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	More by this author
		Thrall, Nathan.

	Subjects
		Salama, Abed.
		Palestinian Arabs -- Biography.
		Jewish-Arab relations.
		Palestinian Arabs -- Israel -- Social conditions.
		Parental grief -- Biography.
		Arab-Israeli conflict -- Personal narratives, Palestinian Arab.
		Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.
		Jerusalem -- Social conditions -- 21st century.

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		Thrall, Nathan.

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		323.119274 T529d

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		Thrall, Nathan.
		Salama, Abed.
		Palestinian Arabs -- Biography.
		Jewish-Arab relations.
		Palestinian Arabs -- Israel -- Social conditions.
		Parental grief -- Biography.
		Arab-Israeli conflict -- Personal narratives, Palestinian Arab.
		Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.
		Jerusalem -- Social conditions -- 21st century.


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A day in the life of Abed Salama : anatomy of a Jerusalem tragedy / Nathan Thrall.

by Thrall, Nathan.

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Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2023.

323.119274 T529d

Palestinian Arabs -- Biography.

Jewish-Arab relations.

Palestinian Arabs -- Israel -- Social conditions.

Parental grief -- Biography.

Arab-Israeli conflict -- Personal narratives, Palestinian Arab.

Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.

Jerusalem -- Social conditions -- 21st century.

9781250854971 (hc.)

xiii, 255 p. : maps ; 25 cm.

Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His essays, reviews, and reported features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Originally from California, he lives in Jerusalem.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos -- the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy. Immersive and gripping, 'A Day in the Life of Abed Salama' is an indelibly human portrait of the Jewish-Palestinian struggle that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth."--From publisher.

"Journalist Thrall (The Only Language They Understand) offers a unique window onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this captivating profile of Abed Salama, a Palestinian phone company worker and political activist, on the day in February 2012 when his five-year-old son, Malid, was among the seven people killed in a traffic accident near Jerusalem. The driver of the semitrailer that crashed into the bus carrying Malid's kindergarten class was blamed for the accident and sentenced to 30 months in prison, but investigators failed to spell out other factors that made the accident and its aftermath worse, such as badly maintained Palestinian infrastructure (the road was congested and poorly lit); the barrier wall dividing Jerusalem from surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods (checkpoints delayed first responders); and a bureaucratic system intended to restrict Palestinians like Salama (because his ID indicated that he had served time in prison -- a stint resulting from his affiliation with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- Salama was unable to cross into Jerusalem in search of his son). Through extensive interviews and research, Thrall reconstructs the day of the accident, interweaving stories of Jewish and Palestinian people involved, including a doctor and a teacher who helped rescue some of the children. But he also dives into the past, recounting Salama's and the rescuers' life stories and the history of the construction of the barrier wall. It's a heart-wrenching portrait of an unequal society."--Publishers Weekly.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, 2024.

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