Dec 09 2024
College student Hisham Awartani, 21, was visiting family in Vermont over Thanksgiving break in 2023 when he and two of his friends were shot. All three victims are of Palestinian descent and were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves when the attack happened. Awartani and the other two young men, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, all survived. However, Awartani was left paralyzed from the waist down and over the past year, he’s been learning how to live a new life that involves using a wheelchair.
Over that year, Notes From America has spent time with Awartani, following his physical recovery and the emotional hurdles he’s grappled with at Brown University where he became a reluctant poster child of the movement for the university to divest from companies associated with the Israeli military.
As Awartani prepares to return home to the West Bank for the first time since his injury, producer Suzanne Gaber takes us through his year in recovery and what he hopes for next as the war in his homeland continues to escalate.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this piece incorrectly attributed an anecdote about the Awartani family in the Middle East being forced to leave their homes in 1948 when many Palestinians, including the family, were pushed out during an expansion of Israeli territory. The story is in reference to a 1967 evacuation of their village and the piece has since been updated to reflect the correct year.
Series Coverage of Hisham Awartani's Story:
A Palestinian-American Victim of American Gun Violence Becomes A Reluctant Poster Child (February 19, 2024)
Still In Recovery From Being Shot, Hisham Awartani Commits To a Summer of Activism (June 6, 2024)
Q&A with series producer Suzanne Gaber
Our show has been following 21-year-old Hisham Awartani since his release from a rehabilitation center where he was receiving treatment for a paralyzing injury after being shot in Vermont. Awartani is a remarkable young man from the West Bank who attends school at Brown University where he found himself in the spotlight as a victim of U.S. gun violence and representative for the movement to free Palestine. Gaber recently concluded her reporting on his healing journey and shares some thoughts about Awartani and the assignment.
Q: You got to know Hisham over the course of a year. What's the biggest challenge of reporting on someone for an extended time?
It was really special to get to get to know different versions of the same person over the course of a year. The biggest challenge was coming into someone’s life at such an intense moment of trauma, not only his physical trauma, but the emotional trauma he was experiencing as a Palestinian living abroad in a moment of war. For Hisham, who is a pretty reserved person, there was a lot of processing in real time and being able to hold that processing and maintain a respectful and professional distance is hard when you see someone going through such intense struggle. Over the year, as I got to know him better and he got to know me, we were able to have honest conversations about when he needed to process and when sharing those moments might be able to help listeners better understand his experience.
Q: What was a moment that says a lot about who Hisham is that didn't make it into the final cut?
This story was really about Hisham’s year learning to adjust to his new life, emotionally and physically, and that often meant we had to cut moments for time that were really special. One aspect of Hisham’s personality I wish we could have shared more of is his deep love for his friends. When I went to visit Vermont for the one year anniversary of the shooting, I got to see Hisham with his friend Tahseen, who had also been shot the day of the attack. Hisham’s face lit up sitting next to Tahseen at Thanksgiving, just chatting about everything from high school crushes, to how they got into college. Tahseen didn’t get into the colleges he had wanted originally so he took a gap year, and Hisham spent that year helping Tahseen studying so that his friend would get the education he wanted and the two of them would be near each other for school on the East Coast. The friendships these boys have is really much more like a brotherhood, and it is so clear how much they care about each other and the community they grew up with.
Q: What do you hope your reporting contributes to the canon of coverage of the ongoing war in the Middle East? Or do you think of it that way?
One of the things that [New Yorker Radio Hour host] David Remnick said early on in the war that stuck with me was that to cover Palestine, “the only way to tell this story is to try to tell it truthfully and to know that you will fail.” It is very easy when covering this conflict to want to have your work feel like it is making an impact, moving the needle towards understanding in some way, but that is an enormous task that puts a lot of pressure on one piece or one story. So as the year progressed, I tried to view this piece more as an oral history of Hisham’s life, for him, his family, and the listeners. There is a lot to be learned about the Palestinian experience through Hisham, as there is with the life stories of many other people from the region. I just hope this piece gives a glimpse into one Palestinian experience and perseveres a moment in history and in this man’s life that allows people to view his community with a level of nuance that may get lost in the daily news updates.
Tell us what you think. We're @noteswithkai on Instagram and X (Twitter). Email us at [email protected]. Send us a voice message by recording yourself on your phone and emailing us, or record one here.
Notes from America airs live on Sundays at 6 p.m. ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts.