We spend the hour with Nathan Thrall and Abed Salama, the author and subject of a remarkable new book detailing the many bureaucratic barriers and indignities that make the lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation even more difficult. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy focuses on the 2012 death of Salama’s son, 5-year-old Milad, who was killed in a fiery bus crash during a school field trip to a theme park. What followed was a desperate daylong search by Salama and his family to locate Milad’s body across different cities and hospitals, encountering numerous barriers due to the Israeli occupation system, like different ID cards giving varying levels of access through military checkpoints, and lack of help from any Israeli authorities. “This awful event allowed me, in telling the story, to describe the entire elaborate system of segregation and subjugation and apartheid in which all of these people live,” says Thrall, who first wrote about the tragedy in a 2021 essay for The New York Review of Books. Salama says his main motivation in participating with Thrall was to keep Milad’s memory alive. “When I start to talk about him, I feel that his spirit is behind me, around me,” he says. “I hope if anyone from the American government hears me … we want only justice. This is what we want as Palestinians.”
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !news@beehaw.org
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
Where possible, post the original source of information.
If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.