Nathan Thrall

Thrall's essay collection The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2017; Picador, 2018) received positive reviews in The New York Times,[7] Foreign Affairs,[8] Time,[9] and The New York Review of Books.[10] The Jewish Book Council's Bob Goldfarb wrote that his book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, "brings unparalleled clarity to the dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and is an essential guide to the history, personalities, and ideas behind the conflict."[11] Mosaic selected the book as one of the best of the year, writing, "A knowledgeable and bold retelling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that forces readers to take a serious and fresh look at their assumptions. Throughout its counterintuitive retelling of this history, it offers an unusually provocative and sometimes startling contribution to the genre."[12]

In January 2021, the London Review of Books published Thrall's article, "The Separate Regimes Delusion," which argued, "The premise that Israel is a democracy, maintained by Peace Now, Meretz, the editorial board of Haaretz and other critics of occupation, rests on the belief that one can separate the pre-1967 state from the rest of the territory under its control. A conceptual wall must be maintained between two regimes: (good) democratic Israel and its (bad) provisional occupation."[13] Thrall's article was praised in Haaretz by Gideon Levy, who wrote, "the American writer Nathan Thrall, who lives in Jerusalem, published an eye-opening and mind-expanding piece in The London Review of Books .... Thrall doesn't hesitate to criticize the supposedly liberal-Zionist and leftist organizations, from Meretz and Peace Now to Yesh Din and Haaretz. All of them believe that Israel is a democracy and oppose annexation because it could undermine their false belief that the occupation is happening somewhere else, outside of Israel, and is only temporary."[14] Thrall's piece was cited in an April 2021 Human Rights Watch report finding that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid.[15]

In March 2021, The New York Review of Books published Thrall's piece, "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: One man's quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule,"[16] together with an animated trailer.[17] The article was covered in The Washington Post,[18] Foreign Policy,[19] The American Prospect,[20] Jewish Currents,[21] European publications,[22][23] the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,[24] a podcast episode hosted by New York Times columnist Peter Beinart,[25] and a two-part, forty-minute segment on Democracy Now![26][27] Longreads called it "an astonishing feat of reporting" and named it a Best Feature of 2021.[28][29][30]

• Thrall, Nathan (2017). The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company. ISBN 978-1627797092. Hardcover ISBN 1627797092, 978-1627797092; Electronic ISBN 1627797106, 978-1627797108 (electronic book). Thrall, Nathan (2018). The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. New York, NY: Picador. ISBN 978-1250303899. Paperback ISBN 1250303893, 978-1250303899. Audio book: Tantor Audio, 2017. ASIN: B071VGJDQK.[6]

• "Can Hamas be part of the solution?," in Jamie Stern-Weiner ed., Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel–Palestine's Toughest Questions. New York, New York: OR Books, 2018.[31]