The New York Times (NYT) has a breathless piece by a Palestinian “shooting victim.” Hisham Awartani survived a gunshot wound he received in Burlington, Vermont, so why not compare that to getting shot at in Gaza?
Talk about a nice contrast. Here he is, on being shot at by Israelis in Gaza.
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?
I’m not sure you can say with a straight face that there has been no sustained coverage of violence against Palestinians in Gaza. For one, you don’t typically protest against something for which there is no awareness. Two, the sort of people inclined to “protest” on a college campus tend to get their information from corporate media (and TikTok). It therefore follows that there is sustained covered or there would be no protest. (What there isn’t, referencing the same sources, is sustained American media coverage of “violence” from areas designated as “Palestinian” against Jews in Isreal).
As for Burlington, give it time. Like it’s larger progressive cousins, the more violence there is against minorities, the less coverage or detailed coverage it will get. Five years from now, it might not even make the news. And I don’t mean to belittle the realities or bemoan an effort to expose an injustice or ask important questions, but this work of art reaks of a career NYT scribbler, not a visiting international college kid.
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.
Burlington, Vermont, isn’t exactly a small town, certainly not in Vermont. It is, in fact, almost as big as Ramallah (45K/49K respectively), where he and his friend were “shot at” by IDF (May of 2021) in the opening of the piece. But he’s right about the Western media focus. Gun violence. Right-wing extremism. Both are paired liberal tropes the author makes no effort to correct. James J. Eaton, the shooter, was a hippie progressive and pro-Hamas. Underreported facts if that’s of interest to the Times. So, in Burlington, the Israeli Security forces didn’t leave your friend bleeding on the street a few years later. It was someone who, at least ostensibly, had the Palestinians back.
The NYT piece continues the theme that Hisham Awartani could or should accept that he will always be a target because of who he is, which fits the NYT’s victimology tropes just as well. Did you mean like the Jews? And nowhere does anyone consider how things might have been different. Imagine a world where Israel’s sworn enemies are not using the Palestinians as a human shield and an easy point of access to launch attacks on Israel.
What if Iran’s Mullahs (more recently) and Islam’s extremists in general had never engaged in a three-quarters-of-a-century campaign of violence against the state of Israel? Against everyone who is not Muslim? What if it never happened? What if it just stopped?
I have news for you.
If it just stopped, peace might be possible. The end of terrorism. Productive trade that is beneficial to all. Real Peace in the Middle East and an end of Islam’s holy global Jihad. We can pretend that is possible but for as long as Demcorats are in charge of Burlington, Vermont, your odds of getting shot there will just keep going up.