A West Bank Family on the Verge of Annexation

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today.
Smart Choice.

Speaker 1 Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once.

Speaker 1 Try it at Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Dell. It's time for Black Friday, Dell Technology's biggest sale of the year.

Speaker 2 Enjoy huge savings on select PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intel Core ultra-processors. And with built-in advanced features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster.

Speaker 2 Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee, and expert support.

Speaker 2 They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at dell.com slash deals.

Speaker 3 WNYC Studios is supported by Apple TV.

Speaker 4 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 4 All they have left is a life raft and each other.

Speaker 4 This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House.

Speaker 4 Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

Speaker 7 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Speaker 6 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 5 I'm Claire Malone.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Two of them were wearing kefias, 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.

Speaker 6 The victims all survived. A reporter named Suzanne Gabber has been talking with one of them since shortly after the attack.
His name is Hishem Awarteni.

Speaker 6 Suzanne went to the West Bank recently to visit the Awarteni family and talk about what's on everyone's minds there. The possibility that Israel will annex their home and the entire West Bank.

Speaker 6 Here's Suzanne Gabber.

Speaker 8 How often do you go back to the school since you graduated? A few times. Like every time I'm back, I come once.

Speaker 5 It seems like you're very close with the teachers.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's a small school.

Speaker 5 In January, I went to visit Hisham Oratani.

Speaker 5 He's a senior in college. And when he was home on break, he went to visit his high school.

Speaker 8 Some of them have like been teaching for like 20, 30 years.

Speaker 8 Some of them have taught my like cousins who are now like married and

Speaker 8 have PhDs and

Speaker 8 got getting divorced.

Speaker 5 Hisham's mother, Elizabeth, drove him.

Speaker 5 The school is Ramallah Friends School. It's at the top of a steep hill overlooking the city of Ramallah in the West Bank.

Speaker 5 It's a cluster of beautiful old stone buildings.

Speaker 5 Two of Hisham's best friends from school met him there.

Speaker 5 Kinan Abd al-Hamid and Tahsin Ali Ahmed. And the three of them were almost giddy.

Speaker 8 No, we're going to go see the teacher.

Speaker 5 The boys go to college in the US, and so people are excited to see them.

Speaker 5 Five different teachers are gathered around,

Speaker 5 fawning over them and saying embarrassing things.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 that kind of thing.

Speaker 5 The head of the school walks up

Speaker 5 and she wants to greet them too.

Speaker 5 And while we were there, one of the boys, Tahsin, got a job offer.

Speaker 5 But I can't really tell if it's serious or not.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 5 Do you want to do that?

Speaker 8 That sounds fun. I don't know how well he got paid, but

Speaker 8 it'd be nice to be here.

Speaker 5 And of course, they got to reminiscing about the times they got in trouble messing around in chem lab.

Speaker 8 Oh my god, we were doing an experiment putting like water on this salt and like watching it sizzle. And I was like, hey, what would happen if I spit in this?

Speaker 8 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, like, you type in like install Counter-Strike 1.6.

Speaker 8 You still hang out in the library too, with the librarian.

Speaker 8 You hang out with the library? yeah that's the guy we saw we talked politics

Speaker 8 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 u.s high school to everyone yeah that's what i think

Speaker 5 even from the grounds of the school you can see directly across a 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.

Speaker 8 I guess, like, reconnecting with my childhood, like, seeing the things that are more familiar, it's like, wow, like a lot has changed. I can't drill that home.

Speaker 8 There are lots of things that are different in my life now permanently.

Speaker 8 But, you know, what's the use in like kicking yourself

Speaker 8 over things that have been lost?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 10 Tonight, police on the hunt for the gunman who they say shot three Palestinian college students in Burlington, Vermont.

Speaker 5 Hisham's grandmother lives in Burlington, so he, Tahsin, and Kinan had all gone there from their respective colleges to spend Thanksgiving.

Speaker 11 President Biden has been briefed on the suspected hate-motivated shooting. The 20-year-old students are all graduates of a West Bank.

Speaker 5 Kinan, Tahsin, and Hisham were shot on the street. The man accused of the shooting is named Jason Eaton.
He's awaiting trial.

Speaker 5 It seems he didn't speak to them or start a fight, just shot them as they walked by.

Speaker 8 My main priority at that point was just to call 911. So I tried to like open my phone and then, you know, when there's like liquid on your phone, it like messes up.

Speaker 8 So I got actually locked out of my phone because I couldn't put in the password right. But then I went like to the emergency thing.
So I ended up calling 911. Didn't know if I was going to survive.

Speaker 8 Didn't know if my friends were alive. I was like, well, the thing is, like, oh, this is how it ends.

Speaker 8 I mean, I always like, you know, it was never outside of the realm of possibility for me for that to happen to me.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 8 I always expected it to be like in the West Bank and never in Burlington.

Speaker 5 The shooting in Vermont was big news.

Speaker 5 It was seven weeks after Hamas's October 7th attack in Israel shook the world.

Speaker 5 Kinan and Tahsin made full physical recoveries, but Hisham

Speaker 12 Hisham Oratani'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.

Speaker 8 Hey,

Speaker 13 I was just checking in to see Hisham Oratani.

Speaker 5 Hi, Yani

Speaker 5 I first met Husham 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.

Speaker 5 His legs remain paralyzed. I spent the year getting to know him.
Husham is a shy, academic kind of guy. He's double majoring at Brown University in math and archaeology.

Speaker 8 I mean, I've always loved history, and archaeology I feel like is

Speaker 8 not a more objective take on history, but it's just another way of looking at things.

Speaker 8 You know, in history, you often get lost in the big picture of, like, you know, King X declares war and whatever, or like larger political systems, whereas archaeology is just

Speaker 8 more personal. It gives you a better idea of how people lived their lives.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 He became a symbol of anti-Palestinian violence.

Speaker 5 But the spotlight was hard on Hisham. It's something that came up a lot in our conversations.

Speaker 8 Is it weird that people are invested in you?

Speaker 8 I mean, even beforehand, I was quite a private person, so.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So what did this do to that? I guess.

Speaker 13 Do you feel like you can have any sort of privacy at this point?

Speaker 8 I don't know. I mean, I hope that just in the future, not that people will forget, but that, I don't know, I'll be able to grow out of it and do things on my own.
and be known by those things.

Speaker 8 I'll try to keep low profile, but it's not that easy in a wheelchair.

Speaker 13 It's also not that easy when you're now like a national news story.

Speaker 13 I feel like even on Brown campus have become quite a point of topic.

Speaker 8 Yeah, especially on the Brown campus.

Speaker 5 The divestment movement was a big part of his life. And if after all that work, the school didn't divest.

Speaker 8 It would be very infuriating.

Speaker 8 It would mean like this institution that I'm a part of is not only is it like implicit in and like refusing to condemn what's happening to like Palestinian people, but it's also like saying it will never condemn.

Speaker 8 And it's like, it's basically just like throwing the whole nation under the bus.

Speaker 5 Eventually, in October of last year, the university board voted against divestment. It was pretty demoralizing for Hisham.

Speaker 5 He was done.

Speaker 5 By that point, he was watching from afar as violence surged in the West Bank.

Speaker 9 A terrifying wave of Israeli settler violence has engulfed the West Bank.

Speaker 15 Israeli forces have killed at least seven Palestinians Palestinians during a military raid in the city of Jenin.

Speaker 15 At least nine Palestinians have also been injured, two of whom are in serious condition.

Speaker 8 I don't know, like, I kind of wish

Speaker 8 I could be there.

Speaker 8 Just like, like,

Speaker 8 you know, experience it with my family. Like, I don't want to feel like I'm abandoning my family.

Speaker 8 Maybe it's a bit of

Speaker 8 survivor's guilt.

Speaker 5 The survivor's guilt was eating at him.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 16 I felt like the time is ticking and that like

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 5 Since Donald Trump was elected in November, the possibility of annexation has felt even more imminent.

Speaker 14 A high-profile Israeli lawmaker said yesterday Israel is a, quote, step away from annexing the occupied West Bank following Trump's election.

Speaker 14 Smotridge suggested planning for this is already in motion.

Speaker 17 He's ordered his officials to draw up plans for Israel to annex some 150 settlements in the West Bank. Now, Smotridge is a settler himself.

Speaker 17 He's also a key minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Etanyahu's ruling coalition.

Speaker 5 So when the fall semester ended in December, Hisham returned to Ramotla for the first time since the shooting. At that point, he told me he might not return to college.

Speaker 5 He was too worried about what might happen in the West Bank.

Speaker 6 Reporter Suzanne Gabber talking about Hisham Arteni. We'll continue in a moment.

Speaker 3 WNYC Studios is supported by Quince.

Speaker 8 I don't know about you, but I love fall.

Speaker 18 Crisp mornings, apple picking, and an excuse to break out my favorite layering pieces from Quince. This season's lineup is simple, but smart and easy with Quince.

Speaker 18 $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like an everyday luxury, and wool coats that are equal parts stylish and durable.

Speaker 18 Their denim nails the fit and everyday comfort, all at a fraction of what you'd expect to pay.

Speaker 8 And let's not forget that the holidays are right around the corner.

Speaker 18 And Quince has everything you'll need for gifts they'll love: stellar knife sets, luxurious bath towels, and impressive line of skincare. It's going to be hard not to keep all this stuff for myself.

Speaker 18 Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.com/slash radio hour for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
Now available in Canada, too.

Speaker 18 Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/slash RadioHour to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash radio hour.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Dell, introducing your new Dell PC, powered by the Intel Core Ultra Processor. It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to-do list gets to be a lot.

Speaker 2 Because it's built with all-day battery, plus powerful AI features that help you do it all with ease, from editing images to drafting emails, to summarizing large documents to multitasking.

Speaker 2 So you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things and plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet.

Speaker 2 Luckily, you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster, so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside, backed by Dell's Price Match Guarantee.

Speaker 2 Get yours today at dell.com/slash holiday. Terms and conditions apply.
See Dell.com for details.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by ATT.

Speaker 2 There's nothing better than feeling like someone has your back and that things are going to get done without you even having to ask, like your friend offering to help you move without you even having to offer pizza and drinks first.

Speaker 2 It's a beautiful thing when someone is two steps ahead of you, quietly making your life easier. Staying connected matters.

Speaker 2 That's why, in the rare event of a network outage, ATT will proactively credit you for a full day of service. That's the ATT guarantee.

Speaker 2 Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more, or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.

Speaker 2 Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage, restrictions and exclusions apply. See ATT.com slash guarantee for full details.
AT ⁇ T, connecting changes everything.

Speaker 19 Big news! Wayfair's Black Friday sale is here. Early.
Right now at Wayfair, get up to 70% off everything you need for the season ahead.

Speaker 19 Save on kitchen and dining, bedroom furniture and mattresses, holiday decor, and way more. Now is the time to score big from seasonal finds to favorites you'll use all year long.

Speaker 19 Plus, with Wayfair, enjoy fast and easy shipping with delivery in time for the holidays. Save up to 70% off early Black Friday deals.
Shop now at Wayfair.com.

Speaker 5 Wayfair, every style, every home.

Speaker 5 Getting to the West Bank is even harder in a wheelchair. So his grandmother from Vermont went with him.

Speaker 5 It takes three flights, multiple border crossings, and hours of waiting to go through Israeli immigration with no guarantee of being let in.

Speaker 8 And then I got home and I like collapsed. Literally like the second day is like probably 36 hours just in bed sleeping.

Speaker 5 In the West Bank too, the shooting in Vermont had made big news. Hishem had a steady stream of visitors.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I'm not like the other. 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.

Speaker 5 By the time I made it to Ramallah, he'd been home for a few weeks.

Speaker 5 One night, I went over for dinner.

Speaker 5 Hisham's younger brother and sister were there. And I wanted to talk about what was on everybody's mind: the prospect of annexation.

Speaker 5 On the news in the U.S., annexation is a hypothetical, a major world event that might happen. But sitting in Ramallah, the Owartani family talked about annexation as a fact of life.

Speaker 20 Yes, I mean, I think annexation is definitely happening.

Speaker 8 You know, like annexation, I feel like, is like, like, it's getting worse, but it's not, like, something that's like

Speaker 8 so jarring. That's like.

Speaker 5 What would be so jarring?

Speaker 8 Uh,

Speaker 8 killing everyone here? Like, I don't know.

Speaker 5 In case you didn't catch that, he's making a joke about the Israelis killing everyone in the West Bank.

Speaker 5 It was surprising to me to hear him talk like that. Somehow, he seemed more carefree than when we talked about this before.

Speaker 5 And you'd think it would be scarier to contemplate from within the West Bank.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 5 And it feels almost like that's evaporated.

Speaker 8 Well, no, yeah, because I'm here. I mean, like, the connection is like, not that home per se will cease to exist.
I'll just lose the right to be here. I don't know, it's like it's uncertainty.

Speaker 8 Do you say so? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 20 I mean we live with the knowledge that we could be killed

Speaker 8 at any moment.

Speaker 14 I also think that when you're in the US,

Speaker 20 you have anxiety because you expect you can control more. Do you think so, Hisham?

Speaker 8 Like when you're here, you're like, yeah,

Speaker 20 whatever happens, happens. When you're in the US, there's a greater anxiety because you feel like you have to take action.

Speaker 20 I think what they're going to do is they're going to be if they 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.

Speaker 8 Sure if they're encouraging people to leave then they

Speaker 8 stop people from coming back at some point.

Speaker 8 But again like because Ramallah is such a bubble like you're kind of like sheltered from everything because like life goes on pretty normally in Ramallah.

Speaker 8 Definitely like like from last time like people are more like depressed and like hopeless and whatever. But like in terms of day-to-day livelihood, you feel more unaffected.

Speaker 5 Hishem 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.

Speaker 5 But his folks weren't buying it.

Speaker 21 He started talking about graduating early. I said, you have to get two degrees.

Speaker 21 I think he was going to sacrifice his math degree in order to get his archaeology degree. And And I'm like, you have one class left in maths.

Speaker 8 As long as he gets a degree, that's not my life to live.

Speaker 21 He gets those two degrees and he's out of there and he can do what he wants.

Speaker 16 That is a very mom answer. Yeah.

Speaker 5 They also didn't want him to stop physical therapy in the U.S.

Speaker 14 That was a non-negotiable.

Speaker 16 I think actually like her bigger concern was, I think she just wanted me to do physical therapy for as long as I could.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 5 His sham and I were talking in Ramallah just before President Trump's inauguration. The Owartanis could see what was coming.

Speaker 8 I mean, I think it's like actual policy aside,

Speaker 8 the feeling that the Israeli government will get, they feel like they've been written more of a blank check than they're already being written.

Speaker 8 Because like, policy-wise, if you look at like on the ground, like what will change, like

Speaker 8 in terms of material support, it's not like the previous administration was like putting any like checks. And like, I think Israel is just more emboldened

Speaker 8 with Trump in office.

Speaker 5 And since January, a series of Israeli attacks on the northern West Bank has led to the largest displacement in the territory since 1967.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Let's say I hope so.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And his friends are helping him put his situation in perspective. One of his sham suitmates at Brown is from Ukraine.
Another is from Syria.

Speaker 5 They've all lived through horrific disruptions in their countries.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 is something that's like makes annexation and like expulsion like more

Speaker 16 concrete idea. Like if you're thinking about it in the abstract, it's like you worry about it more versus like, okay, like

Speaker 16 it's going to be like a big logistical issue.

Speaker 16 I guess like what calmed me down is like, wow, like whatever happens, it's going to be really logistically complicated. And I feel like hopefully I'll be able to

Speaker 16 slip through the cracks. You know, if annexation happens, I can just like take the academic leave and then go hack home real quick and then like somehow like figure my situation out.

Speaker 5 So he's focusing on the practical.

Speaker 16 I have a good idea. It's like, okay, like I take these clothes.
I have some medical medical supplies that I need to always take with me.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 He likes a more intimate view of how people lived normal lives.

Speaker 5 Annexation of the West Bank would have huge consequences, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Middle East.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 8 I think,

Speaker 8 for better or for worse,

Speaker 8 I'm trying to think too much about things too far ahead.

Speaker 8 You know, like annexation, I feel like, is like something that now feels more pressing and salient. But like, I'm not going to think about what's going to happen 20 years in the future.

Speaker 8 Which I think, like, in a large part, is like, what is the time frame that lots of these things are working on? Who knows? Like, I'm 21 years old.

Speaker 8 In the period of time that I've been alive, it's been a slow push.

Speaker 8 It's like I'm the

Speaker 8 frog in the boiling pot.

Speaker 6 Hishem Aurateni is a senior at Brown University. Suzanne Gabber is a freelance reporter.
Some of her reporting about Hishem and the shooting in Vermont has appeared on WNYC's Notes from America.

Speaker 6 I'm Claire Malone. You can find my reporting and all my colleagues' work at New Yorker.com.
You can subscribe to the magazine there as well. David Remnick will be back next week.

Speaker 6 That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.

Speaker 7 Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 7 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 Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Jared Paul.

Speaker 7 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

Speaker 7 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 22 Hi, it's David Remnick. I'd I'd like to ask for your help with something.
We're conducting a survey of our audience, and we want to hear from you as a New Yorker Radio Hour listener.

Speaker 22 We want to learn what you value, whether it's a dream guest for the show or thoughts on your favorite episodes.

Speaker 22 We want to hear from you, and as a token of our appreciation, you'll be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. You can find the link in our episode notes.

Speaker 22 Thanks for listening.