It is the best and worst of times to publish a book like A day in the life of Abed Salama, a great report on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, with which Nathan Thrall, an American journalist and researcher living in Jerusalem, won this year the Pulitzer Prize for best work of nonfiction. The timing could not be better because the Middle East conflict has unfortunately taken on renewed relevance after the atrocity committed by Hamas against Israel on October 7 — the worst attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a crime that continues because the terrorist group still holds 125 hostages in Gaza—and the atrocity committed by Israel against the civilian population of the strip, a massacre of tens of thousands of civilians—36,171 dead according to data from last Wednesday, most of them children and women—during where red lines of inhumanity are constantly being crossed.
The fact that the prosecutor’s office of the International Criminal Court in The Hague requests the arrest of the leaders of Hamas and Israel demonstrates the extent to which international humanitarian law is being struck down in this new phase of the conflict.
But, for exactly the same reasons, it is also a shame that the book has been published now, when it is impossible to look with coldness and slow reflection at the occupation to which, since 1967, Israel has subjected the Palestinians in the West Bank, in which the Most international human rights organizations – such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch – consider an apartheid regime. This is an idea that is shared, although they do not admit it, by the Israeli authorities who, as Thrall narrates, call the roads that only settlers can travel on “apartheid roads”, an adjective that they use only in internal documents.
Israeli novelist David Grossman, the moral conscience of a country that is destroying itself from the ground up, has written: “More than four million Palestinians live deprived of the basic rights that we Israelis take for granted. Although they are only a few kilometers away, they are separated from us by physical obstacles and mental barriers of fear and prejudice.”
A day in the life of Abed Salama —a harsh, exciting, ruthless and deeply sad work—precisely describes those moral and physical walls that Grossman, author of an important book on the occupation, talks about. The yellow wind. Originally published in The New York Review of Books In 2021, Thrall expanded that report into a great journalism book. It starts from a misfortune—the death of six children and a teacher in a bus accident in February 2012—to offer a complex portrait of the consequences of the occupation on a series of specific people.
The Israeli presence, which began after its victory in the Six-Day War and has been advancing inexorably with the expansion of settlements and constant military control, marks every aspect of daily Palestinian life: it is a labyrinth of injustice from which it is impossible to escape. Thrall calls it “a hidden universe of suffering that affects virtually every Palestinian home.”
The subtitle —Anatomy of a tragedy in Jerusalem— perfectly describes the way the book is conceived: all the people who had to do with the tragedy are described in detail, but following the old principle of the best reporting: “Show, don’t affirm.” It is the characters who drive the story, who trace the complex system of repression to which Israel subjects Palestinians who live under a military regime. And it also traces a history of the Palestinians themselves, from the corruption of an important part of the political class to the young people who lose the little hope they had left, the refugee camps or the nightmare that it means to move depending on the circulation permit that is obtained. possess or having gone through prison—an experience that most young people have suffered, in some cases at the age of 12.
![A Palestinian is detained by Israeli forces in the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, on May 23.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/KQFGRFHCERHRFLKFYLXOHMLHGI.jpg?auth=55c6ca25df365f005e251d29483b4cabfafbe80419ae98e793007ab4a7f446a5&width=414 414w,https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/KQFGRFHCERHRFLKFYLXOHMLHGI.jpg?auth=55c6ca25df365f005e251d29483b4cabfafbe80419ae98e793007ab4a7f446a5&width=828 640w,https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/KQFGRFHCERHRFLKFYLXOHMLHGI.jpg?auth=55c6ca25df365f005e251d29483b4cabfafbe80419ae98e793007ab4a7f446a5&width=980 1000w,https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/KQFGRFHCERHRFLKFYLXOHMLHGI.jpg?auth=55c6ca25df365f005e251d29483b4cabfafbe80419ae98e793007ab4a7f446a5&width=1960 1960w)
Nothing justifies the repugnant terrorist assault by Hamas on October 7, just as nothing justifies the brutality of the Israeli response, which includes collective punishments such as induced famine—two actions that international justice, it is worth repeating, investigates as war crimes and crimes against humanity. —. But a book like A day in the life of Abed Salama It allows us to know and understand the framework in which this tragedy, made up of thousands of small tragedies, as incommensurable as the death of six children, unfolds. At the end of the book, when the shock caused by the individual stories, the stories of unhappy families, each in their own way, dissipates (in this book there are no happy families), it is impossible not to feel a deep pessimism. An analyst recently explained on French radio that all conflicts end sometime. But after reading this immense report, there is hardly any room for hope.
The immorality and injustice of the occupation have been destroying Israeli society from within – the authors of a recent and very long investigative report by The New York Times They maintained that “the impunity of the settlers not only threatens the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but also the State of Israel itself”—at the same time they have distanced the possibility of a just and lasting solution. The 250 pages of Nathan Thrall’s chronicle serve to contemplate and understand an aberrant situation, to empathize with human beings whose daily lives are marked every day, sometimes every now, by an intolerable injustice. After meeting all the characters that Thrall describes, it is difficult not to think that peace can never be built on injustice and that any future must involve ensuring that all the elements that came together in the tragedy of those children cannot occur again. And there is no indication that, when the fog of war in Gaza clears, anything similar will happen.
![Cover of 'A day in the life of l'Abed Salama', by Nathan Thrall.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/NSOVFPDLYZDDJG3P2WT45FKCMY.jpg?auth=4dd708ebf60d546e40c26ca1a9eb8aeb6235290d7e003daae45b0e7f773b03b8&width=414 414w)
Nathan Thrall
Translation of Pau Gros
Editions of Periscopi, 2024 (in Catalan)
Pulitzer Prize 2024
328 pages. 21.90 euros
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