On May 16, 2024, Hisham Awartani said in an op-ed published in the New York Times (free link) that being shot in Vermont “was not the first time I had stared down the barrel of a gun. Half a world away, in the West Bank, it had happened before.”
A Palestinian-American junior at Brown University, Hisham explains what happened to him and a friend on the West Bank three years ago:
On a hot day in May 2021, a classmate and I, both of us 17 at the time, were protesting near a checkpoint in Ramallah. Bullets, both rubber and metal, were flying into the crowd, even though we were unarmed. I was hit with one of the former; my classmate, the latter. Before, we had been students cramming for our chemistry final; then, on the other side of Israeli rifles, we were a mass of terrorists, disqualified from humanity.
Hisham continues by noting that the shooting in Vermont received much publicity in the U.S. He asks a question that has “eaten away” at him since the November:
Why did reporters and news channels interview our mothers and take our portraits when young men my age have been shot at by snipers, detained indefinitely without trial and treated as a statistic?
He answers his question this way: “to me, the determining factor is the reframing of the crime: Instead of settlements, the Oslo Accords or the intifada, the conversation around our shooting involved terms such as “gun violence,” “hate crimes” and “right-wing extremism.”
Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America. Instead of being seen as Palestinians, for once, we were seen as people.
Hisham says: “Death and dehumanization are status quo for Palestinians.” As a college student in the U.S., he has learned about the language of dehumanization from his classes and “the portrayal of the colonized as a violent primitive.”
I realized that the infrastructure of the occupation — the checkpoints, the detentions, the armed settlers encroaching — is built around the violence I am assumed to be capable of, not who I am.
Hisham calls the occupation “a system of othering — Israeli-only roads, fenced-off settlements, the security wall.” And he says:
The military apparatus in my home in the West Bank is a judge, jury and executioner. While settlers in the West Bank are subject to Israeli civilian law, Palestinians are subject to military law. It is as if we are all already combatants.
The attack on Hisham in Vermont left him with a large bullet in his spine which cannot be removed, but he says:
My story is one drop in the ocean of suffering faced by Palestinians, and compared to the immense and indescribable suffering of the people of Gaza, frankly trivial. As I wheeled myself down the smooth corridors of the hospital where I received care after the shooting, I thought of those in wheelchairs in Gaza, struggling to navigate the rubble-strewn streets as they fled their homes.
At the university since February, every morning Hisham checks the number of dead in Gaza: “It has exceeded 35,000. It’s difficult for me to come to terms with the reality of so much loss.”
In class, between Mesopotamian myths and commutative algebra, a few thoughts play on a loop in my mind: How can we come back from so much grief? How could we let this happen? What are we supposed to make of the world when Palestinian deaths are excused by talking points, repeated again and again on the news?
Hisham yearns to return to his home, his olive trees, his cats and his family. However, he realizes when he crosses the bridge from Jordan into the West Bank, he will return to being viewed only as a potential terrorist.
I will cease to be a junior at Brown University, a student of archaeology and mathematics, a San Francisco Giants fan, a Balkan history nerd.
Hisham’s entire identity will be reduced to his capacity for violence, “not as a human being, but as a Palestinian.”
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NOTE: There are more details here and here about what happened to Hisham and two Palestinian friends in Vermont in November. Hisham’s mother wrote yesterday about her son’s NYT article here on his gofundme page.