Thirteen years ago, five-year-old Milad Salama almost did not get on the school bus for his class trip, simply because of his father Abed’s carelessness. Only the night before, his wife Haifa had asked him whether he had paid the hundred shekels for the trip. He had in fact forgotten. Milad had been talking about the trip for days and Abed did not want to disappoint his son. He sped to Milad’s school, and crossed the metal gate to the lobby, telling the secretary he wanted to pay for the trip.
“It’s too late,” she said. “We’re closed.” Luckily, Abed found a teacher he knew who facilitated the payment. He sighed in relief. Milad would not miss his picnic. He did not know then the cruel blow that fate was about to deal him. If only the school had been closed.... If only he had not met the teacher.... If only his son had not gotten on the bus that, in a few hours, would crash into a semitrailer, flip over and go up in flames, killing six Palestinian kindergarteners and a teacher.
Jewish-American journalist Nathan Thrall’s book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, which won the Pulitzer for General Non-fiction last year, is a harrowing account of Abed’s search for his son after the accident. The triumph of the book is how it is as much a story of Israel-Palestine as it is of Abed and Milad. The accident itself, Thrall says, was a result of the systemic oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis. The children were in the bus in the first place because they could not play in the nearby Jewish settlement, and instead had to take a detour to a playground along a “death road”. Emergency services in the Israeli-controlled area did not take the situation seriously, and the bus burned for more than half an hour before official help arrived. Although the hospitals in Jerusalem were far better, most of the children had to be taken on the flooded road (it was raining heavily that day) to the hospital in Ramallah, because only drivers with blue IDs could enter Jerusalem. The driver of the semitrailer, who worked for a company based in a settlement, received a very light sentence, despite the accident being a result of his rash driving.
In fact, telling the story of Israel-Palestine through something as simple as a bus crash was a calculated decision. Thrall says that for a decade his writing had been intellectual, historical and analytical. That kind of writing, he says, only appealed to an elite audience of policymakers and politicians, and the conversation they were having was a very limited one. So, to reach a broader audience, Thrall decided he needed to change his tactics. “It had been in my mind for a long time that a car accident was the kind of thing that would allow you to tell the bigger story of Israel-Palestine,” he says. “Because this is a very segregated place. You have Jewish-only communities right next to Palestinian-only communities with almost zero interaction between them. And so I thought I needed something like a car accident, some sort of event that would bring these segregated lives into contact with one another, if I wanted to tell the bigger story of Israel-Palestine.”
Even though Thrall says he wanted to tell a story with a powerful emotional resonance, he adopts a spartan, even forensic style to tell it. He does not embellish the facts, neither does he add his comments or views on what happened. He hardly interjects himself in the narrative. He knows the story is stark as it is. Even while keeping Abed and Milad as its centrepiece, Thrall brings in various characters associated with the accident to bring nuance and depth to the telling. For example, there is Radwan Tawam, the driver of the bus, who had been pulled out through the broken front window and lay on the ground with multiple fractures and severe burns for 20 minutes before help arrived. When he woke up after a two-month coma, he found he had no legs. All kinds of swindlers came to him, promising millions in compensation for the accident. He felt helpless dealing with Israeli lawyers and documents in a language he did not understand. Finally, he accepted the help of his son’s manager, who had a blue Jerusalem ID and spoke good Hebrew. However, he ran off with the money Radwan gave him to hire a lawyer. Radwan’s working life was over, and he would spend the rest of his days confined to his home in Jaba, his wife wheeling him from room to room.
I ask Thrall, currently based in Jerusalem, how he would describe the mood in Israel, especially after the announcement of the ceasefire. “In Gaza versus Israel, you see a totally different picture,” he says. “In Gaza, people are overjoyed [about the ceasefire]. They are shouting and screaming with joy. And in Israel the mood is sombre. There is much opposition to the ceasefire on the right, and a lot of talk about how Israel should only do the first phase and then resume the war.” He says that over the last 15 months, there was no sign in Israel of an ongoing war. “The cafes and streets were full,” he says. “It was like there was no war happening 45 minutes away.”
Thrall himself has faced much opposition, especially being a Jew writing about the plight of the Palestinians. Even his own mother refuses to read his writings. But he does not make much of it, because he says the conflict with your parents over a political issue like this is nothing compared with the suffering of the people he writes about. “The emotional difficulties that Jews in America or elsewhere might be facing are a millionth of what the Palestinians are suffering every day,” he says. But despite their frustration and pain, what amazes him is the Palestinians’ incredible sense of humour. “It is something that emerges in some of the darkest situations,” he says. “It is one of the ways that they fight back against this oppression.” In fact, Abed, says Thrall, was the one person who was not surprised when Thrall called to inform him about the Pulitzer. His story, Abed knew, was no longer his alone. It belonged to the world, changing hearts in a way no military weapon could.