[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 87 (Monday, May 20, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3776-S3777]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
VERMONT SHOOTING
Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, on November 25, 2023, three Palestinian
American students--Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali
Ahmad--were shot by a local resident while they were walking along a
quiet street in Burlington, VT. The three friends had gone to
Burlington to celebrate Thanksgiving with Hisham's uncle and
grandmother, who lives there. Instead, shots rang out, and they fell to
the ground bleeding, for no apparent reason other than that they were
speaking a mix of Arabic and English and wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs.
Hisham was paralyzed from the chest down and now uses a wheelchair.
This despicable crime shocked and outraged Vermont. This despicable
act of violence is a tragic reminder that even relatively tranquil and
tolerant communities like Burlington cannot escape the curse of
Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of hate, such as anti-Semitism
and homophobia. We all have a responsibility to speak out against
hatred, extremism, intolerance, and stereotypes that divide our
communities and can lead to violence.
The alleged perpetrator of this senseless attack was quickly arrested
and is in jail awaiting trial. We can be reasonably confident that
justice will be done. But the lives of Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen have
been changed forever.
One of the things that is especially insidious about this crime is
that if these three young Palestinians had been shot and wounded or
killed back home in the West Bank, the chances that anyone would be
arrested or appropriately punished is next to zero, nor would they have
access to anything remotely resembling the quality of medical care
Hisham is receiving in this country.
Hisham wrote about his experience and what daily life is like for
Palestinians in the West Bank in a moving guest essay published in the
New York Times on May 16, 2024. I ask unanimous consent that the
article be printed in the Record. I encourage all Senators read it.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[May 16, 2024]
I Was Shot in Vermont. What if It Had Been in the West Bank?
(By Hisham Awartani)
That frigid autumn night in Burlington, Vt., was not the
first time I had stared down the barrel of a gun. It was not
even the first time I had been fired at. Half a world away,
in the West Bank, it had happened before.
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
[[Page S3777]]
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.
So that night in November, when my two friends and I were
shot while we were walking on North Prospect Street, I was
not particularly surprised to find myself lying on the lawn
of a white house and blood splattered across the screen of my
phone. Back home in Ramallah, I knew that I was one wrong
move away from bleeding out; Israeli soldiers have been known
to prevent or hinder paramedics from tending to injured
Palestinians. But I had never expected to feel this on a
quiet street in Vermont, on a stroll before Thanksgiving
dinner.
The shooting of three Palestinian Americans in Burlington
has received more sustained coverage than any single act of
violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since
Oct. 7. 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? It's a question that has eaten
away at me these past months. Was it the shock of such a
violent crime in peaceful Vermont? Was it that my friends and
I went to well-known American colleges? Did the timing of our
shooting during a holiday weekend play a role? I'm sure it
did, but to me, the determining factor is the renaming 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.
Death and dehumanization are status quo for Palestinians.
We grow used to being funneled through checkpoints and strip-
searched, assault rifles trained on us all the while. The
result is a constant existential calculus: If an unarmed
autistic man, an 8-year-old boy and a journalist wearing a
vest emblazoned ``Press'' could be perceived to be such a
threat that they were shot dead, then I must accept that by
existing as a Palestinian, I am a legitimate target.
This dynamic was so ubiquitous to me that I could not quite
put it into words until I left the West Bank to attend
college in the United States. My classes gave me the
vocabulary to understand dehumanization, 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.
This system of othering--Israeli-only roads, fenced-off
settlements, the ``security'' wall--is an inherent part of
the Israeli state psyche. Yet far from ensuring Israelis'
safety, it instead inflicts mass humiliation on Palestinians.
Close to half of the Palestinians alive today were born after
the violence of the second intifada, and have interacted with
Israelis only in the confines of the security apparatus built
in its wake. The military apparatus in my home in the West
Bark 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 dehumanization we face is twofold: Beyond the day-to-
day aspects of our lives, it permeates the media coverage of
what we experience. In the news, our militancy is presumed,
our killers unnamed, and our deaths repackaged into
statistics. Somehow, we die without being killed. The very
veracity of our deaths is called into question. The extent of
the civilian death toll in Gaza should not come as a surprise
when Israel's defense minister, Yoav Gallant, can speak
unchecked of ``human animals.''
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. I thought of the
reports about a woman being shot dead as she held her
grandson's hand while he clutched a white flag. I thought of
a 17-year-old shot in the back by settlers in the West Bank.
The pain of knowing their fates is fathomless, and it has yet
to cease.
I think back to the circumstances in which I was shot with
my two friends, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad, and
imagine them instead in the context of the West Bank. A
Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen shot there could have been left to
die. Our names would circulate for a day or two in pro-
Palestinian circles, but in the end, we would be commemorated
only on a poster in the streets of Ramallah, our faces
eventually worn down with time like the countless others I've
walked past in the streets of my home. If that scenario does
not stir the same feelings in you as my shooting, if your
first instinct when a Palestinian is shot, maimed or left
handicapped is to find excuses, then I do not want your
support.
When I was still in the hospital, my family and I were
visited by a friend who had just recently made it out of
Gaza. He recounted how he saw the beginning of the Israeli
bombing from his balcony, and soon after showered and left
his house with a prepacked bag. He told me of tents, of
hunger, of explosions, but there is one thing that really
stood out for me as he recounted his ordeal.
He explained how the only way for him to survive in Gaza
was to accept that he had already died. Only after he had
come to terms with the realization that his life as he knew
it was over could he enjoy a puff of a cigarette and a sip of
coffee in the morning. This acceptance is the goal of the
Israeli dehumanization complex. To be Palestinian today is to
accept this fate.
I have been back on campus since February, and the
adjustment has been tough. The man who is accused of shooting
me has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted
second-degree murder. But my mind is elsewhere. Every morning
when I wake up, I check for one number. 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? I yearn to return to my home, to my olive
trees, my cats and my family.
I realize, though, that when I cross the King Hussein
Bridge from Jordan into the West Bank, I will return to my
designation as a potential terrorist. I cease to be a junior
at Brown University, a student of archaeology and
mathematics, a San Francisco Giants fan, a Balkan history
nerd. My entire identity will be reduced to my capacity for
violence, not as a human being, but as a Palestinian.
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