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….
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After the truth-shower 