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In one year, Palestinian-American Tennesseans have lost hundreds of family members • Tennessee Lookout [1]
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Date: 2024-10-14
Few Americans can relate to the idea of turning on the TV, flipping to the news, and watching as an ambulance thousands of miles away carts off the body of a family member killed in an airstrike, but that’s been the experience of Palestinian-Americans for the past year.
“Our communities have been devastated,” says Sabina Mohyuddin, a Nashville resident and Executive Director at the American Muslim Advisory Council. “Thousands of Arab-American and Muslim-Americans live in Tennessee. Everyone knows someone who’s lost Gazan, West Bank, or Lebanese family members to bombs, bullets and untreated injuries and diseases.”
Mohyuddin isn’t exaggerating. Hossam Bahour, a civil engineer with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, and his wife Eman are Palestinian-Americans who’ve called Nashville home for over 30 years. So far, they’ve lost 242 members of their extended family. They were the ones who, in a moment of shock and grief, suddenly recognized their cousin’s 14-year-old daughter, dead in an ambulance on the nightly news.
“Most have been glued to their phones throughout the conflict,” Bahour said at a Palestine 101 seminar held at the Islamic Center of Nashville. “We were, too, at first. But now we dread when they ring. Because we know it means another family member was killed.”
Amira Ayesh-Akins, whose father is Palestinian, has similar stories. So far, she’s lost over 40 members of her family in Gaza. A student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Ayesh-Akins co-founded 615 for Palestine, a traveling exhibit designed to educate Tennesseans on Palestinian history and culture. To Ayesh-Akins, orchestrating the traveling exhibit has become an essential way of preserving Palestinian culture and identity.
“This work I’ve been blessed to do has become deeply ingrained in who I am and the lenses through which I see this world,” Ayesh-Akins said.
The Israel-Palestine conflict did not begin on October 7, and some Tennesseans can speak directly to that. Karim AL-Saied, a Nashville musician, has stories of persecution going back to Israel’s founding. AL-Saied’s grandparents were displaced from Palestine during the 1948 Nakba, the Zionist-led ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.
Seventy-six years later, AL-Saied still has family in Gaza. “Five of my family members were killed in the last year,” he said. “A 16-year-old girl was featured on the news because she was wounded in an airstrike, and her father had to amputate her leg with a kitchen knife because Israel had destroyed nearby medical facilities. That girl was my cousin.”
Like Ayesh-Akins, AL-Saied does what he can to preserve his Palestinian culture. His song, “5am in Gaza,” went viral across the U.S. and was played in Gaza refugee camps.
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has operated via its Dahiya Doctrine, a war strategy that calls for the destruction of civilian centers and allows for massive civilian casualties in each airstrike if even just one Hamas militant can potentially be killed. The result? Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas operatives broke out of the Gaza Strip, killed hundreds of Israelis, and took hostages, the IDF has carried out an indiscriminate bombing and ground campaign that’s killed over 42,000 Palestinians, including nearly 16,500 children.
“Our community members are losing their relatives because Israel drops massive bombs that western powers previously abstained from using on civilian centers,” added Mohyuddin. She’s referring to U.S.-made 2000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs that can kill and maim people within a quarter mile of the detonation site.
They are just one munition type in an arsenal of an average of 500 bombs per day the IDF has dropped on 2.3 million Palestinians living in a tiny enclave one-third the size of Nashville. “And because Israel targets hospitals, clinics, water, power, internet, and other civilian infrastructure while simultaneously hampering the flow of humanitarian aid, thousands are dying from treatable wounds and diseases,” Mohyuddin said.
Most have been glued to their phones throughout the conflict. We were, too, at first. But now we dread when they ring. Because we know it means another family member was killed. – Hossam Bahour
Coalitions of Arab, Jewish, Christian, and secular Americans have called for a ceasefire, but Mohyuddin’s community has gotten little support from decision-makers in government. Mohyuddin said many Palestinian-Americans feel as though they are in a second wave of Jim Crow dehumanization, as their pain is diminished by political leadership.
“Kill them all,” Tennessean U.S. Congressman Andrew Ogles said on February 15 when a pro-Palestinian activist confronted him by saying, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies. That’s my taxpayer dollars going to bomb those kids.”
“We’ve felt invisible throughout this war,” says Laila Elsherif, a Memphis-based professor.. “Our taxes should pay for comprehensive care for Americans. Instead, politicians send our tax dollars to a foreign government that’s being investigated for war crimes and genocide.”
“Our voices are ignored here in the States, our relatives overseas are killed, and our ancestral homes are being destroyed. Some of my family members stayed behind to care for elderly Gazans who could not evacuate. My father’s house and our entire hometown of Rimal was destroyed.”
The trials of the past year have been unprecedented, but Mohyuddin said she’s even more concerned about the future. In a late-September covert operation, Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies, and cell phones in Lebanon, indiscriminately killing hundreds and wounding thousands.
Mohyuddin said the event has community members worried Israel will spread the conflict beyond Palestine, provoking a broader regional war and perhaps drawing the U.S. and Iran into the conflict. “We already have Lebanese-American families in Tennessee who’ve lost family members during Israel’s recent airstrikes on Lebanon,” Mohyuddin added.
It is a war crime to booby-trap devices that can harm civilians and noncombatants. For Mohyuddin and the Tennesseans she represents, the fact that U.S. leaders won’t levy the denunciation against Israel is a big part of the problem, as it speaks to the broader dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims here and abroad.
“We’re made to feel like second-class citizens,” Mohyuddin said
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