May 28, 2024

• Olivia Ebertz, The Public’s Radio

Hisham Awartani joins Brown University students presenting divestment proposal to board members

The mood at the hill was celebratory after the students presented their divestment proposal, but Awartani was already focused on the next step in the process: the full university board vote on the students’ divestment measure in the fall. (Olivia Ebertz/ The Public’s Radio)

On Thursday morning, a group of four undergraduate students and one graduate student wearing business casual attire made their way up the hill to the John D. Rockefeller library at Brown University. They had just presented a proposal on divestment to some of the school’s board members. A group of their peers, members of the pro-Palestinian organization Brown Divest Coalition, cheered them on as they approached the steps.

“Yes, yes, slay!” said one of the students.

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Among the group of presenters was Hisham Awartani, a Palestinian-American-British student who was paralyzed after being shot in the spine while visiting family in Burlington, Vermont last year. The mood at the hill was celebratory, but Awartani was already focused on the next step in the process: the full university board vote on the students’ divestment measure in the fall.

“I think we should allow ourselves to have moments of joy when we feel like we’ve accomplished something like this, but at the same time, we need to temper our expectations with what is left to do,” said Awartani.

Awartani was born and raised in the West Bank to a Palestinian father and an American-British mother, and came to the U.S. to attend Brown to study math and later, archeology. Over the Thanksgiving break in Vermont, he was shot along with two other Palestinian college friends while on an evening walk. They were speaking in a mix of Arabic and English and two of them wore keffiyehs when it happened. Burlington police are continuing to investigate the incident as a hate crime, although have not yet filed hate crime charges.

Students at Brown sometimes refer to Awartani as a martyr in speeches, and wear shirts bearing the words Divest for Hisham. (Olivia Ebertz/The Public’s Radio)

Since then, Awartani has become the face of the divestment movement at Brown. Students call him a martyr in speeches. They wear t-shirts bearing the words Divest for Hisham. Awartani is a bit reserved and introverted. The day prior to the divestment presentation, he wore a t-shirt bearing an album name from experimental punk rappers Death Grips. When he speaks, he chooses precise words with care. As a Palestinian, he has given up some of his privacy for the divestment cause at Brown, and as the survivor of a possible anti-Arab hate crime, he has given up even more. The New York Times recently published an op-ed he penned.

“I think I appreciate that the evocation of my name is emotionally powerful. And I appreciate that it contributes to the momentum of this movement,” said Awartani.

The students were given the opportunity to present their divestment proposal to the Brown board of trustees as a part of a deal they struck with the administration to end their pro-Palestinian encampment last month. Since 2019, students at Brown have been asking the school’s board to divest from companies they see as facilitating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories. That includes companies like those students say manufacture tear gas, or systems the Israeli government uses to track Palestinians’ movements. As a part of the agreement, the full board is required to present on the measure in the fall.

The protest tent encampment at Brown University. (The Public’s Radio)

To pick the students who would be involved in presenting, the volunteers whittled the list down amongst themselves. They thought it was important to have a Jewish student, a student-body president, a grad student from the union representing grad students, which has been a vocal component of the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. Students also felt it crucial to include two Palestinian students. Hisham says he understands the optics of his injury contributed to him being chosen, and has expressed mixed feelings about the deference and kindness school leaders have shown him compared to people in Gaza, where over 35,000 people have been killed since October 7, 2024.

“It’s a bit disheartening that to get people to empathize, you have to be vulnerable,” said Awartani. “But I think it’s an important step to speak directly to people. And in a way that’s immediate, in their face. There’s no way they can ignore it. I hope that it had an impact,” said Awartani.

Also in the room at the Thursday presentation was a friend who has been by Awartani’s side since the two were in high school back in Ramallah. Aboud Ashhab is also a junior at Brown. Outgoing and a fast-talker, Ashhab is a counterweight to Awartani’s measured presence. And on Thursday in a light moment after the presentation to board members, his co-presenters teased him for being soaking wet. As he rushed to the meeting, the sky opened up.

“Right as I was walking it just starts pouring rain,” he said.

Ashhab and Awartani were roommates at Brown. And in some ways, the two had prepared their whole lives for the divestment proposal. They can finish one another’s stories about how Ashhab’s father’s colon cancer clinic in Gaza has been razed as a result of the war, how Awartani’s cousin died in the West Bank in the violence which has also increased since October 7. Aboud said being in the room presenting next to Hisham made him almost nostalgic, reflecting on what they’ve been through together.

“When it was 2021 at the Sheik Jarrah protests, we were both seniors in high school, and I remember getting tear gassed. This wasn’t some sort of crucial moment, like this is the average Palestinian experience,” said Ashhab.

Over the summer, both Ashhab and Awartani plan to remain in Rhode Island. Awartani will continue his 5-day-per-week, 2-hours-per-day regimen of physical therapy. He is also building upper body strength, he said, navigating the hills of the east side of Providence, and said his recovery is just at the beginning.

Ashhab and Awartani are also already discussing their plans for their pro-Palestinian activism in the fall. Awartani says the presentation was a major step in the process, but much work lies ahead.

“This isn’t even the beginning of the end, it’s still the beginning of the beginning,” he said.

The Public’s Radio in Rhode Island and WBUR have a partnership in which the news organizations collaborate and share stories. This story was originally published by The Public’s Radio.

The Public’s Radio and WBUR Partnership

I Was Shot in Vermont.

What if It Had Been in the West Bank?

May 16, 2024

Credit: Vanessa Saba

By Hisham Awartani

Mr. Awartani is a Palestinian American student at Brown University.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

Hisham Awartani is a Palestinian American student at Brown University studying mathematics and archaeology. He grew up in Ramallah, West Bank.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opinion/politics/palestinian-american-vermont-shooting.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sU0.rOCN.zFmJpTejYt87&smid=url-share