A West Bank Family on the Verge of Annexation

The far right in Israel has long dreamed of settling all of the West Bank, and Gaza, too—annexing the territories to create the land they refer to as Greater Israel. The Trump Administration might not object: Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to the United Nations, has agreed that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. “I think Israel is just more emboldened with Trump in office,” says Hisham Awartani, who lives in Ramallah and is now attending Brown University. The reporter Suzanne Gaber has been covering Awartani and his family since he was left paralyzed by a shooting in Burlington, Vermont. (Two other Palestinian students, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were also shot and injured.) Gaber visited the Awartanis recently in Ramallah to find out how people in the West Bank are thinking about annexation. But, rather than a future event that might happen, the Awartanis describe annexation as a process already well underway. “I’m twenty-one years old,” Hisham tells Gaber. “ In the period of time that I’ve been alive, it’s been a slow push. It’s, like, I’m the frog in the boiling pot.”