{"id":171891,"date":"2025-10-08T10:06:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T14:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171891"},"modified":"2025-10-08T10:34:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T14:34:21","slug":"a-hill-to-die-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/10\/08\/a-hill-to-die-on\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hill to Die On"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Hafeth Jabbar, Zeyad Kadur, and Kamel Musallet. Photograph courtesy of Jasper Nathaniel.<\/p><\/div>\n

On a Monday night in mid-September, when I arrived in Washington, D.C., Israel pounded Gaza with air strikes so intense they rattled buildings in Tel Aviv\u2014one of the heaviest bombardments since October 7, 2023. I stopped at my hotel to drop off my bags before meeting the families for dinner. The courtyard was full of people but eerily quiet.<\/p>\n

At the caf\u00e9, the barista stood with her back to me.<\/p>\n

\u201cHi,\u201d I said. Nothing. \u201cHello?\u201d<\/p>\n

No response.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I get a coffee, please?\u201d<\/p>\n

She still said nothing. At the front desk, it was the same\u2014I spoke, but no one seemed to hear. I wandered into the lobby, unsettled, then noticed the rapid, fluid flicker of hands. I\u2019d unknowingly booked a hotel located on the campus of a university for the deaf and hard of hearing.<\/p>\n

I was in the nation\u2019s capital along with a small delegation of American families who were grieving loved ones killed or abducted by Israeli settlers and soldiers. I wanted to see what it was like for them to walk the halls of power and demand justice from a government that has hardly registered their existence. The trip was organized by two NGOs that stacked seventeen meetings across three days\u2014all with Democratic lawmakers\u2014sending us crisscrossing the Hill.<\/p>\n

When I met the group at a Mexican restaurant, the three Palestinian American men\u2014Hafeth Abdel Jabbar, Kamel Musallet, and Zeyad Kadur\u2014were housing chips and guac. All three are small-business owners in the U.S.\u2014 sneakers, ice cream, and menswear, respectively\u2014who split their time between the States and the West Bank. They were scrolling through the latest grisly footage from Gaza City and passing their phones around. \u201cI watch everything,\u201d Hafeth said. \u201cI have to see it all.\u201d He\u2019s haunted by a clip of an old man picking up a severed hand and slipping it into a bag that reads THANK YOU<\/small>.<\/p>\n

Hafeth is a tall, broad man with a deep, rumbling voice. He raised his family in New Orleans, but in the spring of 2023, they\u2019d decided to spend some time in the West Bank so that his seventeen-year-old son, Tawfic, could feel a deeper connection to their ancestral land. Last January, Hafeth pulled Tawfic\u2019s corpse from the wreckage of his car after he was shot in the head while driving near their home. The Israel Defense Forces put out a statement: something about a stone thrown, a firearm discharged, and an off-duty officer, but Hafeth was sure the bullet came from a soldier\u2019s standard-issue M16. Tawfic had been wearing a North Face jacket and American Eagle jeans. \u201cMade no difference to Biden,\u201d he said. \u201cHe never even said my son\u2019s name.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year and a half later, in July 2025, Hafeth rushed to a scene of Israeli settlers rampaging in an olive grove just outside al-Mazra\u2019a al-Sharqiya, the hilltop village once mapped by Crusaders and Ottoman taxmen where he and many other Palestinian Americans live. It\u2019s one of the wealthiest towns in the area\u2014the Miami of the West Bank, if Miami were hemmed in by masked marauders who terrorized its outskirts and hunted residents for sport. On that day, locals were saying that a young man had been severely beaten and was struggling to breathe, but settlers and soldiers had been blocking ambulances for more than two hours, shooting through their windshields. Hafeth broke through a line of soldiers and found twenty-year-old Sayfollah \u201cSaif\u201d Musallet, a Palestinian American visiting from Florida, dying under an oak tree on his family\u2019s hillside land. Saif\u2019s father, Kamel, flew in from Florida to bury him. At the funeral, Hafeth put his arm around Kamel. \u201cWe fight together,\u201d he told him.<\/p>\n

Kamel and Hafeth share no blood, except for what had soaked into Hafeth\u2019s clothes on the day he carried Saif in his arms. Kamel\u2019s cousin, Zeyad, also a Floridian, was in D.C. to plead for support in freeing his nephew, Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim, who has been held in Israeli military detention without charge since February 2025. Zeyad keeps saying Mohammed\u2019s fifteen. He\u2019s actually sixteen\u2014he spent his birthday in jail\u2014but looks barely fourteen. \u201cJust a little guy,\u201d Zeyad told me. \u201cAnd they sent thirty soldiers to take him from his home at 3 A.M.<\/small>\u201d In an interrogation video from the night of his abduction, two soldiers in ski masks accuse Mohammed\u2014swaying in a chair, a blindfold loosened around his neck\u2014of throwing rocks at a settler\u2019s car. They offer nothing to back it up, and he keeps repeating that he didn\u2019t do it. His family hasn\u2019t been able to speak with him since, but according to the U.S. embassy, he\u2019s down a third of his body weight and covered in scabies. In the one message he managed to send through the embassy, Mohammed said, \u201cAsk my father to buy my sister a gold necklace and tell him once I\u2019m released, I will work hard to pay him back.\u201d Maybe he meant at the family\u2019s ice cream shop in Tampa; he and Saif were supposed to work side by side there this summer. But Saif is dead, and Mohammed is in prison, unaware, for all the family knows, of what\u2019s happened.<\/p>\n

Zeyad ordered three flans that nobody wanted, then quietly picked up the bill. The lead \u201chandler\u201d the NGO had assigned to this trip was beside himself. There were deep bags under Zeyad\u2019s eyes\u2014it was his first trip away from his newborn twins, born six weeks earlier. His wife sent constant updates, which he shared with our group. The babies in a crib. The babies on the floor. Sleeping. Drooling. Murmuring. They named the boy Sayfollah, after their late nephew, and the girl Aiysha, after Ay\u015fenur Eygi, the twenty-six-year-old Turkish American activist killed by an Israeli sniper at a West Bank protest. Ay\u015fenur\u2019s sister, \u00d6zden, and her husband, Hamid, were in D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary of her murder.<\/p>\n

After Ay\u015fenur was killed, one of her family\u2019s first calls was to Cindy and Craig Corrie. Their daughter Rachel\u2014an activist from Washington State, like Ay\u015fenur\u2014was crushed to death in Gaza in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood on a mound of dirt in front of a home to protest its demolition, wearing a reflective orange vest and speaking into a megaphone. She was twenty-three. The Corries had spent more than a decade making fruitless trips to D.C. and Israel in search of accountability\u2014a public records request revealed a Justice Department memo that read, \u201cThe family is not going to go away.\u201d But in 2015, they decided to step back; today, they run the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice from Olympia\u2014now a sister city to Rafah, where Rachel was killed\u2014supporting grassroots efforts for human rights locally and globally, and have embraced \u00d6zden and Hamid like their own children. Both nearly eighty, Cindy and Craig were back in the country\u2019s capital for the first time in a decade, joining the delegation at the Eygis\u2019 request.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Craig and I stepped off the plane into the lobby of the National Airport,\u201d Cindy told me, \u201ca wave of PTSD swept over me.\u201d She paused, then softened: \u201cYou know, many good things came out of those trips. But there was a lot of disappointment.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On Tuesday morning, I grabbed an Uber to the House Triangle, where an outdoor press conference hosted by Representative Pramila Jayapal, congresswoman from Washington State, was set to kick off the families\u2019 gauntlet of meetings on Capitol Hill. My driver, a Bangladeshi man, told me the National Guard had mostly dissipated but ICE still prowled certain neighborhoods. He avoided these. \u201cThe Guardsmen weren\u2019t so bad,\u201d he said. \u201cICE, though\u2014real knuckle men.\u201d He paused, caught my eye in the rearview mirror, and corrected himself. \u201cKnuckle draggers?\u201d I nodded. He grinned before turning serious again: a few weeks earlier, a friend and fellow driver had disappeared without a trace.<\/p>\n

Dark clouds were rolling in from the Chesapeake, but there was no tent and no backup plan for the presser. One by one, sympathetic lawmakers stepped forward to mourn with the families, who stood behind them holding up signs with their loved ones\u2019 names. They castigated their colleagues for refusing to hold Israel accountable. But the target was elusive: Democrats, Republicans; Biden, Trump; Blinken, Rubio.<\/p>\n

Representative Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan, took the podium, and something in the air shifted. In a town defined by careful choreography, her voice was raw. \u201cWhen Americans are killed abroad, it\u2019s a standard procedure for our U.S. government to open an investigation. But when murderers wear Israeli uniforms,\u201d she said, stabbing the air toward the Capitol, gray and hulking behind her, \u201cthere\u2019s complete silence.\u201d She recounted the names of the slain Americans, one by one\u2014none of whose deaths have been investigated by the U.S.\u2014demanding justice for each. \u201cWe say enough is enough,\u201d she cried. \u201cWe’re standing here because we must honor the lives of our loved ones by demanding that our government stop funding and supporting the Israeli government\u2019s genocide and war crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The skies opened up. Umbrellas bloomed in the small press pool, irritating the camera crew. People held bags over their heads. A reporter leaned over to a colleague, whispered, \u201cI\u2019ll watch the recording later.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Kamel\u2019s turn to speak. He\u2019s built like a welterweight\u2014compact, sturdy, shoulders set back\u2014with a graying beard on a strong jaw and an aquiline nose. His eyes are light, but he hides them under a dark cap. Rain and wind lashed him as he boasted about Saif\u2014how he had been building his credit score, had bought his first car. Tlaib stepped forward with an umbrella and held it over him.<\/p>\n

Hafeth, when he stepped up to the microphone, carried a burning sense of outrage\u2014though his was more incredulous, more combustible, than Tlaib\u2019s, as if he couldn\u2019t fathom how the world hadn\u2019t come to a standstill to demand justice for his son. He stressed his own Americanness, how he had been raised on the promises of liberty and humanity, the very ideals he had tried to pass on to his own children. \u201cSo where is my government?\u201d he shouted. There was quiet, scattered applause.<\/p>\n

The storm drove steam from the Capitol\u2019s stones as the handlers rushed us to the families\u2019 first meetings. It was gray outside, but inside Cannon\u2014the oldest of the six congressional buildings\u2014the atrium was washed in fluorescent light. The group split up to meet different lawmakers. Hafeth scrolled through X, scanning reactions to his speech. He looked up at no one in particular and snapped, \u201cWhat the fuck does October 7 have to do with the Israelis killing my son?\u201d Two young staffers in slim-cut suits glanced over, then headed down the corridor.<\/p>\n

In the first meeting, I asked a lawmaker\u2014who asked to remain nameless\u2014why she hadn\u2019t voted against sending weapons to Israel. The suited handler who was with us winced, and for the next sixteen meetings, I was exiled to foyers and hallways. There was fury in those rooms, I was told, but out there, it was quiet. A Raphael Warnock staffer read A Little Life<\/em> (\u201cI was told not to read it with any sharp objects around,\u201d he told me); Bernie\u2019s aides offered me Vermont cheese; a Chuy Garc\u00eda staffer asked suspiciously if I was a \u201cDavid Foster Wallace bro\u201d after hearing the name of my newsletter, Infinite Jaz<\/em>. I could tell the Republican offices apart from the Democrats\u2019 by the Charlie Kirk memorials tacked up on their doors. On a bench near the cafeteria, what appeared to be a college-age intern had fallen asleep sitting upright.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On Wednesday morning, I ducked out to meet a friend and fellow journalist for coffee on Second Street. He\u2019s from Gaza, but he went to university in the West Bank, and when the families came by between meetings, it took less than two minutes for him and Zeyad to figure out they had a mutual friend. We walked together, and Kamel teased me, \u201cWe\u2019re only speaking in Arabic so we can talk about you.\u201d The handlers were checking their phones, nudging the pace of the proceedings along.<\/p>\n

Kamel wanted to talk about his son. \u201cHe had a spark,\u201d he said. \u201cTwenty years old, and he was running the ice cream shop.\u201d He\u2019d turned the Dubai strawberry chocolate cup into an online sensation that drew lines outside the door. The memories pressed out of him, one tumbling over the next. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t built like me. I always wanted him to do more push-ups.\u201d He trailed off, revising as he spoke. \u201cI doubt it would have saved him. They probably would\u2019ve killed me, too.\u201d He invited me for shakshouka when I visit the West Bank. We\u2019ll play soccer then, he said\u2014me, him, and his younger son. Inshallah.<\/em><\/p>\n

We had three umbrellas between the thirteen of us, and we all got soaked through. The lawmakers wedged the families in between their other business. Right after meeting the families in her office, Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts, took the House floor to condemn a Republican bill that would let children as young as fourteen be tried as adults. \u201cAll these things are connected,\u201d she told the families. \u201cOur children have always been adultified by white supremacists.\u201d Representative Garc\u00eda, of Illinois, had just finished tearing into the FBI director Kash Patel over the diversion of agents to immigration enforcement, invoking the killing of one of his own constituents by ICE. Weeks earlier, another of his constituents, Khamis Ayyad, a Palestinian American who lived just blocks away from Garc\u00eda, was killed in a settler arson attack while visiting the village of Silwad, a few kilometers south of al-Mazra\u2019a al-Sharqiya. At two o\u2019clock, Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, published a declaration on his website that he believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza\u2014becoming the first senator to do so\u2014then walked straight into a meeting with the families.<\/p>\n

In the Hart Senate Office Building, Hafeth looked up from the foot of a towering sculpture by Alexander Calder, Mountains and Clouds<\/em>. He traced the mountains with his finger, but the clouds, once dangling from the ceiling, were gone. Officials had feared a steel cloud might fall and crush someone to death on the Capitol floor. Hafeth read the placard\u2014the piece had been installed in 1986, after Calder was dead\u2014then shook his head. \u201cJust imagine\u2014all that work, and he didn\u2019t even live to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zeyad stopped at the office of Senator Rick Scott, from his home state of Florida, to study a poster of Israeli hostages from October 7, mounted beside an American flag outside his door. \u201cWhy isn\u2019t Mohammed on this?\u201d he asked. \u201cIsn\u2019t he a hostage too?\u201d He grabbed Kamel\u2014also a Florida resident, like his late son, Saif\u2014and they walked into the senator\u2019s office. I tried to follow them in, but a handler stopped me; this wasn\u2019t part of the plan, and she didn\u2019t like the optics. When Zeyad and Kamel reemerged, having been denied a meeting with Scott or even a staffer, I expected anger, but instead they just shook their heads with a kind of dry amusement. \u201cThis punk\u2019s been hiding from us for months,\u201d Zeyad said.<\/p>\n

The irony, Kamel told me, rolling his eyes, was that his son thought of himself as an American patriot. He played me a voice note Saif sent a month before his death, after the embassy texted him to take shelter during Israel\u2019s exchange of rockets with Iran: \u201cHell yeah, proud to be an American, trying to keep me safe!\u201d Kamel showed me a video clip: Saif at the airport, waving his U.S. passport at laughing friends, chanting, \u201cBlue is blue!\u201d One shoots back, \u201cYou should work for the embassy!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know Huckabee came to my home?\u201d Kamel said of the U.S. ambassador to Israel. \u201cPromised us justice, then we never heard from him again.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It stormed on and off for three straight days as the families trudged between congressional buildings, narrating their grief again and again. A ten-minute Uber cost forty-five dollars; cab lines snaked through lobbies. The Potomac ran down Constitution Avenue, sluiced through shoes. My own oxfords never quite dried, and I had run out of fresh socks.<\/p>\n

On the final day, Craig and I got lost in the warren of the Longworth House Office Building\u2019s basement: drab, dimly lit, a Dunkin\u2019 tucked in one corner, and \u201cWe the People\u201d from the Constitution stretched across the wall\u2014a black-and-white facsimile of the founding ideals. \u201cI should really know this place better,\u201d Craig said. He can recite every procedural detail of the failed attempts to find justice for Rachel: the IDF\u2019s sham probe; the House resolution for a U.S. investigation that died in committee; the Haifa court\u2019s 2012 \u201cwartime accident\u201d ruling; the Israeli Supreme Court\u2019s 2015 affirmance of that ruling. \u201cBut somewhere along the way,\u201d he told me, \u201cI lost an understanding of what justice might be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the course of the trip, the families had grown closer, and the mission had coalesced around a single urgent hope: that young Mohammed wouldn\u2019t become the next American casualty of Israeli violence. Something, at least, to salvage from the wreckage. \u201cHe feels like my little brother,\u201d \u00d6zden told Representative Jim McGovern, of Massachusetts. \u201cI can\u2019t do anything for my sister, but we can help him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in this place of relative helplessness, there was a clear hierarchy of life: citizenship gave the families access that they wouldn\u2019t have otherwise had. Mohammed was abducted along with three other kids who have no representation in D.C. The settler attack that killed Saif took the life of another young man, Mohammed Shalabi, as well. (Race, of course, played a role as well\u2014Rachel\u2019s case, languishing though it was, received far more attention than the Palestinian Americans\u2019 ever would, a fact of which the Corries are deeply aware.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always been bigger than Rachel,\u201d Cindy said. \u201cFrom the beginning, we were seeking accountability for what happened to her, but we also kept in mind what she had asked us to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the way back to my hotel, I pulled up Rachel\u2019s letters to her mother from Gaza, written in the weeks before she was killed and later published online by her family. \u201cI really can\u2019t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

She worried she wasn\u2019t finding the right words, that her urgency might sound like exaggeration, that even her mother might not believe her. And then I found the ask Cindy had referred to: \u201cI think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s an extremist thing to do anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

A week after the trip, I called Kamel, who was back in Florida, to ask if he thought it had been productive.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was only the Democrats who met with us, and the ones who are already critical of Israel. So they\u2019re listening, and they\u2019re saying all the right things, and they\u2019re even asking, \u2018What can I do for you?\u2019 But in the end, it\u2019s always: \u2018Actually, there\u2019s nothing we can do for you. We\u2019re too weak.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

He hoped there\u2019d be some momentum to get Mohammed out\u2014and that would be a blessing\u2014but he expected nothing in the way of justice for his own son.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they couldn\u2019t get justice for Rachel after twenty years,\u201d he said, \u201cwhat are they going to do for a boy named Sayfollah?\u201d<\/p>\n

While he was in D.C., he told me, settlers had broken into his neighbor\u2019s farmhouse and were now occupying it, giving them a strategic position to launch more attacks from the top of the hill the village is built on. \u201cThey murdered my son,\u201d he said, \u201cand now the same settlers are coming back day after day, shooting at us, scaring our children, stealing our land. They\u2019re living on our property now. Do you understand how crazy that is? Nobody should have to live like this, American or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sounded tired. I asked how he was holding up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was nice being with everybody,\u201d he said. \u201cBut then I got on the plane, and it came out of nowhere. The sadness, man, it hit me like a wave. I didn\u2019t want people to see me. They don\u2019t know what the hell you\u2019re crying for. I always wear a hat to hide it, but I couldn\u2019t this time. So I just found four seats that were empty in the back of the plane, and I just cried, man. I cried the whole way.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jasper<\/span> Nathaniel is a Brooklyn-based writer and reporter. He covers Israel\u2019s occupation of the West Bank and other political and cultural affairs on his Substack, <\/em>Infinite Jaz<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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