The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by journalist Nathan Thrall won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction this year.  The core of the narrative is simple: in 2012 a rickety school bus carrying kindergardeners on a field trip is upended by a tractor trailer in the outskirts of Jerusalem in the West Bank.  The bus bursts into flames. A frantic Palestinian father, Abed Salama, begins a search for his 5-year-old son, Milad. No one can tell him whether and how badly his child has been injured, what hospital he has been taken to, or even if Milad is dead or alive.  Abed has an ID card that strictly limits where he can go, requiring passage through multiple check points, only on old, potholed roads that keep him out of Israeli territory. (Israeli settlers have new, faster bypass roads that relieve them of traveling through Ramallah.) And that’s just the beginning of the constraints on daily living that so many Palestinians must endure as a condition of Israeli occupation post 1967.

Thrall uses the complexity of individual stories to dive deep into the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict: failure to create a Palestinian homeland, the unfulfilled promise of a two-state solution; terror of the first and second intifadas; murderous suicide bombings by PLO terrorists; the heavily militarized response by the Israeli Defense Force; the pledges of self-governance outweighed by Israel’s needs for ever-tighter security; and the apartheid (term actually used by an Israeli expert laying out restrictive road maps) conditions in which Palestinians are forced to lead their daily lives.  Access to daily needs (health care, jobs, decent housing and adequate classrooms) is circumscribed by draconian bureaucracy and miles of 30-foot concrete separation walls hemming in major Palestinian cities.

Thrall tells all of it through the intimate lives of individuals, both Palestinians (including Abed) and Israelis, so the reader can understand more intimately what the news media often gloss over or recount using arid historical data.

What happened to the children, (Milad included) is crushingly poignant. Equally heartbreaking are the ongoing stories of people justifiably consumed by rage, trying to provide their families with safe, decent lives, and burdened by a sense that no one is listening to them. Thrall gives voice to their sorrows, while trying hard to present both sides of this enduring tragedy, not likely to see resolution in my lifetime.

After the horrific crash, some Israeli settlers raised funds and found other ways to help the grieving families. But it’s impossible to forget the hate-filled reactions to the bus crash on social media by some Israeli teenagers who cheered at the deaths of four-and-five-year-old Palestinian children, asserting, “Joyous news to start the morning” and “Great! Fewer terrorists.”

This is a well-researched but difficult book to read, not because of how it is written but the deeply compelling pictures it paints.