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'May His Memory Be a Revolution': Palestinian Peace Activist Killed by Israeli Settler After Being Deported by Trump
Awda Hathaleen was described as "a teacher and an activist who struggled courageously for his people."
Jul 28, 2025
A Palestinian peace activist has been fatally shot by a notorious Israeli settler who was once the subject of sanctions that were lifted this year by U.S. President Donald Trump.
In June, Awda Hathaleen—an English teacher, activist, and former soccer player from the occupied West Bank—was detained alongside his cousin Eid at the airport in San Francisco, where they were about to embark on an interfaith speaking tour organized by the California-based Kehilla Community Synagogue.
Ben Linder, co-chair of the Silicon Valley chapter of J Street and the organizer of Eid and Awda's first scheduled speaking engagement told Middle East Eye that he'd known the two cousins for 10 years, describing them as "true nonviolent peace activists" who "came here on an interfaith peace-promoting mission."
Without explanation from U.S. authorities, they were deported and returned to their village of Umm al-Khair in the South Hebron Hills.
On Monday afternoon, the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) reported on social media that Awda Hathaleen had been killed after Israeli settlers attacked his village and that a relative of his was also severely injured:
Activists working with Awda report that Israeli settlers invaded Umm al-Kheir with a bulldozer to destroy what little remains of the Palestinian village. As Awda and his family tried to defend their homes and land, a settler opened fire—both aiming directly and shooting indiscriminately. Awda was shot in the chest and later died from his injuries after being taken by an Israeli ambulance. His death was the result of brutal settler violence.
Later, when Awda's relative Ahmad al-Hathaleen tried to block the bulldozer, the settler driving it ran him over. Ahmad is now being treated in a nearby hospital.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz later confirmed these events, adding:
An eyewitness reported that the entry of Israeli settlers into Palestinian private lands, riding an excavator, caused a commotion, and the vehicle subsequently struck a resident named Ahmad Hathaleen. "People lost their minds, and the children threw stones," he said.
A friend and fellow activist, Mohammad Hureini, posted the video of the attack online. The settler who fired the gun has been identified by Haaretz as Yinon Levi, who has previously been hit—along with other settlers—with sanctions by former U.S. President Joe Biden's administration and other governments over his past harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
As the Biden State Department wrote at the time:
Levi consistently leads a group of settlers who attack Palestinians, set fire to their fields, destroy their property, and threaten them with further harm if they do not leave their homes.
The sanctions were later lifted by U.S. President Donald Trump. However, they'd already been rendered virtually ineffective after the intervention of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has expressed a desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlements.
Brooklyn-based journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who has covered other cases of settler violence for Zeteo described Levi as "a known terrorist who's been protected by the Israeli government for years," adding that, "One of the only good things Biden did for Palestine was sanction him."
Violence by Israeli settlers in the illegally-occupied West Bank has risen sharply since the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas and the subsequent 21-month military campaign by Israel in Gaza.
Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by settlers during that time. More than 6,400 have been forcibly displaced following the demolition of their homes by Israel, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The killing of Awda Hathaleen—who had a wife and three young children—has been met with outpourings of grief and anger from his fellow peace activists in the United States, Israel, and Palestine.
Issa Amro, the Hebron-based co-founder of the grassroots group Youth Against Settlements, described Awda as a "beloved hero."
"Awda stood with dignity and courage against oppression," Amro said. "His loss is a deep wound to our hearts and our struggle for justice."
Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who last year directed the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, described Awda Hathaleen as "a remarkable activist," and thanked him for helping his team shoot the film in Masafer Yatta.
"To know Awda Hathaleen is to love him," said the post from JVP announcing his death. "Awda has always been a pillar amongst his family, his village and the wider international community of activists who had the pleasure to meet Awda."
Israeli-American peace activist Mattan Berner-Kadish wrote: "May his memory be a revolution. I will remember him smiling, laughing, dreaming of a better future for his children. We must make it so."
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The Genocide Denial of the 'Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace' Crowd
The Israeli government has displayed clear and unequivocal genocidal intent. Continuing to arm Israel with U.S. weapons means full complicity in what they do with them.
Mar 19, 2025
Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.
In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”
Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide.
Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent—underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”
Those statements “by people with command authority—state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers—and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”
Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza—using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians—has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.
On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”
It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.
A growing number of congressional Democrats—still way too few—have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.
This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.
For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.
This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.
That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.
While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”
J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.
It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.
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Why Are Liberal Zionists Cheering as Harris Echoes Biden on Gaza?
J Street is eager to define the limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli government policies from the Democratic Party establishment—setting aside human rights as secondary to the mantra of Israel’s “right to exist.”
Aug 27, 2024
Hours after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, the president of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street took a victory lap in an effusive email to supporters. “Wow,” Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote. “What a week! As J Streeters leave the Democratic National Convention fired up and ready to go, it’s clear we’re having a greater impact than ever.” He added that “the vice president’s remarks on Israel-Palestine were perhaps the clearest articulation of J Street’s values from a presidential nominee.”
But what are those “values” and how do they apply to what’s happening in Gaza?
Discussing Gaza, Harris’ DNC acceptance speech began with the anodyne evocation of “working on a cease-fire” of Gaza’s pounding that America is funding: “President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a cease-fire deal done.”
Style aside, what Harris articulated about Israel-Palestine in her speech was no different than what President Joe Biden has been saying and doing since last fall while enabling the slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
Then came the “ironclad” pledge of eternal support for Israel, justified in this case by the October 7 Hamas raid: “And let me be clear. And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself…”
Key to Harris’ brief discussion of Gaza in her acceptance speech was the customary refusal in American political discourse to attribute the slaughter to the U.S. or its Israeli partner. Instead, there was a reference to “what has happened”—evoking victims without victimizers—in this way: “What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
After pledging unconditional support for Israel’s military, Harris expressed sorrow—as if the horrors are being inflicted by a force of nature, not a military force that the U.S. government supplies with fundamental and essential support.
Style aside, what Harris articulated about Israel-Palestine in her speech was no different than what President Joe Biden has been saying and doing since last fall while enabling the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The vehement enthusiasm from J Street, perhaps the USA’s leading liberal Zionist organization, is illuminating.
Harris carefully omitted any mention of the only way that the U.S. government could actually put an end to the suffering in Gaza that she called “heartbreaking”—an arms embargo to stop the huge shipments from the United States that provide the Israeli military with the weapons and ammunition it’s using to continue to massacre Palestinian people of all ages.
The Harris speech was consistent with the national party’s new platform—which “J Street helped shape,” Ben-Ami proudly wrote. But full affirmation of Biden’s policies toward the Gaza carnage should not have been any cause for celebration.
“As a Palestinian American who is an elected Democrat to the Colorado State House, it has been disheartening to witness Biden facilitate and abet Israel’s brutal war on Gaza with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons,” Iman Jodeh wrote during the convention. Harris “has said that an arms embargo—which human rights organizations have been calling for—is off the table, but that she supports a cease-fire.” However, “to truly reach a cease-fire and prevent a regional conflict, the U.S. must halt the arms shipments that fuel the conflict.”
The British medical journal The Lancet estimates that well over 100,000 residents of Gaza will die because of the Israeli bombardment and siege since October 7, as hunger and disease are endemic, and housing and infrastructure have been systematically destroyed. Polio is appearing in the devastated population of more than 2 million. Israel’s assault on the enclave, populated substantially by refugees from the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, remains unchecked—and is literally made possible by the continuous arms pipeline from the United States.
For J Street’s leadership, the current U.S. policy hits the spot. “Could not be prouder of VP Harris for her remarks on Israel/Palestine—and of Democrats’ reaction,” Ben-Ami tweeted after the convention adjourned. “This is what it means in 2024 to be pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy.”
At the convention, the parents of a hostage held by Hamas since October 7 spoke. But no Palestinian American was allowed to say anything. In effect, the convention’s podium was a place of apartheid, mirroring the reality of Israel’s apartheid system. (In his email, Ben-Ami wistfully noted the missed opportunity: “Hosting the first ever Palestinian speaker at a national convention would have been a powerful way to underscore the shared goal of an immediate cease-fire and hostage deal, and the compassion the party feels for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”)
J Street is determined to help ensure that liberal Zionism does not question the “ironclad” U.S. commitment to Jewish nationalist control in Palestine, as discussed in articles I co-wrote that were published 10 years ago and last spring. The organization is eager to define the limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli government policies from the Democratic Party establishment—setting aside human rights considerations as secondary to the mantra of Israel’s “right to exist.” (Whether apartheid South Africa had a “right to exist” is not a topic open for discussion.)
J Street represents untenable liberal American Zionism that clings to the fantasy of a democratic and humane “Jewish state.” Washington office-holders pledge continued weapons resupply for that fantasy Jewish state—with no connection to the actual Israel that is now engaged in remorseless genocide.
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