Nathan Thrall (2023) A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict_in_2024

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0ep0j83p7o

Nathan Thrall’s account of a traffic accident where a bus flipped and six kindergarten children and a teacher escorting them were burnt to death and others injured was the winner of The Pulitzer Prize. It focuses on the life of one parent, Abed Salama, mirroring A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

‘On the night before the accident, Milad Salama, could hardly contain his excitement for the class trip. “Baba,” he said, tugging on the arm of his father Abed, “I want to buy food for the picnic tomorrow’.

Epilogue.

‘A television crew showed up at Abed’s door a month after the accident. They were shooting a feature for the weekend news show on Channel 10, one of Israel’s main stations. It would air on a Saturday night at the end of March. The title of the segment was ‘An Arab Kid Died, Ha Ha Ha Ha’.

The hook for the story was not the accident itself but the reaction of young Israelis who rejoiced at the death of the Palestinian kindergartens.’

Children who hate other children. It’s been a good year for fostering hate and division as reasons for fostering more hate and division. The importance of not caring for the marginalised and displaced. Building walls and checkpoints and restricting movements of people.

The moron’s moron, Trump’s re-election. His promises to create more of the same.

Jordanians, for example, a tribal society who owned all of the land around Jerusalem, but were willing to settle for twenty percent of it under the Oslo Agreement but that was thought was too much because they were now Palestinians and lived in an apartheid society. Genocide is the next stage which is being played out now.

Human dignity has been on trial this year and it lost overwhelmingly. Ivan Denisovich’s narrative was about survival in a Soviet gulag. Oppression was built in. Unquestioned. Reduced to the basic of staying warm, finding food, and maintaining dignity in freezing and dehumanising conditions.

Thrall shows the daily realities of the Israeli occupation: checkpoints, restricted movement, and systemic inequality. Abed struggles with hope and despair. To find his son and then identify him among the other burnt bodies. It reflects both personal—and universal—grief. A grieving father among many—as Ivan Denisovich was among the many—and the collective experience of Palestinian life under occupation. Mass murder, bombs guided by artificial intelligence, makes such deaths commonplace and a mockery of common humanity. Read on.

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