carefully cropped beard, and unfashionably long but again well-tended brown hair. He listens patiently to questions and responds with great openness, while at the same time refraining from revealing much emotion.
Thrall grew up in a secular-Jewish family in San Francisco. In a very early foray as a professional writer, in GQ magazine in 2009, he recalled a period in his adolescence when he was a very bad boy (the opening sentence of the article reads, "I sometimes wonder if none of this would have happened if I hadn't pissed on Sarah Chapman's desk"), and then learned that moving beyond that period required him to contend with a very difficult moral challenge.
Later, a grown-up Thrall attended and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Aspiring to be a filmmaker, he took an entry-level job – "a cog in the giant wheel of film editing," as he puts it. It was the moment when Hollywood was transitioning from 35-mm film to digital photography, and in his first job (on the 2003 Peter Weir movie "Master and Commander"), he recalls, "I was quite literally taping together pieces of film, implementing the edits that were done digitally by my bosses."
He ended that career abruptly after the death of his maternal grandmother, with whom he was extremely close. She and his grandfather had visited him in Los Angeles and were on their way back to the Bay Area, with her at the wheel. Blinded momentarily by the sun, she lost control of the car, which rolled off the side of the highway, killing her.
Thrall says his grandparents, who had emigrated with his mother from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, had "raised me as much as my own parents," and when the tragedy struck, he immediately left his job and moved back home to be with the family. At one point, his mother told him that her mother had always dreamed of going to Israel with him. She suggested he honor his grandmother's memory by doing just that, by taking "one of those free trips."
He had never been to Israel and says he had never even heard of Birthright, but six months later he was on one the organization's 10-day visits. What he saw captivated him sufficiently that when he returned home, he decided to study political science. He completed his master's degree at Columbia University in June 2006, "and the month that I graduated, [Gilad] Shalit was kidnapped, taken into Gaza and war with Lebanon broke out." Thrall "hopped on a plane, came here, and started studying Hebrew and Arabic at Tel Aviv University."
One day, Thrall wandered into the offices of The Jerusalem Post, assuming, like so many before him, that reading and writing the language fluently qualified him to work as an English-language journalist in Israel. It was during the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and so, instead of telling him explicitly to get lost, the paper's editor sent him to Mea She'arim to cover ultra-Orthodox Jews performing the kapparot ritual (in which they expiate their sins by swinging a live chicken around their head three times, after which it is slaughtered and given to the needy before the holiday).
To continue his climb up the journalistic ladder, Thrall returned to the U.S., where he landed an editorial assistant's job at the prestigious New York Review of Books. His big break came in 2010 when editor Robert Silvers agreed to his proposal to write about Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and the American security adviser to the PA, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton – who was turning out what he called "new Palestinian men" to maintain law and order in the West Bank, and suppress Hamas, which in 2007 had grabbed control of Gaza.
At the time, Fayyad was a darling of U.S. officials, international diplomats and journalists, and Israel, for his efforts to create the foundations for a Palestinian state. (Today, after more than a decade in American exile, Fayyad is again being mentioned as a potential head of a PA-led government that could theoretically govern a post-Hamas Gaza.) But among Palestinians – and not only the Hamas supporters among them, Thrall learned – Fayyad and his boss, Mahmoud Abbas, were viewed as collaborators with Israel, in their efforts to prevent terror attacks against settlers and soldiers in the territories.
Thrall ended up writing a contrarian piece, in which he pursued a theme that has become a trademark of his: In their desire to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Americans often put their money on politicians who tell them what they want to hear, and ignore what may be happening at street level.
The 4,600-word article, titled "Our Man in Palestine," was the first of Thrall's handful of reported pieces for the New York Review (he quickly quit his job as editorial assistant), and it also led to a job offer from the International Crisis Group – the nonprofit think tank that reports on and offers analysis on conditions in some 65 conflict zones around the world. Within weeks, he was on a flight back to the Middle East. But this time, his first stop was a six-week residency in Gaza City.
Will anything change?
Thrall's natural skepticism, and his ability to avoid the confirmation bias that can at times prevent both government officials and journalists from recognizing uncomfortably disappointing truths, is one of the qualities that makes observers value his reporting. He has long since stopped relating to Israel's control of the territories as temporary or reversible. As far as he's concerned, Israel's population is 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs, 4 million of whom lack citizenship.
We met nearly two weeks before the start of Ramadan, when there was still optimistic speculation, at least in Jerusalem and Washington, of a "deal" that would end the war, bring about the release of the Israeli hostages and maybe even jump-start the gargantuan reconstruction effort that will be required in Gaza. What did Thrall think?
"Will we see a major change of the status quo after October 7?" he asked rhetorically. "I think the answer is: It is possible, but unlikely."
Thrall acknowledges the "genuine effort being made by the United States to achieve a major change on the ground here, and ... [the] genuine fear among the leadership of the Israeli government that it will come to pass." However, he believes that "at the end of the day, what's more important are the set of circumstances that are in place that show a country that [such a change] is in [its] rational self-interest to pursue."
But isn't it in Israel's best interest to recognize that something's got to change?
"I think it's that question precisely that's been at the center of the thinking of John Kerry and Martin Indyk, and all of the rest of the [Washington peacemaking] crew [over the years]. And the assumption is exactly as you put it: The Israeli mainstream, the majority in Israel, prefers to have Israel remain a Jewish state, and to have a Jewish demographic majority in that state. They prefer it over the land. And given that that's the case, it is in Israel's self-interest to arrive at a two-state solution – and eventually Israel will come to that conclusion."
That's what the peacemakers say?
"That's what they say. Now, the part they're right about is: If you put a gun to Israel's head and you say: 'Give the Palestinians sovereignty or give them citizenship – you choose,' Israel will choose sovereignty. That is absolutely correct. The flaw in their thinking is that they discounted the fact that there was no gun to Israel's head. In their minds, sitting in Washington, this is the central issue for Israel and it's existential, and of course Israel needs to resolve it, and all of the right-thinking leadership is going to reach this arrangement.
"But there is a third option, which is: neither. I won't do either of those things because there's no gun at my head. That's still the case. I believe that October 7 did, in the most horrible and vivid way, make Israelis see that there are real costs to option C. But I am afraid to say that I think that it's not enough; it doesn't constitute that gun at Israel's head."
And you don't think that even before that date, Israelis were beginning to think that it couldn't go on this way?
"Oh no, I think quite the opposite – that [Israelis believed] Netanyahu was doing a great job, and that all of this [hand-wringing] was nonsense. Barak's tsunami didn't come to pass," he says, referring to then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak's 2011 warning that Israel would be hit by a diplomatic tsunami if it didn't pursue peace with the Palestinians. "It turns out we can normalize with many Arab states without doing anything on the Palestinian issue. And we've got Gaza contained, and the West Bank is quiet, and we're building and we're growing, and who's stopping us? Our economy is booming, too, and we're increasing our military exports, and we're making inroads in Africa. And the European Union? It can't even ban settlement goods from entering the territory. So, what are we talking about?"
Fundamental inequality
The protest movement didn't make you feel, perhaps, that these people who'd been asleep for 20 years were waking up and beginning to ask themselves questions?
"It didn't. I went to the protests. I saw the anti-occupation bloc. I saw it at Kaplan [in Tel Aviv], and I saw it in Jerusalem, and I thought it was marginal. I saw the education that was going on about democracy, I saw all these Zoom classes, but I didn't see people really asking the question that you were just asking. About the fundamental inequality built into the state, and about discrimination against Palestinian citizens. Or people asking: 'How is it that if we control millions of Palestinians without voting rights, we're talking about democracy today?' To take it a step forward, let's imagine they succeeded. And that we would have a Prime Minister [Benny] Gantz. Did that fill me with hope that there was going to be some sort of change? Absolutely not."
Do you expect to leave the country at some point?
"Wow. My daughter who's about to turn 13 was 6 weeks old when we moved here. From the moment we came, we told ourselves that we could leave at any time. People would ask, 'How long are you staying?' And we would say: 'No idea.' And a decade later, that was still our answer – and we started to say it with a smile on our faces because we were aware that at some level we were lying to ourselves. Obviously, we had moved here permanently, and we were just kidding ourselves that we could pick up and move at any time.
"But October 7 really shook my wife in particular. She was weeping every day for months afterward, and there were times when I would talk with her and she would say, 'I'm mourning our future in this place.'"
Thrall says he's heard similar talk from many Israelis, "people who say they don't believe that their children or grandchildren have a real future here." But many were talking that way during the period of the anti-government protests, he recalls, when his impression was that their talk "was in large part driven by the Kulturkampf that was at the heart of the judicial reform protests."
He says, though, that "in our case, I did not feel that way. And it was really after October 7, I thought: Wow – you got a glimpse of it in 2021, but on October 7 you could really imagine communal violence [between Jewish and Palestinian civilians on both sides of the border]. We still don't know the degree to which a lot of the [October 7] atrocities were done by the so-called second and third waves [of Gazan citizens coming over the border after the initial terror attack]. But in any event, [now] it was conceivable to me to think about. I had never before imagined Balkan-style violence, neighbor on neighbor, and I can imagine it now.
"My life's work is this issue, so I feel pretty committed to being here. But I have to weigh that against the fact that I think it's going to be a bleak future for my children."
"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," by Nathan Thrall, is published by Metropolitan Books and out now.