Reviewing this nonfiction book feels like a political land mine, but it’s important to first consider the writer’s credibility: Nathan Thrall is a Jewish American journalist, essayist, and author based in Jerusalem. This book was published in early 2023, months before the Hamas attack on Israel, which does not change this story of the 2012 West Bank bus accident nor the sordid history of Israel and Palestine. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024.

When the book opens, Abed Salama is looking for his kindergarten son after a semi has slammed head-on into the bud taking the kids on a field trip. There is no information about which of many hospitals they may have been taken to. A Palestinian doctor and her staff were some of the first people to pull over while the bus was in flames. She and her co-workers, along with others nearby, pulled everyone out of the burning bus, including bodies charred beyond recognition. 

When the first Palestinian emergency worker arrived–after getting through his walled off neighborhood, heavy traffic, and checkpoints–bodies were laid out on the ground, and several had been taken to hospitals by car.

It took 24 minutes before the first Israeli emergency services arrived, even though they are only “a minute and a half away,” and the site of the accident–a road used by hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians – was under Israel’s jurisdiction and emergency services. Every body had already been removed from the bus and the scene of the accident before an Israeli ambulance arrived.

This accident, then, becomes a metaphor to portray the greater tragedy of Israel and Palestine, examining the daily iniquities and indignities Arab inhabitants of the West Bank endure in Israel’s dominance over Palestinian lives. And now, after Oct 7, 2023, life on both sides of the West Bank walls looks even worse. 

But as stated in a review published in The Guardian, this book “ brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this. It looks at the Israel/Palestinian conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger but above all, with nuance.” We see the everyday lives of each person involved in this tragedy as Thrall takes us back and forth in time, from the moment of the accident to the many events leading up to it, including Abed’s marriages, Huda’s (the first doctor on the scene) work with UNRWA, the engineer charged with designing the location and materials to build the snaking separation wall throughout the West bank, the intifadas, the prison sentences, and the many historical decisions that lead the the current untenable situation.

This book was preceded by Thrall’s 20,000 word article published in 2021 in The New Yorker which he then expanded, according to The Guardian into this book after “delving deeper into the lives of Salama and his family, looking at the chain of events that led to his son being on the bus…and the way that politics seeps into every aspect of the lives of those in Palestine.” I have not yet read the essay, but I plan to.

This is a heartbreaking read that left me with a better understanding of the human and historical suffering, of love, endurance, and despair.