This is the John Fugel-Sang Podcast.

I am so pleased to welcome Nathan Thrall to the show.

He's the former director of the Arab Israeli Project. I am so pleased to welcome Nathan Thrall to the show.

He's the former director of the Arab Israeli Project

at the International Crisis Group

and the author of the only language they understand

forcing compromise in Israel and Palestine. You may have read his stuff in the New York

Times magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of

books. He's taught at Bard College and lives in Jerusalem and his new book is

a day in the life of Abad Salama, the anatomy of a Jerusalem

tragedy.

This is a book that is unlike anything you'll read this year.

In it he tells the story of a bus accident where six

little Palestinian kindergartners and a teacher were burned to death. One of the

children tragically killed was a five-year-old boy named Millad and the story follows his father

Abed Salama as he desperately searches for his son following the accident.

It's a book about the bureaucracy and the indignities. A father must as a Palestinian endure in the hours and days after the accident

including how it was impossible to travel to the hospital where his son might be lying and through the story of these

children and their loss and their parents and all the emergency responders and

the civilians who jumped into action Mr. Thrall paints a painful and honest picture of what life is like

under Israeli authority for both Jewish citizens and Palestinians who are living under occupation.

It comes from his experience living in Gaza and in Jerusalem as an American Jew.

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