On Monday, in the suburbs of Chicago, a six-year-old Palestinian American child was laid to rest. Wadea Al-Fayoume, who had recently celebrated his sixth birthday, and his mother, Hanaan Shahin, were brutally attacked by their landlord in what police say was a hate crime. Little Wadea was stabbed 26 times by a trusted person who was once a friend. Shahin is in critical condition.
That same day, in the Detroit metropolitan area, Dearborn police arrested a man who posted an invitation to “hunt Palestinians” on his Facebook account.
President Biden’s Oct. 10 address in response to the Hamas attack just days earlier was a moment that defined his presidential legacy. Rather than calling for calm and de-escalation, or making clear that the actions of states and armed groups do not justify attacks on civilians, he gave a speech that was incredibly inflammatory, repeating unverified, incendiary Israeli allegations. Civil rights organizations immediately saw an uptick in Islamophobic and anti-Arab incidents.
Delivered at a point in which Israel had already killed nearly 700 Palestinians, 140 of them children, Biden’s remarks threw a brick on the accelerator of the violence, approving Israel’s massive and indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear the Israeli military would bomb indiscriminately, saying: “We are pounding our enemies with unprecedented force, and I stress, this is only the beginning.”
The landscape of its cities is now unrecognizable.
For Palestinian Americans who fear for the lives of their families, friends and even strangers in Gaza, this grief has been compounded with immediate threats to their safety here. The Biden administration has mishandled the Palestine-Israel crisis from the outset, and it has now reached U.S. soil.
It began when Biden parroted disinformation propagated by the Israeli military. Many U.S. journalists also spread the unverified claims of mass rape and beheadings like wildfire. More than a week later, Israel still has not provided any hard evidence to support these allegations, which have whipped up anti-Palestinian hatred and the desire to shed Palestinian blood, both in Palestine and the U.S.
Soon after, many journalists began quietly retracting the unsubstantiated claims. Still, President Biden claimed to have personally seen “confirmed” images of beheaded babies. The White House later walked this back, admitting that Biden had not seen these images and the U.S. has not been able to verify Israel’s claims. Meanwhile, a State Department memo on Oct. 13 directed staff to keep the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm” out of official publications.
In his Oct. 15 interview on “60 Minutes,” one week into Israel’s war on Gaza, Biden finally changed his tune, warning that the actions of Hamas do not speak for all of the Palestinian people. But the damage was done. On that same day that the president finally made this necessary clarification, a Palestinian American child was murdered. According to his father, some of the last words Wadea heard were: “You are killing our kids in Israel” and, “you Palestinians don’t deserve to live.”
The Biden administration and other U.S. politicians and media fanned the flames, and Palestinians paid the price — so far, almost 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and one Palestinian American in Illinois.
The Biden administration’s negligence bears significant responsibility for this disaster. This is not a one-off foreign policy miscalculation. Instead, it is the product of longstanding systemic failure in the realms of foreign and domestic policy that has ignored the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli rule and the context of Israel’s more than half-century-old military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and 16-year-long siege of Gaza. It has done nothing but disenfranchise the Palestinian American community, rendering successive administrations incapable of commonsense policy geared toward lasting solutions.
Over 600 Palestinian Americans are trapped in Gaza now as it is being bombarded. The State Department was not keeping record of the Palestinian Americans there, and the White House denied meetings to Arab American organizations and Palestinian American leaders, according to the national executive director of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Palestinian Americans are the subject of surveillance and criminalization that places targets on our backs, and yet, at the same time, our community is rendered politically invisible when it counts.
Israel cannot be handed carte blanche to bomb away its problems. A real political solution is the only way forward. This includes a change in the foundations of U.S. foreign policy on Palestine and Israel, an end to Israel’s occupation and suffocating and illegal siege and naval blockade of Gaza, and an end to racist incitement against Palestinians, including those who are American.
In Gaza, after the end of each of Israel’s wars, students mourn on their first day back at school, looking at the empty seats of their murdered classmates. On Monday, little Wadea did not return to his assigned seat in the classroom. Instead, he was buried in a small white coffin, surrounded by hundreds of mourners.
This immense pain requires true courage and leadership. If policy makers care about the lives of innocent people on both sides, it is time to face reality: the dehumanization of Palestinians, including the more than 1,500 children in Gaza killed over the past 12 days, has emboldened Israeli war crimes, and is endangering our lives here. Palestinian Americans and others see the hypocrisy of condemning a hate crime that stole a six-year-old’s life while cheerleading atrocities in Gaza. Wadea’s murder should be a wake-up call.
In this difficult moment with all of its bloodshed and pain, we can still find an opportunity to forge a path toward a better future. The only way forward is to broker a peace based on justice. The old U.S. gameplan is hollow and incapable of preventing tragic episodes like the one we find ourselves in now. Do not fail us again, President Biden.
Hanna Alshaikh (@yalawiya) is a Palestinian American doctoral candidate at Harvard University.