I’m an American Activist. Israeli Forces Shot Me at a Peaceful Protest in the West Bank

On Friday, Aug. 9, I was shot by an Israeli soldier during a peaceful demonstration in the West Bank village of Beita.

The weekly demonstrations there began in May 2021 in response to the establishment of a newly-formed settlement called Evyatar, which the Israeli government has since legalized, as they accelerate the annexation of Palestinian land. The Israeli army fired tear gas and live rounds, forcing a few dozen of us protesters to flee and seek shelter in a nearby olive grove. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

At first, I didn’t realize I had been shot. I thought I had been hit by a tear gas canister and was even able to keep running for a few moments. It was when I looked down and saw the raw mass of pulsing flesh that I understood a bullet had torn through my leg.

The Palestinians around me rushed me to a nearby pickup truck that waited on a dirt road about half a mile away, and then to an ambulance. En route to the Rafidia hospital in Nablus, we were stopped three times by Israeli army vehicles and checkpoints, and arrived at the hospital about an hour later. Palestinians are nowhere near as lucky. In August 2023, for example, an ambulance carrying an unconscious 40-year-old stroke victim was denied entry in East Jerusalem, resulting in his death. In June this year, the Israeli military even strapped an injured Palestinian man to the front of an Israeli military vehicle.

The bullet that struck me did not hit anything vital. But just down the hall, a 13-year-old boy named Marwan was recovering from a gunshot wound by Israeli fire that same day. The bullet sliced into his bone as he was playing soccer with his friends. When I hobbled down the hall to visit him, his family told me that his injury was nothing compared to what was happening to people in Gaza.

The next day, four people, including children, from Beit Furik, east of Nablus, were admitted to the same hospital I was in. Three had been shot in the leg, and one in the arm. That day nearly 100 people were killed in Gaza when a school and mosque were hit by an Israeli airstrike during morning prayers.

I came to the West Bank with Defend Palestine to provide nonviolent civil protection—a well-known form of peacekeeping—for Palestinian farmers and families. Such efforts are made necessary by rapidly-escalating settler and military violence; violence that only ever seems to garner condemnation and individualized sanctions by the Biden-Harris administration, and never a rethink of the U.S.-Israel security relationship.

Read More: It’s Time to Rethink the U.S.-Israel ‘Special Relationship’

The Israeli army called my shooting an “accident,” claiming the soldiers fired live rounds into the air. (I had previously used an alias, Amado Sison, but have decided to go public with my real name.) The truth is they fired straight at me. The bullet entered through the back of my thigh and out the front. It’s a trajectory that would be impossible for a bullet falling from the sky. The State Department has said they are “aware of the incident,” and the U.S. Embassy has offered me accompaniment to file a report with the Israeli police. But I declined the offer because I believe such reporting whitewashes the systemic impunity Israel wields. The data bears this out.

Earlier this year, President Joe Biden said that “if you harm an American, we will respond.” Yet the Biden Administration has not even condemned my attack. The same was true when two weeks prior Americans were bludgeoned by Israeli settlers. And when a Palestinian American teen was shot and killed in the West Bank in January. And when a Palestinian American boy was shot and falsely imprisoned by Israeli forces last December.

A week ago, meters from where I was shot, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old American activist, was killed at the same weekly protest in Beita. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called her killing “unprovoked and unjustified” after the Israeli military said she was “highly likely” hit by IDF stray fire. Biden and Harris both faced criticism in the days after her death for failing to call Eygi’s family, who say they are “deeply offended by the suggestion” that her killing was “unintentional.” They have called for an independent U.S. investigation. None have been announced.

Had the Biden Administration taken my shooting seriously, Ayşenur might still be with us today.

The U.S. enables such needless violence with its blank-check support for Israel and steady supply of arms. On the same day I was shot, for example, the State Department cleared military aid for Netzah Yehuda, an ultra-Orthodox battalion accused of gross human rights violations against Palestinians.

The U.S. and other countries have imposed sanctions on around a dozen extremist settlers and a handful of groups but they have had minimal impact. For these reasons, I echo activists and most Americans in demanding our government do better. It is not radical to ask that we follow the rule of law. The Leahy Laws and the Foreign Assistance Act very clearly prohibit the provision of military weapons and assistance to countries that have committed human rights violations, as does Biden’s own National Security Memoranda. It is time that the U.S.—which provides billions in arms to Israel each year—imposes an arms embargo until Tel Aviv complies fully with the International Court of Justice’s landmark July ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal.

I still have hope for a world where people like me do not have to put ourselves in harm’s way to stand against the brutalization of Palestinians, so that they can live with freedom and dignity in the West Bank, Gaza, and beyond.