Angry Planet - Angry Planet's Resident Zionist Reckons With the Brutal Reality of Arab Life in Israel

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

This week on the show we’re honored to have Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nathan Thrall on the show. His 2023 book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama cuts to the heart of daily life in and around Jerusalem.In 2012, 5-year old Milad Salama was excited for a school field trip to a theme park. When his school bus hit a semi trailer, it upended the lives of everyone on the bus. What followed was a nightmare of bureaucracy that encapsulates what life is like for people living on the wrong side of the walls Israeli Arabs are forced to live behind. Masha Gessen and Nathan Thrall on The Whole Story of Israel and PalestineA Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem TragedySupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. It's time to have another conversation about life on an angry planet. And I should apologize for my voice right away. If you're hearing me now, it's because I've gotten through COVID. If you're hearing me croak, it's because I've got to sign. infection. Everything you wanted to know, and that's the kind of show this is. Today, we are being joined by Nathan Thrawl. Thrill or Thrawl? Probably Thrawl. Okay. So, and we're going to talk about a different side of Israel than what we've normally talked about here. I, Nathan, you're probably not aware or anything, but I actually am back fairly recently from a trip to Israel. And we've talked about Israel on the show quite a bit because, well, that's where the news is. So you're telling a very different story than the narrative I think most people have in their minds.

Can you tell us just a little bit about yourself? And also, I mean, we are obviously talking about a book. Tell us all about the book. Sure, with pleasure. So I've been working in Jerusalem since 2011. I worked for a decade for an international organization called the International Crisis Group that works in conflict areas all over the world. I was the director for what was called the Arab-Israeli project, the project on Israel-Palestine. And in that work, I was doing reports that were looking on the ground at devils. developments and writing really detailed papers about the blockade of Gaza, about efforts at Palestinian reconciliation, all kinds of things that have occurred over the last decade.

And they were really designed for policymakers and also a bit for journalists and politicians. And I left that work in 2020, deciding that actually it was more important to try to speak to a broader audience. I encountered so many policymakers who said that they didn't believe their own talking points and there was very little prospect of them actually changing policy and what really was needed for them to have the freedom to act on what they believed in was a change in public opinion. So in 2020, I left and decided that I would work full time as a writer. and I started on what became my current book, A Day in the Life of Abid Salama.

And that book tells the story of a tragic bus accident in the Greater Jerusalem area in 2012, a group of Palestinian kindergartners who live in a walled enclave. This enclave is just a few kilometers from my house. They are surrounded, the residents of this community are surrounded on three sides by a 26-foot-tall gray concrete wall that is called by the Israelis, the separation barrier, sometimes called the apartheid wall. On the fourth side is a different kind of wall that runs through a segregated road, Route 4370, with Israeli traffic on one side, Palestinian traffic on the other. This is sometimes called the apartheid road.

And you have about 130,000 people living in this walled enclave. They receive virtually no services, even emergency services, won't go into this area without a police or army escort. They have no sidewalks. They have no playgrounds. People are forced to burn trash in the middle of the road at night. And it's just a radically different existence than that of Jews just on the other side of the wall. In fact, the most prestigious university in Israel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, looks down on this enclave. You can see the crowded streets and the checkpoint that the residents are forced to go through.

And the children at this particular school that I focus on were excited to go on an excursion. They had no play areas within the enclave. so they were forced to go to a distant one. They couldn't access the play areas just on the other side of the wall and the Jewish settlement of Pizgatsaev. So they went on a long, winding path next to the wall, passed through a checkpoint, and a minute later, they were struck by a giant semi-trailer.

The bus flipped over, it caught fire, six children died and one teacher. And because this accident took place on a road that is used almost entirely by Palestinians, it's under full Israeli jurisdiction, Israeli traffic, police give out tickets on this road. But it's used mostly by Palestinians and is an area of total neglect like the walled enclave, like the areas on the other side of this wall. And it was more than 30 minutes before the first Israeli fire truck arrived at the scene. So who was left to try to help deal with this crisis to rescue these children were people who just pulled over on the side of the road on their way to work that morning. And one man in particular, together with one teacher, heroically entered this burning bus, pulled off dozens of soot covered. kids and put them in the back seats of private vehicles.

And the drivers of those private vehicles, they're all Palestinian. They have different colored ID cards that allow them or don't allow them to cross through the nearby checkpoint and access the superior hospitals in Jerusalem or if they don't have the right color ID card to go in a different direction toward the Ramallah Hospital or elsewhere. And I tell the story of Abid Salama, who is the type of. character and is the father of one of these children who learns of the accident and rushes to the scene. The army has shut down the main road leading up to the accident site. He gets out of the car that he's in. He races toward it. And when he gets there, he sees a giant crowd,

a burned out shell of a bus and no children. And he's asking people in the crowd, where are the children? And they tell him different answers. They're at one Jerusalem hospital. They're at another Jerusalem hospital. They're at the military base a minute up the road. They're at the hospital in Ramallah. And Abed himself doesn't have the right color ID to go and check for his son at those Jerusalem hospitals. He certainly can't enter the military base a minute up the road. And he goes to the Ramallah hospital to try and find his son. And it's more than 24 hours before he even finds out where his son is. What's happened to his son. And it's through Abid's story, but also the story of other parents, children,

teachers, and also some of the Jewish characters, Jewish emergency service personnel, some of the settlers who lived right next to the accident site, that I really try and tell through the story of this accident, the whole story of Israel, Palestine. So people, I think there's some background that would be really helpful for people, which is that there are about 10 million citizens in Israel proper, or at least Israel proper, I think is actually disputed. I think is fair to say. But two million at least are Arab Israelis, and that does not confer the same kind of citizenship, I think we'll all agree that Jewish Israelis necessarily have. Not if they're wearing different colored ID cards, no. Right.

So can you explain the status of the enclave you're talking about, just so we understand who everybody is and, you know, try to understand this whole concept of the IDs and what they, you know, because obviously they have a meaning that's both literal and symbolic, right? Yeah, absolutely. So to zoom out for a second, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, we have a single sovereign in the state of Israel. And under the state of Israel's control are 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians. The vast majority of those Palestinians don't have basic civil rights. and they are fragmented into different categories with different restrictions on their movement. And those categories are as follows. There are Palestinian citizens of Israel, about two million of them who have citizenship

and do not have the same collective rights as Jews. and they are about 20% of the population of citizens of Israel, and they're constricted to about 3% of the land. Many of their lands have been taken over by Israel, and many of them come from families who were internally displaced in the 1948 war and are not permitted to go back to their homes and villages. The next category are the Palestinians who are in the West Bank. And the West Bank includes East Jerusalem. And so within this category of the West Bank, we have different zones of Israeli control. We have areas that Israel has formally annexed in 1967, which is East Jerusalem and the lands of about more than, than two dozens surrounding villages. And that includes part of the walled enclave that I'm discussing.

So the wall, if we think of this walled enclave, basically the western half of it is formally considered by Israel to be within its sovereign territory was annexed in 1967. The eastern half of it is unenext. But within the enclave, you can't tell the difference between the unenext and the and next parts. It's all one undifferentiated area of deliberate neglect. And then within the rest of the West Bank, you have it carved up into Area A and B and C. These are Oslo Area, sorry, Oslo-era designations, where in Area C, it's about 60% of the West Bank. And that's where all the Israeli settlements are, all the Israeli settlement roads are, all of the Israeli military bases. Anywhere you might find in Israeli in the West Bank is considered area C. And that area is totally contiguous. And within that

area C, you have a bunch of tiny little islands of area A and B with limited Palestinian autonomy. And in area B, there's less Palestinian autonomy in area A, there's more Palestinian autonomy. But at the end of the day, Israel is the sole sovereign. It enters area A regularly. It enters area B regularly. And then finally, you have Gaza, where Palestinians long before October 7th, were basically not allowed to leave with a few exceptions. You know, prior to October 7th, you had about 17,000 who had exit permits to go and work as day laborers inside of Israel. But for the most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza, they were trapped and they could not go and even study in the West Bank.

And it was an onerous process just to get permission to go to a hospital if they needed treatment that they couldn't get in Gaza to go to a West Bank. or East Jerusalem Hospital. So that is the kind of the fragmentation of the Palestinians who live under Israeli sovereignty, under Israeli sovereign control. That's not counting, of course, the many Palestinians who live outside of the area under Israel's control. And those are the Palestinian refugees who are not even allowed to enter the occupied territories or Israel. it's interesting because every single word that you've said is going to piss somebody off. And it's just...

We can't do this topic without making someone upset, though. No, we're going to make somebody upset. There's no doubt about it. And I'm trying to think about... And you please help me. Sure. I mean, because, you know, there's, I guess the only thing that I feel is important, that I feel personally is important to mention is just simply that there is a back and forth to a certain extent. And whether Israel is all powerful in the current circumstance, it's clearly not all powerful because October 7th happened. And Gaza was not always. under the same strictures. I mean, stuff has happened where there have been attacks inside and outside caused by

Israelis, caused by Palestinians. I mean, I just don't want to simplify it too much into a simple colonialist occupation narrative. That's all. I'm not trying to deny what's happening on the ground, meaning that I do acknowledge 100% that Israel is in charge and whether it should be or shouldn't. you know, I would, I, I, I can see a lot of arguments why I shouldn't be. But I don't, I don't want to let it get entirely, does what I'm saying make any sense to you?

Does it just sound like apologist, you know, stuff? Or what does it sound like to you? Well, I think it can be quite, um, quite shocking to people when they have absorbed for decades, That's kind of the, you know, talking points of the, you know, main anchors on American television stations who, you know, are telling you that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is a thriving democracy and good standing. There is a temporary occupation that's rather unfortunate. It's the fault of the Palestinians that that occupation continues. But of course, you know, the Israelis who are living in the occupied territories, you know, they could leave at any time.

And again, this situation is going to end. So we don't need to treat it as really a single system that is under Israel's control. We have to think about it conceptually as there is a good Israel within its pre-1967. seven borders, and then there is this kind of bad, unfortunate occupation that we may blame on all kinds of different factors. And that's not an objective presentation of a reality in which for more than half a century, Israel has controlled the occupied territories, deprived Palestinians of basic civil rights. It's not giving them either citizenship inequality or sovereignty and that situation isn't changing. And I think that when people really look at that

reality objectively and they see, well, actually, there is a single sovereign and actually one in ten Israeli Jews live in the occupied territories. And actually these settlements are not caravans on hilltops, but they're major cities with huge population centers and shopping malls and Israeli schools and health clinics and fire stations and police stations. Then you start to see that this is permanent, that it has lasted for the majority of the state of Israel's existence, and that it's kind of a convenient fiction that we tell ourselves that really there are two separate entities here. Israel's occupation on one hand and Israel within its pre-67 borders on the other. Those Israeli Jews who live in the occupied territories aren't

filing absentee balance when they vote from their settlements. They are traveling seamlessly to their jobs inside of Israel back and forth. And there is a steady process of expansion of Israeli Jewish settlements and constriction of Palestinians into smaller and smaller spaces. So if you zoom out and you kind of look at this process historically, it looks a lot like what has happened to Native Americans. It looks a lot like what has happened to South Africans. So, again, that is not the kind of what the older generation of TV anchors are describing, but it is kind of indisputable, objective accounting of what exists here. Yeah, there's, I mean, I actually have relatives who live on the West Bank.

And one thing that I was really surprised by, these are not religious. zealots, it's actually, I think they got a good deal. Yeah. Which I think people don't understand that, I mean, there's, there are a bunch of Israel's, Israelis aren't monolithic. And some of them are just callous. Some of them are actively trying to hurt people. Other people just don't care. You know, it's.

Yeah. So, so if I could just, uh, Speak to that for a second. It's about a third of the, if you take the settler population, about a third of them are ultra-Orthodox, are hereti Jews who traditionally were opposed to the settlement project and now comprise a significant portion of it. A third are ideological settlers, mostly national religious. And a third are what you call quality of life settlers who were, are there because they can, it's a suburb of Israel. It feels like a suburb of a town in Israel. And the housing is cheaper. And you can get a much larger place for a lot less money. And there are lots of financial incentives that were given to people to move there.

Now, after they live there for a while, they start to justify it. and they tend to drift to the right. But yes, absolutely. A huge number of the settlers are quality of life settlers. They're not driven by ideology. And that is because the settlement project has been a priority of the state of Israel for decades. This is its biggest national project. And the center of that project is the good.

greater Jerusalem area, because there is a strategic objective of ensuring that no Palestinian state arises and that no Palestinian state could possibly have East Jerusalem as its capital. And so what you have is a very concerted effort to create dense Israeli population centers in and around East Jerusalem, thus preventing a Palestinian state from arising. And that's where more than half of the settlers live is in the greater Jerusalem area. And this is where this accident takes place. This is where the community that suffered from this tragedy resides. And I think, yeah, to get back to the tragedy, because I think that it's, no one's going to

argue about that. No one's going to argue that, please explain how the is. Israeli press covered this, or did they? Did they cover this at all? It was a blip. It was a blip. It's just, you know, there was an accident. It appeared for a couple hours and the news sites that morning, and then it was over. One of the things that happened with the coverage was that on the comment sections of the online articles about the accident, you have.

had a number of Israelis posting jubilantly about the deaths of these kindergartners. And one of the things I write about in the book is a kind of center-left Israeli TV anchor who was really shaken by this phenomenon of the Israelis celebrating the deaths of these kindergartners. And what shocked him was that people were doing it in the... their own name, that they weren't even bothering to write these posts with pseudonyms. They were doing it on their own Facebook pages or with their real names on the common sections of newspapers. And so he decided to create a TV special about not the accident itself, but about the Israeli

reaction to the accident. And he asks in this voiceover, you know, how did we get here? How did we get to the point where this is happening, where this has been normalized, where people feel comfortable and unabashed about celebrating the deaths of kindergartners. And of course, you know, today, uh, we're seeing that on a much larger scale, uh, with Gaza and with, um, you know, really widespread dissemination of, um, you know, again, jubilant posts, celebration of, um, of deaths in Gaza. All right, angry, plaintiff listeners,

we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. Can I ask a question a strange way, if I may?

Yeah. Have you happened to have read the fiction novel, The City and the City by China-Mioville? No. No, I haven't. Okay, so it's like a murder procedural.

It takes place in a kind of a generic Eastern European city, but the kind of the trick of it is that it is a city that was divided a long time ago. No one remembers why. And it's divided block by block and street by street. And so the people of the two different cities live on top of each other and have trained each other to, you ignore the site of the street where the other city is. And it's kind of the way people, people, and it's kind of the way people go about their lives. And I'm wondering about the day-to-day life of an Israeli citizen that lives next to this wall and these Palestinians.

Is it kind of a thing where you have to train yourself to be able to go down the street and buy groceries and pass this thing? Do you just, do you ignore it? How do you reckon with everything that is going on around you all the time? and live your day-to-day life. That's a great question. Absolutely. You do ignore it. And it's not a matter of training yourself to ignore it.

I think you ignore it quite naturally. And, you know, the wall is just a natural part of the landscape here. And you don't think about what's on the other side of it. And you don't really even think about the Palestinian neighbor. neighborhoods that are on this side, on the old city side of the wall. And this is part of a broader phenomenon. I mean, I think that within Jerusalem, you have more awareness because it's right in your face of the existence of Palestinians right next to you living in very different conditions.

but in other parts of Israel, it's even easier to not think about it. And this process of compartmentalization of ignoring something that's right next to you, ignoring an occupation that you yourself served in or that your kids are serving in and coming home for dinner on Friday night from serving in. and just not thinking about it, not talking about it. It's just a dozen or more kilometers away and out of sight, out of mind. And even today, the thing that would shock you the most coming to Jerusalem or to Tel Aviv, for that matter, is that you would not know that there is a war happening in Gaza 45 minutes away.

And so I think it's been it's been decades where Israel and Israelis have learned to compartmentalize and to not think about it. And it also precedes the occupation, you know, during the first decades of Israel's existence from the state's founding in 1948 until just before, six months before the occupation began in June 1967, Israel. had a military government that ruled over Palestinian citizens within Israel. And they had curfews, and they had checkpoints, and they had areas that they were not permitted to go to, that Israeli Jews could go to. And this was actually the blueprint for the occupation of the West Bank in Gaza that began six months after this system came. came to an end. And again, you know, Israelis in those decades, I mean, if you read kind of liberal Israeli writers today, they talk about that period as a golden era, the golden era of Israeli

democracy. And nobody, none of them are mentioning that, you know, Palestinian citizens of the country, who were quiescent, by the way, this military government was there really to facilitate the takeover of their lands. And none of these people who talk about a golden era of Israeli democracy in the 50s and the 60s mentions this. Because, again, there is this great ability to deny. Well, but the Arabs from all over region invaded Israel in 48. I don't think there's actually a dispute about that. and I mean I guess what you're saying to me just seems it's completely out of context there's no context it's as if the Israelis were doing it because they're mean and that the 67 war didn't happen it was just the Israelis decided to take over these various parts of the West Bank I mean I I'm not sympathetic to oppression

And I don't think the Israelis are going about it right in any way. But context, my friend, a little context. So, but the context is we're talking about a military government that existed from the end of the 1948 war, Israeli state's been established. Armist disagreements have been made with all of Israel's neighbors. and now you have a small minority within Israel, those who remained, those who did not flee or were not expelled during the 1948 war, those people were quiescent. There was no threat from them. You have all kinds of archival documents that testify from the Israeli officials overseeing the military government that they did not. not believe these people posed any kind of threat. There wasn't a security rationale for keeping them under a military government. But what Israel was doing was it was taking over their lands,

as well as the lands of the refugees who had left, and keeping them constricted. And this was an explicit part of the military government. So this all precedes the 1967 war, and it comes after the 1948 war is over. Mm-hmm. I'm, yeah, I'm gonna shut up. I mean, you know, I also know that this is subject you know more about. You've been living there a lot longer than my four visits. And I don't want to just be quarrelsome for the sake of being quarrelsome either,

So my apologies. Would it be possible? There's nothing to apologize for. I mean, I'm happy to discuss all of this. I mean, that there is a lot that, you know, people don't know. And that is revelatory when you learn it. And I'm here to discuss it. I do feel like, though, we have lost genuinely, like, I mean, you have such a compelling

story in the book. And I don't want to entirely get it. from it while we have you. This is four years of interviews. Yeah. How do you build the trust with your subjects to do this kind of work? So it's a question that I've been asked quite a bit, and I really feel that almost implicit in that question is that there is something special about me, and I don't think that

that was the case. I really think that, you know, in some, the motives were different for different people who appeared in the book. But in a number of cases, it was that these were parents who suffered this horrible tragedy. And then after the tragedy, they were surrounded by a cloud of silence. And their own close family members would avoid the subject at all costs. They just didn't want to upset the parent or other relatives. And a lot of people are hungry to talk about their grief and to talk about the loved one whom they miss. And so I think some people were just you know, really ready to talk at length with the first person who came to them who really wanted to listen to the story and wasn't doing a short little news article, but really wanted to get the whole story. And, you know, with Abid Salam in particular, the title character, often I would go with him.

I spent years with him and we had very long and intimate conversations and it was frequently the case that he would well up while I was talking to him and so much so that he started to introduce me to people in his town of Anata as the man who makes me cry. And I used to apologize to Abid for causing him distress. and he would always say to me, don't apologize. I'm happy to be remembering my son, to be talking about my son. I feel his presence here as I talk about him. I feel closer to him as a result of this conversation.

And so I think a big part of it was really, was that. Oh, my God. Excuse me. Did we not say exactly what ended up happening? No, we did not. Well, I kind of deliberately avoided it because there's a bit of suspense in the book. So it's probably adds to the reading experience if you don't know. Well, let me ask this then.

What is at the heart of the accident itself? Why did this happen? Was it just like a freak car accident? Was there an inquest? Was there any kind of investigation in the aftermath? So on the most basic level, this was an accident. It was due to terrible negligence on the part of the driver of the semi-trailer, who was poorly trained, speeding in the rain, in terrible weather,

and very likely misapplied a special kind of braking system that exists on these massive trucks. And so, you know, that is on the most surface level, obviously, it's an accident. But on a deeper level, you know, what are, what everything that transpired from the moment that that semi-trailer struck the school bus was an entirely predictable consequence of a set of policies that are in place that wall off hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that keep, you know, something like a third or more than a third of the Palestinian residents of the city away from the center of the city because they're Palestinian, because there is a goal of trying

to make Jerusalem as Jewish as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. and because there are policies of deliberate neglect of this population, which Israel would like to push out and for them to be replaced with large Israeli Jewish communities. So that is kind of the deeper issue that is lying underneath all of the events that I describe on that day. What are the cards? The ID cards? Yeah. What are they denote? So, you know, Palestinian movement is controlled in a number of different ways.

And one way is, of course, just checkpoints and roadblocks and different road system. Another way is through permits. permits, there are dozens of kinds of permits that you can apply for to go to parts of the occupied territory such as East Jerusalem. And then there are the colored IDs. And this is particularly relevant in the greater Jerusalem area where you have a large number of Palestinians who have what are called blue IDs, blue Jerusalem IDs, that denote residency in Jerusalem and that allow you to pass through checkpoints to enter Jerusalem and to enter to go to the rest of Israel. And then green West Bank IDs that prevent you from entering East Jerusalem.

And you have many members of single families who have both who have either a green ID or a blue ID. And that's why, for example, Abid, who has a green ID, most of the kids on the kids on this bus came from families with blue IDs. His son was among the few who came from a family with green IDs. And the very direction that the bystanders took the kids in their private cars depended on the ID color of the driver of that car. And Abid himself, when he goes to the hospital in Ramallah and doesn't find his son there, he calls on relatives who do have the blue ID to go and search for his son at the various Jerusalem hospitals he was told the kids might be at. So how do you get a blue ID?

What is it based on? I mean, I assume there's some kind of rationale. And is there movement between the IDs? Can you change? Yeah, can you go from a green to a blue? In rare cases, you can go from a green to a blue ID through marriage, is where. is one way. And in fact, now Israel has made it extraordinarily difficult for that to happen now. It's almost impossible. But in the 90s, Abid was at risk of losing his job in Jerusalem. The jobs in Jerusalem are

much higher paying. And he and his coworkers, the only way they thought they could keep their job was if they got blue IDs. And they actually went and sought marriage partners. It's one of the things I describe in the book is that they seek out marriage partners who have blue IDs or Israeli citizenship in order to try and keep their jobs in Jerusalem. And there's also a story of a character in the book who everybody looked on with suspicion in Abid's community because he came from a town near Janine and his family had blue IDs. And you would never get a blue ID if you came from somewhere near Janine. And everybody suspected that they were collaborators,

that Israel had given this to them. Because it's a highly sought after thing to have the blue ID. It means you can move much more freely. You can get higher paying jobs. And the basic policy is that the areas that Israel annexed in 1967, which again is what was Jordanian, East Jerusalem, and then the lands of more than two dozen surrounding villages, those areas are all considered by Israel to be within the state of Israel. They've been formally annexed. And so anybody in those areas, born in those areas, is supposed to get a blue ID at birth. But the way that Israel did the annexation, again, the policy is maximum territory, minimum demography.

Maximum land, minimum Palestinians. And so what they did is they would annex up to the most densely populated. part of these more than two dozen villages. And so they would leave out the population while taking most of the land when they did the annexation. And that's why you have these communities where there's this mixture of some people in the community have green IDs, some people in the community have blue IDs. And what's much more common than going from a green to a blue ID is the opposite process,

which is being stripped of your blue ID, because, again, Israel wants to have as few Palestinians in Jerusalem as possible. And so you could be a native-born Jerusalemite Palestinian family from Jerusalem for generations. And unlike an immigrant from Los Angeles, a Jewish immigrant from Los Angeles, who gets Israeli citizenship, you know, within immediately upon entering Israel, if you as a Palestinian who was born and raised in Jerusalem, lived in Jerusalem for a generation, go and study abroad and you're gone for too long, Israel will try and strip you of your blue ID. If you are that same Jerusalem Palestinian, if you have a job in Ramallah and you get a second apartment in Ramallah and decide actually you're going to spend half the week there. Israel will send inspectors

to your home in Jerusalem to determine whether you, it's truly your center of life, is still your apartment in Jerusalem, or if it's really the second apartment in Ramallah, and they will come in your home, they'll lift up towels and examine, you know, is there too much dust on the clothes here? Do you really live in this place? And then they will try to strip you of your blue ID, in which case you would just have a green one. Do Israeli citizens also have, is there a comparable ID system? Do they also have blue IDs? No.

Okay. It is completely separate. They all have full Israeli citizenship and full rights and no restrictions on their movement. Sure. Can you tell me about the structure of the book? So it's a short book and you've put it together in a very interesting way. Thank you. So the book, you know, the narrative spine of the book is the accident.

And what I'm doing on, I'm operating on two different levels in the book, which is one, the story of the accident and each character, major character, who appears in the book, really appears in the book at. the moment where they're most crucial to telling the story of the accident. At the same time, through these people's personal and family stories, I'm also telling the bigger story of Israel, Palestine. So one of the characters is a doctor who works for the UN Refugee Agency for Palestinians and plays a critical role in the rescue of the children. And through her life story, we learned kind of the whole story of Palestinian exile and how her family was forced to flee from Haifa in 1948. And so the structure is it was a kind of delicate balancing act between conveying through family histories and personal stories, the deeper story of Israel-Palestine.

You know, for example, Abid's, the title character, Abid Salama, he was. politically active in the first intifada. He just graduated from high school right before it broke out. He found himself, to his surprise, to be the local leader of a left faction inside his town. And he was arrested and tortured and sent to a prison in the Negev Desert. And so each character kind of tells us some critical moment of Israeli-Palestinian history, and through kind of learning the story of that day and the immediate aftermath of the crash, we also really learn the whole story of Israel-Palestine. Another character who we made is the architect of the wall, who decided actually on the route of the wall in the Jerusalem area and decided that this enclave that Abbot and the other characters live in was going to be an enclave. And we learn also through his story about his families,

Alia to Israel, how they first immigrated, their background as, you know, one of the few Zionists in their community in Eastern Europe, and how many of his relatives perished in the Holocaust because they didn't move to Palestine. How do you break through people's unwillingness to reckon with complexity? My hope is that the narrative pulls people in enough that they become interested in the details. and those details are complex and that you as a reader are just absorbing that complexity because you want to know, you want to understand who these people are, you want to know those details and the facts of their story are indeed complex.

And so I really felt that writing a book like this one, doing a work of narrative nonfiction, was the key to doing precisely what you're asking, which is, in a way, forcing a reader to engage with complexity. Because you've given all of these moments a human face and connected them with this concrete tragedy. Thank you. That's absolutely the ambition of the book and really more than that to put you in the shoes of these people to really let you see. see the world through their eyes, both the Palestinian and Jewish characters. When did it first publish? Was it 2023? Is that right? Yeah, it was published four days before October 7th. This is my question is, you have published this book. You wake up the morning of October 7th. How are you, what is your reaction? So I didn't wake up the morning of

October 7th because I was on book tour in the U.S. with Abed. And we had just done an event in New Jersey. We came back to where we were staying in Brooklyn. It was late at night on Friday. And as we were doing at that time, we were checking in with our relatives in what was the early morning for them. and I actually my wife beat me to the punch and she sent me a voice recording on on WhatsApp with sirens and said something's something's going on. I don't know what. I don't see anything on the news yet.

And then I started searching and still none of the news sites had anything. There wasn't a video up yet of anything on on social media. And then I kept searching and then I saw the first. video of a truck inside the Israeli town of Steroat with a bunch of militants in the back armed. And that image was kind of the first one that most Israelis saw on that day. And it was, to me, I never thought I would see that image. And it was a total shock. and I knew immediately that there was going to be a war in Gaza and a very, very big one. I still didn't know anything about the scale of what I was going to learn over the coming hours and days.

But that image was enough for me to know that there was about to be a major war. What does the book tour become about after that moment? It varied, you know, from place to place. there were some organizations that canceled. We had about 25% of our events canceled. We even had radio ads on national radio in the U.S. that were taken down, very neutral-sounding ads, as is required, actually.

In the U.S., you're not even allowed to use superlatives in ads for books. So if you get a great early pre-pub review and it says brilliant, like you can't say that in the ad. So these are very, very neutral ads that are really just saying the title of the book. And those were taken down in the days after October 7th. We had a major event. The biggest one of our tour was going to be at a hall in London called Conway Hall. You know, 400 seat venue. People bought tickets.

And the UK police shut that one down. They were shutting down anything. with Palestinian and the title, basically. But the events themselves, this may surprise you, but the events themselves really did focus on the book and the story of the book, because the story of the book is also the story of a system of domination

that precedes October 7th, that exists today, and is going to continue to exist when this Gaza war finally ends. And there was a real hunger, and I think there still is a hunger, to understand how that system works and what it actually means on a human level for people to live inside of it. What do you think is going to happen next? I mean, you've written this book, and you said at the beginning, that you're hoping that working through public opinion, I mean, maybe the only way to change things. Do you have any thoughts about how effective this is going to be? And do you have any

hopes going forward? So I think that the, I've been pleased to see the response to the book. It's been overwhelmingly positive. I've had a number of people. tell me how their views have been changed by reading the book. And, you know, the book is just one, one small aspect of this broader effort of shifting public opinion. And I do think that that is happening. But it's a very long process. It's a very, very long road. And if we see, for example, today, there's a big generational gap in the United States.

and elsewhere in terms of perceptions of Israel-Palestine. So, you know, it's going to take probably until this generation of college students is in positions of power to decades from now for us to see really significant changes. That's my own kind of very bleak, long-term view. I think things are moving in that direction, but very slowly. Jason, do you have anything else? No, I think, first of all, I think people should read the book. I think that however you feel about the circumstance, there's something to learn from it. And I want to thank you very much for coming on the show while I still have a voice to do so.

Thank you. Thanks very much for having me. It was really a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for coming on. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like us, if you really like us, Angry Planetpod.com is the website that is the substack that you can give us the $9 a month and we will get you the bonus episodes and the early commercial free versions of the mainline episodes. We will be back sooner than you think with another conversation about conflict on an Angry

Planet. Stay safe. Until then.