Speaker 1: Tonight marks one year since three Palestinian college students were shot in downtown Burlington.

Speaker 2: Family members have identified the college students as Tahseen Ahmed, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani.

Speaker 3: Hisham Awartani's mother says her son is now paralyzed from the chest down. Authorities investigating the shooting as a possible hate crime.

Speaker 4: Tonight we have updates from the families of one of those young men.

Marian Price: I got the text saying, "Granny had been shot."

Kinnan Abdalhamid: He shot my friend Tahseen first and then Hisham, and that's when I ran away.

Hisham Awartani: I didn't know if I was going to survive, didn't know if my friends were alive.

Speaker 8: Palestinian students told you not divesting made them unsafe. What are you doing? Not divesting. Hisham was shot because of your complicity.

[cheering]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show.

Basil Awartani: Who's going to carve this turkey?

Hisham Awartani: The food, I think is the most exciting subject.

Kai Wright: That's the sound of Thanksgiving at a home in Burlington, Vermont a few weeks ago. It could have been just about anywhere in America, but this particular celebration is extraordinary because on the same holiday a year ago, the family you're overhearing found itself at the center of the world's attention for an awful reason. One of its youngest members, 21-year-old Hisham Awartani and two of his friends were shot while visiting Hisham's grandmother in Burlington on fall break from college.

Speaker 12: Breaking overnight, police in Vermont say a suspect is now in custody accused of shooting and wounding three young men of Palestinian descent. Police are investigating this incident as a possible hate crime.

Basil Awartani: It was like three men of Palestinian descent. I was like, "No, these are not of Palestinian descent. They're Palestinians."

Kai Wright: That's Hisham's cousin Basil. And what he's saying is important because the shooting in Vermont happened just one month after Hamas's vicious attack in Israel on October 7th and just after Israel's brutal invasion of Gaza began.

Basil Awartani: One of my friends from back home messaged me and they're like, "Someone from your family got shot." My head, it was like some of my cousins back in Anabta, or like something happened back there.

Kai Wright: Hisham and two other young men, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ali Ahmed, all survived. Our producer, Suzanne Gaber has spent the years since they were shot learning about this family and about how two very different traumas collided in the experience of one college student. Suzanne takes the story from here.

Suzanne Gaber: One year ago, Marian Price was at home preparing dinner for her loved ones. Her grandson Hisham had stepped out for some air with his friends, and so she texted him an update about the meal plan. When she sent off a message about a neighbor who would stop by for a pie later, she never could have anticipated the response she would receive.

Marian Price: I got the text saying, "Granny had been shot," and I texted back and said, "What?" and then he called me on FaceTime or WhatsApp video. I could see the paramedics working on him.

Hisham Awartani: We were walking along the sidewalk and a guy comes down from the balcony and pulls out a gun. Before I know what's happening, it's like I'm on the floor. I heard the gunshots and I didn't quite understand it at the moment, but I didn't know that I had been hit until I saw blood on my phone. I tried to open my phone and then, when there's liquid on your phone, it messes up. I got actually locked out of my phone because I couldn't put in the password right. I didn't know if I was going to survive. Didn't know if my friends were alive.

Suzanne Gaber: When do you realize that you're also fairly injured?

Hisham Awartani: When the EMT people come. Mm. Like they tell me to move my legs and I realized I couldn't.

Suzanne Gaber: What went through your mind when that happened?

Hisham Awartani: I didn't know what to think. I just didn't know why I couldn't.

Suzanne Gaber: Hisham's mom, Elizabeth Price, lives in the West Bank. It was the middle of the night when she found out.

Elizabeth Price: I got a telephone call at 2:30 in the morning from my brother and I hung up. It woke me up and I hung up because I thought it was a mistake, and he called me back. Richard said, "Elizabeth, I'm in the hospital with Hisham. He's been shot," and Richard says, "He's alive."

Suzanne Gaber: As his parents were scrambling to figure out what happened, Hisham's younger sister Marion and his 13-year-old brother Adam were woken up from the commotion.

Adam Awartani: I heard my parents talking. Like, I go and ask my dad, "Sufi, what's happening?" He's like, "Hisham got shot."

Elizabeth Price: He told us not to worry and not to come. Hisham was experiencing difficulty regulating his temperature, so he was shivering violently and they were trying to warm him up. Then later on he was too hot and they were trying to cool him down.

Suzanne Gaber: Eventually, the family went back to bed, but news traveled around the West Bank quickly, and by the next morning, it felt like the whole city of Ramallah had already heard.

Elizabeth Price: Everyone came. The house was full of people who were coming to express their support, in bringing food. There was people calling almost immediately. The school wanted to know if they could put a statement out, and then once the school put a statement out, the entire media, everyone was calling.

Suzanne Gaber: At this moment in 2023, residents of the West Bank were hesitantly, hopeful. Israel and Hamas had agreed to a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, and there was a slim chance the current campaign of violence would end. For many Arabs around the world, hearing that a Palestinian student was shot on US Soil was a jolt back to reality.

Hisham Awartani: A lot of my friends were asking me a whole bunch of details about it. I was answering a whole bunch of people at the same time. Everybody was texting me, and also in school.

Suzanne Gaber: To say the attention was overwhelming would be an understatement.

Elizabeth Price: We were trying to get grips. We realized that this was going to be a massive endeavor.

Suzanne Gaber: Elizabeth barely had time to breathe, much less process and grieve what had just happened to her son, who was a world away.

Elizabeth Price: Even the discussion about which photo to release was a moment of great debate because we knew that these boys could potentially be stereotyped, could be victim blamed. It's so easy that Arabs and Arab Americans are vilified and demonized, and we didn't want that to happen to our boys.

Suzanne Gaber: As she weighed the politics of the incident, she was learning just how badly Hisham had been hurt.

Elizabeth Price: Later that day, Hisham's doctor talked to us and told us that Hisham was not able to walk and had no motor function, that he was currently, at that moment, paraplegic. That was really hard. That was the first time I actually lost it.

Suzanne Gaber: The attack left Hisham paralyzed from the waist down. In the year since the attack, Jason Eaton, the man who allegedly shot Hisham and his friends, has been taken into custody and charged with three counts of attempted murder. He's still awaiting trial, which will likely take place in the summer of 2025. Prosecutors say hate crime charges are unlikely to be added at this point, although the three friends were all wearing traditional Palestinian attire when they were gunned down.

When I first heard about Hisham, it was shortly after my own family's Thanksgiving, where we laughed and ate and debated what it meant to be Arab in America in 2023. The coverage of the attack made me think about previous Palestinian and Arab victims of hate crimes and how too often, we stopped paying attention after the moment of big public trauma, but there is so much life thereafter. I wanted to know how Hisham was going to navigate that new life as a Palestinian living in the US. I went to visit him for the first time in early February.

It was his last day in a physical rehab facility in Boston where he was training his body for a new life in a wheelchair. His favorite activity in rehab was a machine called a Lokomat. It's a machine that allows him to be standing upright, moving his legs as though he's walking in place. It's meant to keep his muscles active even though he can't move them on his own.

Nurse: Good. Okay.

Elizabeth Price: How long is he going to do this for?

Nurse: Probably we'll go like 25 minutes. Until five to.

Suzanne Gaber: There was a joy on his face and freedom in his movement. His mom stayed in Boston for the two months he was in rehab, visiting him every day. It reminded me the most immediate change in his life was a return to a routine managed by his parents, a fate that most 20-year-olds would hate. Hisham moved back to campus in February. It was his first step in regaining his space, even just physically but the space couldn't really be his own just yet. His parents took turns flying back and forth from the West Bank and staying in housing provided by the university just so that they could be around to help Hisham through daily tasks.

Elizabeth Price: You take Hisham and you focused on Hisham. Your barometer of how successful the day is or how successful what we're doing is whether we get places on time, whether he has food, whether he's physically and mentally okay. It was like taking a newborn baby home from the hospital and you suddenly think you don't know how to do this and everyone who knows how to do this isn't with you right now. It was really difficult. I think for those first few days, Hisham, he said to me he was just trying to get through every minute.

Suzanne Gaber: The task of caring for Hisham in this new and very routine way was challenging for both Hisham and Elizabeth, but it was also a welcome distraction. By the time Hisham was out of rehab, the war in Gaza had escalated into the deadliest conflict his homeland had seen in his lifetime. The massive loss of Palestinian lives was a chilling backdrop to Hisham's efforts at healing. For Elizabeth— 

Elizabeth Price: It really narrowed us down to a kind of we were out of time and out of space.

Suzanne Gaber: Back on campus— 

Elizabeth Price: For the first two weeks, I think he was really just focusing on surviving, understanding how to create, how to set up and manage the process of managing himself and his body, understanding how to be disabled in this new university

Kai Wright: Not just any university, Brown University, where tensions over the war in Gaza were at a fever pitch.

Protestor: Brown Corporation is a scam, no other like Hisham.

Crowd: Brown Corporation is a scam, no others like Hisham.

Kai Wright: As much as Hisham might have tried to keep his focus on his own physical and mental recovery, he found himself square in the middle of a moral battle that bore his name.

Hisham Awartani: I don't like seeing my name plastered everywhere, but I condone it in as much as using my name and my experience can elicit more of an emotional reaction people and can get the point home.

Kai Wright: That's when we come back on Notes from America. More just ahead. It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. In case you've missed the program over the past couple of weeks, we have some news. WNYC, the public media station that makes Notes from America, will cease production of this show at the end of the year. For these final few weeks that we get to spend together, we're offering you our closing thoughts on some of the topics we've returned to most often while making this show.

When we conclude at the end of December, we hope to have shared some useful insights on how to embrace a multiracial democracy in this country. Honestly, what forces are at work to keep us from achieving that? For many months now, we've been revisiting the story of Hisham Awartani. He's a Palestinian student at Brown University who found himself in the headlines and in the center of a campus firestorm this time last year when he was shot and left paralyzed from the waist down while visiting family in Vermont for Thanksgiving.

Our producer, Suzanne Gaber, has been spending time with Hisham and checking in on him all year, and this week she's concluding her reporting on his story. Here's Suzanne.

Suzanne Gaber: There was one really nice thing about rehab for Hisham, peace and quiet, a dream come true for a guy who sincerely loves curling up with a good book. He had months to just sit by himself and it's something his mom says has always been part of who he is.

Elizabeth Price: The defining memory that I have of him is pushing his stroller when he was like three or four and him asking questions, "Mommy, what is this? Mommy, what is that? What is this? Mommy, why did that? The end that I just got to a point where I would say, "I don't know. Hisham, what do you think? What's the answer that you have?" Because I literally couldn't keep up. [laughs] I also wouldn't know. Looking back, I think he actually did want the information, but it was also a chance for him to begin to offer his own ideas.

He just loves to deep dive. If you get him on a certain subject, he will give you a 10-minute lecture and it's really interesting.

Suzanne Gaber: That's what moms are supposed to say, but actually she's right. In rehab, I spent an hour hearing the different types of archaeology he hoped to do in his future. It was in fact really interesting.

Hisham Awartani: 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. In history you often get lost in the big picture of like King X declares war and whatever, larger political systems. Whereas in archaeology it's more personal and it gives you a better idea of how people live their lives.

Suzanne Gaber: The peace and quiet he found at the rehab facility wasn't something he could replicate easily when he returned to campus at Brown University, he tried to find solace in books while working to regain his physical independence. The story of his shooting spread across campus and out into the surrounding community at a time when the movement for Palestinian freedom and lives was being amplified by the rising death toll of war.

Christina Paxson: This is how you want to honor your friend? I'm sorry.

Protestor: Palestinian students told you not divesting made them unsafe. What are you doing? Not divesting. Hisham was shot because of your complicity.

[cheering]

Suzanne Gaber: Hisham, a shy scholar, was forced into the spotlight, and at first it was really jarring.

Hisham Awartani: I don't like the tension because I don't feel like I've done-- Not that I haven't done anything in particular. It's not something that I've actively accomplished.

Suzanne Gaber: He bravely decided to let go and lean in as long as he felt it was useful to the cause.

Hisham Awartani: I condone it in as much as using my name and my experience can elicit more of an emotional reaction people and can get the point home better than just-- It sucks to say, but people here find it harder to empathize with people in Gaza than they would me.

Suzanne Gaber: Before his injury, Hisham had been involved in the Brown Divest Coalition. It's a group of students who were working to pressure the school to divest from companies they saw as supporting the Israeli military. When he got back to campus and saw that the coalition had joined students around the country in putting up an encampment on their main lawn, he and his dad made an appearance.

Speaker 18: Brown University students joining schools like Columbia, Emerson, Tufts, and others.

Hisham Awartani: It's funny because lots of people back home were paying attention to that. It gave them hope. I don't know. Like, there's a sense in Palestine that, especially in the US, the US is just willing to stand by and watch them get killed and isn't willing to intervene and doesn't care about them. The fact that prominent universities that are an important part of the American social fabric, they all stood up and emphatically said, "We stand with Palestine. Were willing to do this," I think it gave lots of people hope.

Suzanne Gaber: I think it gave Hisham hope, too. It took a few months after he got back to campus, but eventually, Hisham decided to share his story to add an important perspective, one that he hoped would be just the push the university needed to divest. The protesters efforts seem to be working

Speaker 18: Most of those tents. In fact, all of the tents are cleared and a majority of the students are gone.

Suzanne Gaber: The students agreed to disband the encampment ahead of commencement weekend activities if Brown University considered their proposal and brought the issue to a vote, and Brown agreed.

Speaker 19: Students say they have reached an agreement with the administration in exchange for a seat at the table with the Brown Corporation.

Suzanne Gaber: By the time the end of the semester came around, Hisham had become so dedicated to the cause that he'd taken a few days off of rehab to work on a speech. He and five other members of the Brown Divest Coalition presented to members of the university's corporate board, and Hisham used his personal story to bring the points home.

Hisham Awartani: To understand the facts on the ground of social harm, I'll take you through a hypothetical day in my life in the West Bank. I live in Ramallah, but my family is from a village called Anabta in the northern West Bank. It's a Friday afternoon, and we have to take the long way out of Ramallah because there's a protest at the checkpoint that's the main exit of the city. You can smell the tear gas, even with the windows rolled up.

Suzanne Gaber: The tear gas is something Hisham has smelled many times at protests over the years. In 2021, he was shot for the first time. On that occasion, it was by the IDF with a rubber bullet while at one of those protests.

Hisham Awartani: Reached a checkpoint known as Za'tara, and you see settlers throwing rocks at Palestinian cars passing by. The IDF is standing by without intervention, even though the sentence for Palestinian rock throwers is up to 20 years in prison, but very often they are shot then and there. The next day you get news that a relative of yours has been shot and killed in the nearby city of Tulkarm. He was unarmed and there is no way for his family to get justice. Social harm in this situation is not just an abstract set of guidelines determined by bullet points on the university website.

This social harm is real and is felt by people in their day-to-day lives. It's being funneled through checkpoints, having your house bond, being forced to eat animal feed because there's no food left.

Suzanne Gaber: For Hisham, those were very real experiences he was sharing down to the last detail. Early on in the war, his cousin had been shot and killed in the West Bank. As he tried to process that violence and his own recovery, participating in the movement for divestment felt like a way to engage, to change his new home in a way that would have significant benefit on Palestine. There was a lot riding on this moment and I wondered how he was going to handle it if the university said no to divestment.

Hisham Awartani: It would be very infuriating. It would mean like this institution that I'm a part of, not only is it implicit in and like refusing to condemn what's happening to Palestinian people, but it's also saying that it will never condemn. It's basically just like throwing the whole nation under the bus. That's just how you feel all the time. Especially with the US and the role the US plays in international politics. Basically, it's like we're willing to sacrifice Palestinian lives and Palestinian security and Palestinian statehood for the interests of our ally.

That was something that we felt wasn't going to change. We're trying to tip the scales.

Suzanne Gaber: The university's corporate board took a vote in early October. It was announced just days after the one-year anniversary of October 7th. The answer was no. I spoke with student organizers that day. None would speak on the record. They were all too emotional. The next week the vibe was much more defiant. Everyone was disappointed, but they were willing to keep pushing.

[MUSIC - Which Side Are You On?]

Suzanne Gaber: Student body president and Brown Divest Coalition member Niyanta Nepal even pushed for a vote of no confidence against the corporate board that voted against divestment.

Niyanta Nepal: I think moving forward there'll be a lot of conversations too in terms of what else happens for this movement. We are fighting for Palestinian liberation. That comes in a lot of forms. We will continue demanding divestment on this campus, but we also want to make sure that everyone is cued in every other avenue of advocacy that they have to continue fighting for the Palestinian liberation, the struggle of Palestinians, and advocating on their behalf.

Suzanne Gaber: For Hisham, the vote felt like a confirmation of something he already knew, something that alienated him and other Palestinians further away from their home in the US.

Hisham Awartani: I kind of expected it on a pessimist's outlook, but I don't think there was any way they would have let it happen because from the university's point of view, it would have been like a PR disaster. That's how they think.

Suzanne Gaber: As we keep talking about the vote, his eyes start to lose some of their light. He's over it. The vote against divestment felt like a crushing defeat and he's tired of trying to convince people in the US that Palestinians matter. Now he's moved on to focusing his attention back on Gaza and his home, the West Bank. In the years since he was shot, the war has only come closer to that home, closer to his family there.

Speaker 22: A terrifying wave of Israeli settler violence has engulfed the West Bank.

Speaker 23: 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.

Suzanne Gaber: On a personal level, Hisham's family was doing okay back home. His little brother was hanging out with his friends as he always did. His little sister was getting ready for college, but in the background, when they left the bubble of their home in Ramallah, the scene was much more devastating. In May, his mom sent me a voice note. She had visited Hisham's dad's family in a small village outside of the city

Elizabeth Price: The night before, some soldiers had driven through town and one of them got out of a jeep and shot a man who was sitting with his father in front of their store.

Suzanne Gaber: These were the kind of updates Hisham was getting from home. A slow buildup of bad news that was really starting to weigh on him. How's that been watching it right now from afar?

Hisham Awartani: It's been slowly ramping up so it's not like it's jarring. It's not like it's something that all of a sudden the flip switched on. It's been happening, but getting more and more intense.

Suzanne Gaber: For a lot of Americans, this is the image of Palestine that they know, torn apart by war and occupation. It's part of what Hisham has known too but for him and his friends who grew up in the West Bank, it's not the whole picture by far. The village his mom had visited was actually one of Hisham's favorite places to be. I think the best way to describe it might be with the help of a local Palestinian movie Hisham starred in as a kid, and yes, this guy has lived a lot of lives to only be 21. The movie is called Madam El. It's a short film from 2016, only about 15 minutes long.

I looked and looked, but I couldn't find it anywhere online, but it does have an IMDb page.

Hisham Awartani: It was about two kids who find the statue of Ishtar.

Suzanne Gaber: Ishtar is a goddess who dates back to the Mesopotamian empire. The idea was that the artifact may have been thousands of years old. It was a big moment for the kids in the movie, and it paralleled a lot of Hisham's actual life. Growing up, Hisham and his friends would climb the mountains around his small village of Anabta looking for old artifacts.

Hisham Awartani: In fact, the site where the movie was shot was a cave where they'd found objects from a culture called the Natufian culture, which is one of the oldest sedentary cultures in the Levant. During the shooting, I found an arrowhead, but I lost it. It was an actual arrowhead? It's indicative of why I'm into archaeology. It's something you just grow up around.

Suzanne Gaber: That connection to history is something his mom has also appreciated since she moved to Palestine more than 25 years ago.

Elizabeth Price: There's the cultural analysis of just living as an outsider in a culture, and then there's the history. You go walking in the olive orchards, and not only do you find bits of Roman glass, but you find fossils from millennia every time we go out, or potsherds that someone along thousands of years ago touched and made. You never get bored because you look around and there's always something to get your mind snagged on and for you to understand and try and analyze.

Suzanne Gaber: The version of the West Bank that Hisham was seeing now felt very different. Yes, the region had been through war, but as a 21-year-old, this was nothing like Hisham had seen before. This feels different to you than what you've been alive for.

Hisham Awartani: The trend is worry. It's just getting more and more extreme. There's a rightward trend in Israeli society.

Suzanne Gaber: That you haven't seen before.

Hisham Awartani: Not to this extent.

Suzanne Gaber: However calm his voice, you can see the changes that he's seeing in the region are making Hisham nervous. These days, all he can think about is going home. Why is that so important to you?

Hisham Awartani: The real reason is because I think if anything goes down, I want to be on the ground, and then what happens, happens. I don't want to be watching from afar. I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to get back before [Arabic language]. I can't get back anymore.

Suzanne Gaber: That's the thing you're genuinely concerned about?

Hisham Awartani: Yes, it happened in '67. Anyone who was out of the country-

Suzanne Gaber: Got stuck.

Hisham Awartani: -got stuck out.

Suzanne Gaber: The history of Hisham's own family leaves him with a very real fear that the borders can change at any time, going all the way back to his family's village in 1948, when the state of Israel was first created and the Israeli military started pushing Palestinians out of their homes as they expanded their own territory.

In 1967, when the next regional war broke out, another round of Palestinians found themselves pushed off their land when the territorial lines of the State of Israel were again expanded.

The way Hisham's mom tells the story, Hisham's father's family had their village evacuated in one of many village removals.

 

Elizabeth Price: The families all packed up their stuff and went down to the street. The women often mixing up their lentils and rice and flowers and olive oil so no one who came after them could use it.

Suzanne Gaber: A lot of Palestinian women at the time did this in part because in some cases, Jewish residents would move into Palestinian homes, as is, taking the furniture and household items of the people who had left. In Hisham's ancestral village of Anabta, something different happened.

Elizabeth Price: They waited on the street for several days, and a lot of people from Anabta got on the buses and left. Then for some reason, the military changed their mind and Ali's family were part of that group that didn't get forced out. There are a lot of people from his village who live in Jordan as refugees or beyond.

Suzanne Gaber: Some of the family did get pushed out, Hisham's grandparents in particular. The story goes that Hisham's great-grandfather had to use his connections in the Jordanian military to get them back across the border.

Elizabeth Price: They could have been refugees, and they could have been divorced completely or exiled completely.

Suzanne Gaber: Nobody knows what changes to the land and the laws this war will bring, but Hisham is trying to prepare for any scenario, and being back home close to family is his top goal.

Kai Wright: Coming up after a break, how Hisham imagines making his return to the West Bank. Will he find the home he remembers or have things changed too much for his community there after a year of violence? More in a moment on Notes from America. Stay with us.

Regina: Hi, I'm Regina, a producer here at Notes from America with Kai Wright. I know, I know you're loving this episode. I promise I won't hold you long but I have to ask, have you seen what we're up to on Instagram? That's where we post questions to you that help shape the conversations that we have on this podcast. Plus, it's a great way to keep up with the show. Follow Notes with Kai on Instagram. That's @noteswithkai and we'll talk to you there. Thanks for listening.

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. This week, our producer Suzanne Gaber is reintroducing us to Hisham Awartani. Hisham is a senior at Brown University who grew up in Palestine, and last year, while visiting his grandmother in Vermont, he was shot. The attack left him paralyzed from the waist down. Suzanne has been following his recovery all year, and this week she concludes her reporting on his story. Here's Suzanne.

Suzanne Gaber: I've been going to see Hisham at school on and off this year. On one trip, I attended a local pro-Palestine protest where I met a Palestinian organizer who had grown up in Rhode Island. Her name is Rania Mostafa. She says Hisham's shooting mobilized a community she didn't even know existed in her hometown.

Rania Mostafa: I mean it. I see it. I feel it. The community we've built, at least for me, in a year. I didn't know any of you. Did any of you know me before?

Crowd: No.

Rania Mostafa: How many of you know me now? Yes.

[cheering]

Suzanne Gaber: We spent a lot of time hearing people talk about how the last year has created community and a sense of home for them here. It sounds like that hasn't been the situation for you. He looks off into the distance and then in a quiet voice he says,--

Hisham Awartani: I've just been too isolated.

Suzanne Gaber: Too isolated. We sit in silence for a bit and I can see his eyes start to wow. In the year I've been talking to him, it's one of the first times that he's wearing the pain he feels on his face. What do you mean you've been too isolated from everything?

Hisham Awartani: The hospital. I only got back like in February, and even then I just didn't see many people.

Suzanne Gaber: When I visited campus in February, the isolation of this new dorm seemed like a positive. He could focus on getting stronger, catch up on his studies, and read, but it left him lonely for the life he once had as a college student with a tight-knit circle of friends.

Hisham Awartani: I like social, like hanging out with people, going places, going to events on campus and walking around, doing events, going to the grocery store.

Suzanne Gaber: Do you not go to the grocery store currently?

Hisham Awartani: Not personally.

Suzanne Gaber: You're roommates do that?

Hisham Awartani: Yes.

Suzanne Gaber: To be clear, his friends are still his friends but being so reliant on them is hard for someone who enjoys his independence. There is one friend at Brown who's been in Hisham's life since kindergarten.

Aboud Ashhab: Hi, my name is Aboud Ashhab.

Suzanne Gaber: Aboud grew up with Hisham in the West Bank. They spent their last few years of high school together, and when they were both accepted to Brown, they were excited for the chance to take on a new adventure in the US as a team.

Aboud Ashhab: I'm very happy that we went together. We also moved in together, so I came to Providence summer 2021. He was in Vermont with his grandmother. I went to go see him in Vermont and then his mom moved us in during orientation.

Suzanne Gaber: They lived together sophomore year and often travel home together between semesters, an experience that is much more challenging than for most students going home.

Aboud Ashhab: For instance, like when we traveled to Palestine, we'd coordinate pick-ups who were staying with, because you have to cross through Jordan.

Suzanne Gaber: That's right, Jordan, not Israel.

Aboud Ashhab: We're not allowed to use the Israeli airport.

Suzanne Gaber: When they make it to Jordan, they drive to the land crossing into Israel. There they spend the day getting on and off buses at the behest of the Israeli army, stopping at different checkpoints along the way. At each of those stops, some people are pulled aside for questioning. If you're Palestinian or Arab in general, the chances of that are really high.

Aboud Ashhab: It wastes the whole day because of the occupation.

Suzanne Gaber: You can be turned away without explanation at any point. After years of making the trek, it's a process Hisham and Aboud are very used to. Still, it's something Hisham is especially worried about with all the press coverage of him since he was shot.

Hisham Awartani: Hopefully I can get back in in the first place. I'm pretty sure I can.

Suzanne Gaber: Ah, I hadn't even thought about that.

Hisham Awartani: Unless they decide to be really mean to me in particular, which is possible, I'm sure there are people who do more than I do. At the end of the day, it's up to their own personal whims.

Suzanne Gaber: Aboud, much like Hisham, carries with him the story of his family and how they were displaced from their homes in previous wars and what it means every time he returns to the West Bank.

Aboud Ashhab: My family, both sides were kicked out in 1967, actually, the Six Day War. They risked their lives so that their kids and grandkids can also stay and not be refugees living in camps in Jordan. I wouldn't want to capitulate that.

Suzanne Gaber: All the work that your family did to be there.

Aboud Ashhab: Yes, there's also a saying in Arabic, like, [Arabic language], like, we're in steadfast for like forever. That's part of it. You have to be steadfast or you lose. I think that's also something maybe other Palestinians like Hisham feel instead of that leaving or choosing to immigrate, it's like already a capitulation.

Suzanne Gaber: Hisham is in his fourth year at Brown, as are many of his friends, but because he's double majoring, Hisham is on a five-year course at school. Which means next year, when most of his friends graduate, he'll find himself alone again in a dorm without the help of his closest support systems. It's part of why his mind is so focused on Palestine where he never has to worry about everyone leaving him behind.

Hisham Awartani: It'll be tough because Palestine is way less accessible than lots of places in the world, but I think also having family or community around you will offset that.

Suzanne Gaber: Kind of like when having your parents here?

Hisham Awartani: Yes, or like being around friends, they help me get around. Like if there's a big hill, someone can push me up.

Suzanne Gaber: Something as small as if there's a big hill.

Hisham Awartani: Yes, or if there are stairs, someone can carry me up.

Suzanne Gaber: Returning home is a goal shared by many international students in Hisham's social network, like his friend Amir from Iraq.

Amir: They don't want to end up like ultimately giving back to the US. That's a phenomenon. The US just keeps, what?

Hisham Awartani: Brain drain.

Amir: Yes, exactly. I feel like our countries would just never progress if all the smart people just end up going like to the US or abroad and just staying there, just never coming back.

Suzanne Gaber: Another friend, Mahmoud, is from Syria.

Mahmoud: I think I wouldn't go back directly to Syria. I would probably go back to Lebanon. If nothing goes well, there's a desert in Jordan and it's like that place has perfectly clear skies at night and there's no pollution. I think I might just go there and then just volunteer somewhere to just use a telescope and just stay there. That way I could hear the call to prayer finally again.

Suzanne Gaber: Hisham's notoriety on campus doesn't make him feel more supported. Every day, his sense of belonging is becoming more intertwined with his deep desire to return to the West Bank. His four years here in the US are starting to feel like a larger structural failure.

Hisham Awartani: In Palestine, it's like people do things for each other. There's always someone, something to catch you.

Suzanne Gaber: Then you don't feel that here.

Hisham Awartani: That's why there's so many homeless people here. It's like you just fall and you keep on falling and--

Suzanne Gaber: And society lets you.

Hisham Awartani: Yes.

Suzanne Gaber: What complicates that feeling is survivor's guilt. Hisham is not the only Palestinian to have been disabled this year. In fact, in Gaza alone, more than 22,500 people have sustained life-changing injuries since October of 2023. When Hisham talks about going home, the fact that his own care has likely been so different keeps coming up.

Hisham Awartani: Honestly, it feels like what I'm going through is not that big of a deal. In Gaza, it's all over. Like I'm getting treatment but if the same thing had happened to me there, I'd probably be carried around on a stretcher, if even.

Suzanne Gaber: Is that a thing you've thought about a lot in this process?

Hisham Awartani: Yes, I'm very lucky.

Suzanne Gaber: Hisham is lucky. When he was first injured, his family raised more than $1.7 million on GoFundMe. That money has helped to cover the cost of all of his rehab and the new equipment he needs to move through his life. Now it's helping to modify his home back in the West Bank. When I called his mom Elizabeth in November, his family was already preparing for his return.

Elizabeth Price: I'm sitting in the room, I'm sitting in Hisham's room.

Suzanne Gaber: Knowing how much Hisham loves his books, Elizabeth is slowly turning his room into something of a library.

Elizabeth Price: I've just recently moved these bookshelves into the room because his books were just randomly stuffed into shelves. Then a month ago I realized he can't access these books any longer because he's in a wheelchair. I brought in these bookshelves from what was our library and now these are his books. These books up here are the children's books that we had in our library. I think he's going to enjoy this because he loves being around books.

Suzanne Gaber: She and her husband, Hisham's dad, Ali, have spent months working to make sure Hisham's room has enough space for him to move around in.

Elizabeth Price: We did this thing where when I was with him in Providence, Ali sent the dimensions of the hallway outside his bedroom, which is a narrow hallway, and I taped the dimensions out, and then Hisham drove through the mock-up to see if he could get through the hallway and then into his room and everything was fine. Then Ali's like, "No, you didn't understand at all. It had to be three dimensions." So our friend in Burlington, who was an architect, mocked up a three-dimensional layout with some garbage cans and some chairs so that when Hisham moved through the space, it was clear whether his elbows and the rest of it.

We were able to prove that in fact, he can maneuver into his bedroom. Hisham, do you also want a keffiyeh to wear down the street or not?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. I'll see you on Saturday.

Marian Price: Do you have one or should I get you one?

Hisham Awartani: I do not. I forgot to bring one.

Marian Price: I'll get you one.

Suzanne Gaber: We're at the home of Marian Price. This is Hisham's grandmother, the one he and the other boys had been visiting in Vermont for Thanksgiving at the time of the shooting attack last year. When Hisham makes his first trip back to the West Bank at the end of the year, Marian will be the one to travel with him. Their journey was one of the main topics of conversation at the Thanksgiving table this year.

Marian Price: I have to let British Airways know how heavy his wheelchair is. I thought since he takes his wheelchair apart to get in the car, we can at that point weigh each component.

Suzanne Gaber: Marian has done this trip herself quite often since her daughter Elizabeth moved to the West Bank 25 years ago. She estimates she's visited once every six months or so but as a foreigner, her trip is often a little different than the one Hisham takes.

Marian Price: We have to hope they'll let me travel on your bus because usually when I've gone with Elizabeth, Ali and the children had to go in one bus because they're Palestinian. Elizabeth and I had to go on another one because we were foreign.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: Hisham is Palestinian. He doesn't get kicked out, he uses American passport.

Marian Price: I'm not going to separate us, Hisham. I'm going to say you can't leave me. I'm old. He's in a wheelchair. We need each other.

Suzanne Gaber: This year, Hisham and Tahseen spent Thanksgiving at Marion's house, just as they did a year ago before that terrible night. The next day, we went on a walk to the spot where the attack happened. How does it feel being here?

Hisham Awartani: I've been here before. I don't know. Surprisingly, it doesn't feel like much.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: Hisham was awake enough to call the police. I tried to get up, and then I was like, maybe he's still there. So I didn't get up, and then I just started saying Shahada. I was on my side. I saw Hisham, and I saw Kinnan running away. Someone was telling me they read the news and it said that you weren't screaming and I was screaming. I was very calm. I was not screaming I was just whispering the Shahada.

Hisham Awartani: I could hear you. You were screaming, bro.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: I could hear you screaming. You were like, "Ah, ah, ah." I was very calm and stoic and manly.

Suzanne Gaber: Wait, really? You have no emotions? I'm so surprised.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: We're Arab men.

Suzanne Gaber: They're joking now, but in the months after the shooting, it was a little bit harder.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: I don't know. I think I've had a lot of time to process things, and we also. We also didn't have enough time to process things while they were happening. Like, as soon as it happened, there was all these people around us, all this news around us. There's a lot of paperwork when you get shot, it's a nightmare. It's more about the idea that a Palestinian gets shot. It's just something that happens every day. The biggest time I had an actual PTSD flashback was when we were walking to Ben and Jerry's after I left the hospital, and a girl walked really fast next to me, and I saw Eaton holding a gun.

Suzanne Gaber: Jason Eaton is the accused gunman.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: Oh, that was terrifying. I think it was first time I had a panic attack. I thought they were fake, but I was with my sister. I was walking with my sister. I had to pretend like nothing happened.

Suzanne Gaber: Why did you have to pretend?

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: She's my little sister. I don't want to be crying in front of her. I waited until I got back to the hotel room, and then I cried.

Suzanne Gaber: We stand there for a while, and I listen as they recount the events of a night that changed their lives, laughing as only old friends with a shared trauma can. The conversation eventually makes its way back to the topic of Palestine, of home, and then Hisham's cousin Basil asked the million-dollar question.

Basil Awartani: Would you rather get stuck here for the next 40 years if Israel annexed the West Bank and you guys have your ID revoked or whatever, or go back and get stuck for the next 40 years?

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: I’d definitely get stuck back in Palestine.

Basil Awartani: But with atrocious circumstances.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: Can't be worse than here.

Basil Awartani: Come on, man.

Suzanne Gaber: What they aren't saying is that something shifted for all of them when Trump was elected. In the days after Trump's victory, the Israeli government started speaking in somewhat bolder terms, bringing up the idea of annexing the West Bank, which would put all of their futures at even more risk. Particularly for Palestinians like Tahseen, who don't have American citizenship.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: There's an uncertainty about how long it's going to even be around Palestine.

Suzanne Gaber: That's a real fear that you have.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: Yes. I had always come back to America. Actually, who knows how long America's going to be around?

Suzanne Gaber: For Hisham, that fear is just as real. He would also pick a life in the West Bank, but he's a little more hesitant to lay his cards on the table. He's going to wait until he can be there and see it for himself. For the first time, these young men are going back with an understanding of their circumstances in the West Bank that they didn't have before.

Tahseen Ali Ahmed: After October 7th is when I really started to think about it more. I think I was still pretty disconnected from the Palestinian struggle because it just became so normal, so mundane. That was such a big thing happened there. I realized what was going on. Stuff that was happening around me all the time is now more clear. I got older, too.

Hisham Awartani: It just seems like normal life until you were forced to think about it.

Elizabeth Price: I think he needs to get back to Palestine to be able to orient himself.

Suzanne Gaber: Hisham's mom has noticed this shift in her son and his friends, but she understands that there's nothing she can share over the phone that could compare to Hisham being back for himself.

Elizabeth Price: It's like he can't think about anything else until he's been in Palestine and then figured out what it's like. He hasn't shared this with me, but I get a sense he can't move forward in his life planning until he's come back here because everything else is not complete. I think it's really important for him because I think it'll unlock some ways of thinking about the world after that.

Suzanne Gaber: For Hisham, the missing piece to feeling whole again is being home again.

Kai Wright: That was our producer, Suzanne Gaber, telling the story of Brown University student Hisham Awartani. Notes from America is a production of WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Suzanne Gaber. Our music and sound design is by Jared Paul, with mixing this week from Mike Kutchman and Owen Kaplan. Our team also includes Katerina Barton, Regina de Heer, Matthew Morando, and Siona Petros. Lindsay Foster Thomas is our executive producer, and I am Kai Wright. Thanks for spending time with us.

 

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