A West Bank Family on the Verge of Annexation
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WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Claire Malone. You might remember a story from a little more than a year ago when three college students were shot while walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont. Burlington is generally known as a safe, very liberal college town. The young men were Palestinians from the West Bank attending schools in the Northeast.

Two of them were wearing keffiyahs, the Palestinian headscarf. And so the shooting was assumed by many people to be a hate crime, though the suspect hasn't been charged with that by prosecutors. The victims all survived. A reporter named Suzanne Gabber has been talking with one of them since shortly after the attack. His name is Hisham Awartani.

Suzanne went to the West Bank recently to visit the Awartani family and talk about what's on everyone's minds there. The possibility that Israel will annex their home and the entire West Bank. Here's Suzanne Gabber. How often do you go back to the school since you graduated? A few times. Like every time I'm back, I come once. It seems like you're very close with the teachers. Yeah, it's a small school. In January, I went to visit Hisham Awartani. Like,

He's a senior in college, and when he was home on break, he went to visit his high school. Some of them have been teaching for 20, 30 years. Some of them have taught my cousins who are now married and have PhDs and getting divorced. Hisham's mother, Elizabeth, drove him. Wait, can we wait until I park? You don't open the door until the car's parked.

The school is Ramallah Friends School. It's at the top of a steep hill overlooking the city of Ramallah in the West Bank. It's a cluster of beautiful old stone buildings. Two of Hisham's best friends from school met him there, Kinan Abd al-Hamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmed.

And the three of them were almost giddy. No, we're going to go see the teacher. The boys go to college in the U.S., and so people are excited to see them. Five different teachers are gathered around, fawning over them and saying embarrassing things. We really missed you. You guys were the best class.

No, really, you were older than your years. You understood things way above your age. That kind of thing. The head of the school walks up.

And she wants to greet them too. And I was just on the phone with Sa'ed. Oh, yeah, of course. So he says hello. Oh, thank you. I want to say hello to Hisham. Okay, thank you. Holding court. Yeah. And while we were there, one of the boys, Tahseen, got a job offer. But I can't really tell if it's serious or not. She was like, I told him I was doing math. He's like, okay, by the time you graduate, I'll be retired and you'll come replace me. Do you want to do that? That sounds fun. I don't know how well he gets paid, but...

It'd be nice to be here. And of course, they got to reminiscing about the times they got in trouble. Messing around in chem lab. Oh my god, we were doing an experiment putting water on this salt and watching it sizzle. And I was like, hey, what would happen if I spit in this? The only time I ever got in trouble for something in school was I installed Counter-Strike on the PCs here. It's not that hard to install. You type in, like, install Counter-Strike 1.6. We used to hang out in the library, too, with the librarian.

You came out of the library? Yeah, that's the guy we saw. We talked politics. Here, you have to be political. Like, you see what's happening around, and then you're like, oh, why is this happening? And then you get into politics. And that for you was high school? Just everyone, yeah. That's what I think. Even from the grounds of the school, you can see directly across the valley to the Israeli settlement town of Sagot. But the West Bank has changed since Hisham left for college. It's grown far more dangerous for Palestinians.

And nostalgia is especially complicated. Hisham has lost a lot.

Part of the reason the teachers were so emotional about greeting the three boys was what happened while they were away at college, a little over a year ago. Tonight, police on the hunt for the gunmen who they say shot three Palestinian college students in Burlington, Vermont. Hisham's grandmother lives in Burlington, so he, Tahseen, and Kinan had all gone there from their respective colleges to spend Thanksgiving.

President Biden has been briefed on the suspected hate-motivated shooting. The 20-year-old students are all graduates of a West Bank... Kinan, Tahseen and Hisham were shot on the street. The man accused of the shooting is named Jason Eaton. He's awaiting trial. It seems he didn't speak to them or start a fight, just shot them as they walked by. My main priority at that point was just to call 911. So I tried to open my phone and then, you know, when there's liquid on your phone, it messes up.

The shooting in Vermont was big news.

It was seven weeks after Hamas's October 7th attack in Israel shook the world. Kinan and Tahseen made full physical recoveries, but Hisham... Hisham Orotani's mother tells WBZ in Boston her son is now paralyzed and may not be able to move his legs for the rest of his life after the shooting left him with a bullet in his spine. Hey. Hello. I was just checking in to see Hisham Orotani. What?

I first met Hisham in January of last year, in a physical rehab facility in Boston. He spent two months there, recovering from surgery and adjusting his body to using a wheelchair. His legs remain paralyzed. I spent the year getting to know him. Hisham is a shy, academic kind of guy.

He's double majoring at Brown University in math and archaeology. I mean, I've always loved history. And archaeology, I feel like, is not a more objective take on history, but it's just another way of looking at things. You know, in history, you often get lost in the big picture of, like, you know,

King X declares war and whatever. Larger political systems, whereas in archaeology it's just more personal. It gives you a better idea of how people lived their lives. When Hisham went back to Brown, in a wheelchair, he got involved in the movement for Brown to divest from companies that students said facilitated the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. He became a symbol of anti-Palestinian violence. Brown Corporation is a scoundrel's legacy!

But the spotlight was hard on Hisham. It's something that came up a lot in our conversations. Is it weird that people are invested in you? I mean, even beforehand, I was quite a private person, so. Yeah. So what did this do to that, I guess? Do you feel like you can have any sort of privacy at this point? I don't know. I mean, I hope that

just in the future. Not that people will forget, but that I'll be able to grow out of it and do things on my own and be known by those things. I'll try to keep a low profile, but it's not that easy in a wheelchair. It's also not that easy when you're now like a national news story. I feel like even on Brown campus have become quite a point of topic. Yeah, especially on Brown campus. The divestment movement was a big part of his life.

And if, after all that work, the school didn't divest? It would be very infuriating. It would mean this institution that I'm part of is not only implicit in refusing to condemn what's happening to Palestinian people, but it's also saying it will never condemn. It's basically just throwing the whole nation under the bus. Eventually, in October of last year, the university board voted against divestment. It was pretty demoralizing for Hisham.

he was done. By that point, he was watching from afar as violence surged in the West Bank. A terrifying wave of Israeli settler violence has engulfed the West Bank. Israeli forces have killed at least seven Palestinians during a military raid in the city of Jenin. At least nine Palestinians have also been injured, two of whom are in serious condition. I don't know, like, I kind of wish I could be there. Just like, like,

you know, experience it with my family. Like, I don't want to feel like I'm abandoning my family. Maybe it's a bit of survivor's guilt. The survivor's guilt was eating at him. He was attending classes, going to physical therapy, but in every lecture, every new workout, the desire to return to the West Bank and be with his family hung over him. I felt like the time is ticking and that, like,

there could be a possibility that like some form of annexation happens while I'm outside. And then because I'm outside, I like lose my legal status to live in Palestine. Yeah.

Since Donald Trump was elected in November, the possibility of annexation has felt even more imminent. A high-profile Israeli lawmaker said yesterday Israel is a, quote, step away from annexing the occupied West Bank following Trump's election. Smotrich suggested planning for this is already in motion. He's ordered his officials to draw up plans for Israel to annex some...

150 settlements in the West Bank. Now, Smotrich is a settler himself. He's also a key minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition. So when the fall semester ended in December, Hisham returned to Ramallah for the first time since the shooting. At that point, he told me he might not return to college. He was too worried about what might happen in the West Bank. Reporter Suzanne Gabbert talking about Hisham Awartani. We'll continue in a moment.

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Getting to the West Bank is even harder in a wheelchair. So his grandmother from Vermont went with him. It takes three flights, multiple border crossings, and hours of waiting to go through Israeli immigration, with no guarantee of being let in. And then I got home and I, like, collapsed. Literally, like, the second day, I was, like, probably 36 hours just in bed, sleeping. In the West Bank, too, the shooting in Vermont had made big news.

Hisham had a steady stream of visitors. I think the past week there have been guests over every single day. And I've had to greet them every single day. So I've had a whole week of not lounging in bed. By the time I made it to Ramallah, he'd been home for a few weeks. One night, I went over for dinner. Hisham's younger brother and sister were there. And I wanted to talk about what was on everybody's mind. The prospect of annexation.

On the news in the U.S., annexation is a hypothetical, a major world event that might happen. But sitting in Ramallah, the Awartani family talked about annexation as a fact of life. Yes, I mean, I think annexation is definitely happening. Yeah, like annexation, I feel like it's like, like it's getting worse, but it's not like something that's like so jarring. What would be so jarring? Killing everyone here? I don't know. In case you didn't catch that, he's making a joke about the Israelis killing everyone in the West Bank.

It was surprising to me to hear him talk like that. Somehow, he seemed more carefree than when we talked about this before. And you'd think it would be scarier to contemplate from within the West Bank.

When we were sitting in Providence there was such a present fear of losing your connection to home and like the escalation of the war and what that would mean to your connection to home and it feels almost like that's evaporated. Well, yeah, because I'm here. I mean like the connection is like not that home per se will cease to exist. It's all just I'll lose the right to be here. I don't know. It's like it's uncertainty. Do you say so? Yeah. Yeah. I mean we live with the knowledge that we could be killed at any moment. Um

I also think that when you're in the US you have anxiety because you expect you can control more. Do you think so Heshan? Like when you're here, you're like, yeah, whatever happens happens. When you're in the US, there's a greater anxiety because you feel like you have to take action.

I think what they're going to do, if they were to annex, it would be a slow suffocation to encourage people to leave. And then potentially, yeah, I think that's what they would do. Surely if they're encouraging people to leave, then they will stop people from coming back at some point. But again, because Ramallah is such a bubble, you're kind of sheltered from everything. Because life goes on pretty normally in Ramallah.

Definitely, like, from last time, like, people are more, like, depressed and, like, hopeless and whatever. But, like, in terms of, like, day-to-day livelihood, like, you feel more unaffected. Hisham broached the idea of graduating school early. He didn't want to risk returning to the States for too long in case Israel made a sudden move that cut him off from his home in the West Bank. But his folks weren't buying it.

He started talking about graduating early. I said, you have to get two degrees. I think he was going to sacrifice his math degree in order to get his archaeology degree. I'm like, you have one class left in math. As long as he gets a degree, that's not my life to live. He gets those two degrees and he's out of there and he can do what he wants. That is a very mom answer. They also didn't want him to stop physical therapy in the U.S. That was...

was a non-negotiable. I think actually like her bigger concern was I think she just wanted me to do physical therapy for as long as I could. It's not that like I didn't care about it, but it's like something that I felt like how much is physical therapy going to help if like if I'm miserable? Hisham and I were talking in Ramallah just before President Trump's inauguration. The O'Wartanis could see what was coming. I mean, I think it's like

And since January, a series of Israeli attacks on the northern West Bank

has led to the largest displacement in the territory since 1967. Around 40,000 Palestinians have fled their homes. The idea of a political solution that would include a Palestinian state seems farther away than ever. But after the long discussions with his parents, Hisham went back to Brown for the spring semester.

And once he recovered from the trip, he settled back into college life. It's been good. I have my routine, and the routine is nice. It's like, okay, I think I have things figured out, and like, you know, just go to class, go back to class. How was it seeing your cats? It was really good. I was afraid that they would have forgotten me, but they didn't. And then, like, one of them was, like, actually even more affectionate because, like, I think she missed me. That's how I hope, so...

Sitting back in his dorm at school, it's been more than a year since Hisham and I first started talking. And when this semester started, I saw a lightness in him that felt new. Being home changed him in some ways. After a year of watching violence in the West Bank on the news, seeing life go on, at least in what he calls the bubble of Ramallah, was comforting.

And his friends are helping him put his situation in perspective. One of Hisham's suitemates at Brown is from Ukraine. Another is from Syria. They've all lived through horrific disruptions in their countries. I don't know, maybe it's like naive, but it's like just going back there and like seeing life there being lived as it is, is something that's like mixed annexation and like expulsion, like more concrete idea. Like if you're thinking about the abstract, it's like you worry about it more versus like, okay, like,

It's going to be a big logistical issue. I guess what calmed me down is, wow, whatever happens, it's going to be really logistically complicated. And I feel like, hopefully, I'll be able to slip through the cracks. If annexation happens, I can just...

take academic leave and then go back home real quick and then like somehow like figure my situation out so he's focusing on the practical i have a good idea it's like okay like i take these clothes i have some medical supplies that i need to always take with me books wise like yeah maybe i take like one or two books for the journey but like i have so many books back home it's kind of like superfluous it's like bringing cold to newcastle do your parents know that this is the plan if that were to happen

I think I told them. I don't know how, if they thought I was joking or something. I keep returning to something Hisham told me early on about majoring in archaeology. He likes the field because it isn't about the big headlines of history, kings declaring war and so on. He likes a more intimate view of how people lived normal lives. Annexation of the West Bank would have huge consequences, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Middle East.

But Hisham is also seeing it as a fight to keep living a normal life during one of the most unsettled and deadly historical moments in this long conflict. I think, for better or for worse, Trump thinks too much about things too far ahead. You know, like, annexation, I feel like, is, like, something that now feels more pressing and, like, salient. But, like, I'm not going to think about, like, what's going to happen, like, 20 years in the future. Which I think, like...

Hesham Al-Rateni is a senior at Brown University. Suzanne Gabber is a freelance reporter. Some of her reporting about Hesham and the shooting in Vermont has appeared on WNYC's Notes from America.

I'm Claire Malone. You can find my reporting and all my colleagues' work at newyorker.com. You can subscribe to the magazine there as well. David Remnick will be back next week. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Decat. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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