The New Yorker Radio Hour - A West Bank Family on the Verge of Annexation

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

The far right in Israel has long dreamed of settling all of the West Bank, and Gaza, too—annexing the territories to create the land they refer to as Greater Israel. The Trump Administration might not object: Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to the United Nations, has agreed that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. “I think Israel is just more emboldened with Trump in office,” says Hisham Awartani, who lives in Ramallah and is now attending Brown University. The reporter Suzanne Gaber has been covering Awartani and his family since he was left paralyzed by a shooting in Burlington, Vermont. (Two other Palestinian students, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were also shot and injured.) Gaber visited the Awartanis recently in Ramallah to find out how people in the West Bank are thinking about annexation. But, rather than a future event that might happen, the Awartanis describe annexation as a process already well underway. “I’m twenty-one years old,” Hisham tells Gaber. “ In the period of time that I’ve been alive, it’s been a slow push.  It’s, like, I’m the frog in the boiling pot.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

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 kaffirs, the Palestinian. and 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 Gabbar has been talking with one of them since shortly after the attack. His name is Hishem Aworteni. Suzanne went to the West Bank recently to visit the Alwartani 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 Gabbard.

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 O'ertani. 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, like, 20, 30 years. Some of them have taught my cousins who are now, like, married and have half PhD. and getting divorced. Hisham's mother, Elizabeth, drove him. Wait. Can you, like, wait until I park? You don't open a door until the course of that. The school is Ramallah friend's 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. Kinnan Abd al-Hamid and Taka'an. Al-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 Saeed. Oh, yeah, of course. So he says hello. I want to say hello to Isham. And while we were there, one of the boys, Tachin, got a job offered. But I can't really tell if it's serious or not.

I told them 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 the 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 Counterstrike on the PC's here. It's not that hard to install. You type in like install countershrie like 1.6. We used to like hang out in the library too with the librarian. You're hanging out with the library? Yeah, that's the guy we saw.

We talk 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? It's everyone, yeah. That's what I think. Even from the grounds of the school, you can see directly across a valley to the Israeli settlement town of Sagoat.

But the West. Bank has changed since Hisham left for college. It's grown far more dangerous for Palestinians. And nostalgia is especially complicated. I guess like reconnecting with my childhood, like seeing the things that are more familiar, it's like, well, like, a lot has changed. I kind of like drove that home. There are lots of things that are different in my life now permanently.

But, you know, what's the use in, like, kicking yourself over things that have been lost? 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, Tashin, and Kinnan 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, Tachin, 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 and, like, messes up. So I got actually locked out of my phone because they couldn't put in the password right. But then I went to the emergency thing. So I ended up calling 911. I didn't know if I was going to survive. Didn't know if my friends were alive. I always was like, well, the thing is like, oh, this is how it ends.

I mean, I was like, you know, it was never outside of the role of possibility for me, for that that happened to me. But I always expected it to be like in the West Bank and never in Burlington. The shooting in Vermont was big news. It was seven weeks after Hamas' October 7th attack. in Israel shook the world. Kinan and Taksin made full physical recoveries. But Hisham...

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. Hey. Hello. I was just checking in to see Hisham Oratani. Sixth floor.

Hi, yeah, next to you. I wanted to go. 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. Like, 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. 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. Yeah. 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, like, this institution that I'm part of is not only is, like, implicit in and, like, refusing to condemn what's happening to, like, Palestinian people, but it's also, like, saying, like, it will never condemn.

And it's, like, it's basically just, like, 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 Janine.

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, you know, experience it with my family. 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 out. and then because I'm outside, I'd like lose my legal status to live in Palestine. Since Donald Trump was elected in November, the possibility of annexation has felt even more imminent. A high-profile Israeli lawmakers said yesterday, Israel is a, quote, step away from annexing the occupied West Bank following Trump's election. Motridge suggested planning for this is already in motion. He's ordered his officials to draw plans for Israel to annex some 150 settlements in the West.

Bank. Now, Smartridge is a sepler himself. He's also a key minister and 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 Gabbardt, talking about Hesham Arwartani. We'll continue in a moment. 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 is, 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 Oortani family talked about annexation as a fact of life. Yes, I mean, I think annexation is definitely happening. You know, like annexation, I feel like it's like, like it's getting worse, but it's not like something that's like so jarring. That's like... 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 law. 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, no, yeah, because I'm here.

I mean, like, the connection is like not that home per seest exists. It's all just. 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. I also think that when you're in the U.S., you have anxiety because you expect you can control more.

Do you think so, Hishan? Like when you're here, you're like, yeah, whatever happens happens. When you're in the U.S., there's a greater anxiety because you feel like you have to take action. 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 sure like they're encouraging people to leave then they stop people from coming back at some point 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 definitely like from last time like people are more like depressed and then like hopeless and whatever but like in terms 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 a non-negotiable. I think actually her bigger concern was, I think she just wanted me to do physical therapy for as long as I could.

It's not that I didn't care about it, but it's like something that I felt like how much is physical therapy going to help 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 actual policy aside 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.

Because like policy-wise, if you look at like on the ground, like what will change, like, in terms of material support, it's not like the previous administration was like putting like any, like, checks. And like, I think Israel just. more emboldened with Trump in office. 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 Springfield. semester. And once he recovered from the trip, he settled back in to 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 cat? 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. I hope, so. sitting back in his dorm at school it's been more than a year since his sham 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 Hashem's sweetmeads of 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 in the abstract, it's like you worry about it more versus like, okay, like it's going to be like, a big logistical issue. I guess 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 slip through the cracks. You know, if annexation happens, I can just like take the 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 it take like one or two books for the journey. but I have so many books back home. It's kind of like superfluous. It's like bringing cold Newcastle.

Do your parents know that this is the plan, if that were to happen? I think I told them. I don't know 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 the more intimate view of how people lived normal life,

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 think too much about things too far ahead. You know, like, annexation, I feel like is something that now feels more pressing and, like, salient. But, like, I'm not going to think about, like, it's going to happen, like, 20 years in the future. In the large part, like, what, is the time frame that lots of these things are working on? Who knows?

Like, I'm 21 years old. In the period of time that I've been alive, it's been a slow push. It's like I'm the frog in the boiling pot. Hesham Alrateni is a senior at Brown University. 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. 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. 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 Thiele

Theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccat. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.