What is a Palestinian-American’s Life Worth?
Jeffrey St. ClairShireen Abu-Akleh, Amer Rabee, Saif Musallet. Image: Jeffrey St. Clair.
His family and friends called him Saif. He was affable and gregarious. He was kind and generous. He was handsome and athletic. He helped run the family’s ice cream parlor in Tampa. He liked cars, hip-hop, soccer and the beach. He was an American kid with Palestinian roots.
A few weeks before his 21st birthday he traveled to the West Bank to visit relatives. His family owns land in al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, a Palestinian village northeast of Ramallah. In his last phone call with his father, Saif was upbeat, glad to be exploring his familial roots. He said that he felt he was finally ready to get married and hoped he might fall in love with a woman in Palestine.
But Saif would would not find a beautiful Palestinian girl to marry. He’d never return to Tampa, to his friends, to his siblings or to his parents. Said would not turn that magical age of 21.
Sayfollah Musallet would die only a week after coming to Palestine. He would die shortly after attending Friday prayers in the ancient town of Sinjil.
But die is not the right word.
Saif was killed. Killed isn’t precise either.
Saif was murdered. Murdered by a mob. He was clubbed in the head repeatedly and left to die. The ambulance that might have saved him was blocked. The mob that killed Saif had smashed the windshield and kept it from moving for at least two hours. When his brother reached Saif’s crumpled body, he was bloody and unconscious, but still breathing. By the time paramedics were finally allowed through, his face was blue and he had no pulse.
Saif wasn’t the only body on the ground, while the ambulance was waylaid.
Mohammed Rizq Hussein al-Shalabi, a 23-year-old Palestinian, was down, having been shot in the chest by the same mob that attacked Saif. Mohammed also died that day, left to bleed out as paramedics were kept from treating him. When his body was found hours later, he had bruising on his neck and face, suggesting that he’d been beaten either before or after being shot.
Saif’s body also showed signs of other forms of abuse. According to his cousin, Diana Halum, who examined his body after it was retrieved: “His body showed signs of strangulation, a large bruise on his back that looked like it came from a rock, and dirt was found in his mouth.”
There is no mystery about who attacked Saif and Mohammed or who kept life-saving medical care from reaching them. In fact, the killers were still on the scene when Israeli security forces arrived, both police and military.
Yet no action was taken against them. They weren’t arrested, detained or interrogated.The Israeli forces didn’t even let the ambulance through. Instead, they begin firing tear gas canisters at the Palestinians, trying to disperse them from their own land and drive them away from their wounded friends. One IDF reservist fired his weapon with live rounds at the Palestinians.
The Israeli forces didn’t leave empty-handed that day. They rarely do. At the scene of two murders, they took three people into custody: two solidarity activists and one Palestinian, who had themselves been beaten by the Israeli mob. The activists were released the next day and promptly banned from reentering the West Bank for at least two weeks. It’s apparently a crime to witness crimes being committed against Palestinians.
“They prevented the ambulance and allowed the settlers to do what they do anytime they want to,” said Saif’s father Kamel Musallet. “I hold the Israeli military just as responsible as the settlers and the American government for not doing anything about this. You know, why are you not telling the IDF? Why are you not preventing settler terrorism?”
The village of Sinjil has been a flashpoint, one of many across the West Bank, as the Netanyahu government has encouraged the development of illegal outposts and settlements deeper and deeper into the Occupied Territories, demolishing barns, killing livestock, poisoning wells, uprooting gardens and torching olive groves.
Last September, Israeli forces constructed a razor-wire fence and metallic wall around the village of Sinjil, cutting the town off from the local highway and the fields and pastures of Palestinian farmers. Since then, there’s been only one gate allowing passage to and from the town and it’s operated by the Israeli military. The Palestinian farmers are routinely attacked by settlers after they exit the gate and head to their fields.
This small town of 5,700 is now nearly encircled by four illegal settler outposts on Palestinian land seized by Israelis without official authorization from the government. Under Netanyahu’s regime, these outposts–illegal under both Israeli and international law–quickly become “legalized” after buildings go up and roads are plowed in. Two outposts on the edge of Sinjil, Givat Harel and Givat HaRoeh, were legalized in 2023.
A few months ago settlers began attempting to build another outpost on a bluff outside Singil, once again employing their customary methods of violence and intimidation, knowing that if they stick it out, their brutal tactics will usually be rewarded with the Israeli government legitimizing their theft of Palestinian land.
It was into this fraught and perilous scene that Saif and his friends drove toward after Friday prayers. They had gone to inspect the family’s imperiled farmland between the villages of Sinjil and al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. But they didn’t realized they were heading right into an ambush. The killer mob armed with sticks, clubs and guns hid behind rocks and boulders, laying in wait as the Palestinians approached. The fatal consequences were all too common and predictable.
Since October 23, nearly 1000 Palestinians, including five Americans, have been killed in the West Bank in attacks much like this one, where Israeli settler mobs, troops and police congeal together in violent assaults on unarmed Palestinian civilians, who can only defend themselves with rocks or farm tools.
By 2024, the settler violence in the West Bank had grown so extreme, emboldened and gratuitous, with little evidence that Israeli security forces were doing anything to quell it and lots of evidence that they were abetting it, that the Biden administration felt compelled–if largely as public damage control–to impose sanctions on individual settlers and organizations funding the settlements, such as Amana and Hashomer Yosh. But these meager restraints were quickly junked on Trump took office and the settlers once again had the green light to commit land theft through acts of mob violence, regardless of who stood in their way.
Saif was an American murdered in a foreign country. That used to matter. Sometimes it still does. Often it means that the FBI will be dispatched to conduct an investigation. But not in this case. Not in the West Bank. Not when the killers are Israelis. Not when the victim isn’t only an American, but also a Palestinian, the decisive denominator. In these cases, the investigation, if there is one, is left to the Israelis. Israeli investigations into the killings of Palestinians rarely go anywhere–and that’s by design.
And why would the Israelis aggressively pursue holding the killers to account? The settlers are agents of the regime. Indeed, they are the leading edge, the shock forces, if you will, for the Netanyahu government’s evolving plan to annex the West Bank. These marauding gangs function more like paramilitaries than ad hoc mobs. They’ve been armed to the teeth by Netanyahu’s Kahanist National Security Minister Itamar Itamar Ben-Gvir with more than 120,000 weapons since October 7, 2023, many of them supplied by the US. Some of these armed settlers have now been deputized into police units. But they’re not there to keep law and order, but to sow chaos. The intent is to terrorize people into abandoning their fields, their villages and their homes.
Impunity is the unspoken but prime directive. The Israel human rights group Yesh Din examined 1,600 cases of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023. They found that less than 3 percent of the cases ended in a conviction. More than 90 percent of the cases didn’t even result in charges.
As a measure of the sense of license and immunity these armed hordes enjoy, two days after Serif and Mohammad were murdered, the same gang attacked a clearly-marked CNN van that had returned to film the scene of the killings, pelting the vehicle with rocks and hammering it with clubs.
More often than not, the Israeli investigation quickly turns away from the killers and toward the victims, who are routinely smeared as the agents of their own murders. This was the case with the last American killed by Israelis in the West Back. In April, Amer Rabee a Palestinian-American from Saddle Brook, New Jersey, was shot by Israeli forces 11 times in the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya. He died at the scene. Two other Palestinian-American boys were also shot and injured at the same time, but survived. The Israelis blamed the kids, calling them terrorists for allegedly throwing stones at body-armored and helmeted Israeli troops. Amer Rabee was only 14 years old. Amer and his friends were shot at 47 times while they were picking almonds.
Rabee’s killing generated no pushback from the Trump administration, as similar killings (Shireen Abu Akleh and Aysenur Ezgi Eygi) elicited no meaningful protests from the Biden administration. Palestinian lives, even Palestinian-American lives, are considered expendable, their loss scarcely even worth noticing and certainly not worth inconveniencing the relationship with one of the US’s most dutiful weapons buyers.
“Nobody does anything,” said Kamel Musallet. “It’s just another name, another number. We want justice. We want the American-Israeli and the American-Palestinian to be in the same class. These are Americans. But for some reason, the American-Palestinian is differentiated from the American-Israeli.”
A shorter version of this piece originally ran in Gaza Diary.
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.