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My 14-year-old daughter loves history and is a voracious reader and had been asking me questions about Israel and Palestine and I realized that much to my embarrassment I actually didn’t recall much from my high school history classes beyond the bare bones facts so I pulled this unread tome off our book shelves.
Jewish-American author Nathan Thrall first wrote this story as a long form journalistic piece for the New York Review of Books and I can’t imagine this made any friends within the Israeli government. He expanded that article into this book that earned him a Pulitzer in 2024 for general nonfiction. Thrall is a masterful researcher and story-teller–my daughter didn’t realize that it wasn’t fiction until she’d nearly finished it.
The author uses a singular event–a horrific school bus accident–to extrapolate the dizzying, dehumanizing level of bureaucracy and indignities Palestinians endure living in the West Bank. Along the way, he delves into the broader history of the conflict at a surface level. In peeling back the myriad onion layers that led to a Palestinian father losing his son, Thrall offers the reader a truncated history of how the current system was created.
The book’s strength comes from the author’s focus on the humanity of “the other’ (an idea of which I wrote at length in my review of Ayah Ahktar’s Homeland Elegies (my DoD Read review is here) which addresses the broader idea of “they groups”). In A Day there are grotesque caricatures of either side–only individua and wrnechingly personal snapshots in time of a father’s grief or a mother’s disorienting isolation. Indeed, Thrall’s eye is for the specific and his writing leaves the reader reeling from what a life is like spent dying by a thousand paper cuts of checkpoint, colored IDs, permit denials, legal obfuscations and bureaucratic hurdles–all just to exist. It becomes readily apparent how two people groups’ identities have become tied to one other–for the worse. As the main character notes in Homeland Elegies: “Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion.”
In crafting a book as eulogy, Thrall offers something that often gets buried, blurred and lost in the 10-second news clips and scrolling videos cycle on this conflict: humanity. When headlines only capture the horrid of one side in a conflict it becomes impossible to see “the other” as anything but a monolith. Of course, this book is decidedly only one side of the story but that should not be taken as criticism. As I sit with my 14 year old daughter in the midst of a barrage of global tragedies (to include the abhorrent October 2024 Hamas attacks), I hope to instill in her the value of reading and listening to one side of the story, and then another, and then another until she can form for herself a more nuanced (and ideally empathetic) understanding of something as visceral as a father’s grief amidst his child’s death in a fiery bus crash on a the blackened side of a West Bank road.
Next Up: For a deeper dive in the Israel-Palestine history, we are reading "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East."
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