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| Vanessa Saba |
 | By Meher Ahmad Ms. Ahmad is a staff editor in Opinion. |
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Since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, many people in the United States have lived in fear of violence spilling over into our own communities. Last Thanksgiving, that came to fruition for three 20-something U.S. college students on a quiet street in Burlington, Vt. Hisham Awartani was on an evening stroll before Thanksgiving dinner with his two friends when a man standing on his porch fired his gun toward the group. Awartani was shot in the back and his friends in the leg and chest. All three survived and are recovering, but Awartani's injuries have rendered him paralyzed from the waist down.
In a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, Awartani recounted how the media swarmed him and his friends after the attack. The three were raised in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and had been wearing kaffiyehs and speaking Arabic when they were shot. (The shooter has since pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder, though prosecutors have not attached a hate crime enhancement to the charge.) The shock of the attack, which echoed a conflict far away yet occurred in a quiet state like Vermont, captured the country's attention.
The media spotlight left Awartani filled with guilt. As the war in Gaza ground on, he questioned why his injuries deserved any more attention than the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, not to mention the many more who have been maimed. Having grown up under Israeli military law, Awartani was used to the omnipresent risk of violence and death that characterizes life for so many Palestinians. But what surprised him about the shooting wasn't just that it happened in the United States; it was also that people cared.
Awartani, a 20-year-old junior at Brown University, asks the reader to imagine if he and his friends were shot in the West Bank instead of sleepy Vermont. Would his name have made international headlines? It's impossible to know, but Awartani argues that the dehumanization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has become so routine that a shooting like his would come and go like most every other headline about Palestinians facing violence.
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READ AWARTANI'S FULL ESSAY HERE |
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