This commentary is by Mary Dingee Fillmore of Burlington, a member of the Peace & Justice Center and author of an award-winning historical novel, “An Address in Amsterdam.”
Vermont doesn’t usually make international news, especially not for the shooting of three students of Palestinian origin by a guy wielding a handgun from his front porch.
Vermonters like to believe that we live in the most livable state in the union, and in many ways we do. Vermont is small, verdant and has far more villages than suburbs. Our population is under 800,000. We still have town meetings, and they matter.
Yet our feeling of being exceptional has eroded a lot lately. It’s hotter than ever. Lake Champlain hardly freezes across any more. We’ve suffered from hurricanes and floods. Our homicide rate has gone up. Black Lives Matter has rightly taken the police and others to task. The opiate situation is dire: Who would have thought there would be enough discarded needles in our “big city” of Burlington to pose a health risk?
None of these, or the many other situations which could be cited, prepared me for the news that confronted me as I spent Thanksgiving weekend in Boston. The first sign was a neighbor’s email saying there was an active shooter less than a mile from where we live now, and that the police were telling everyone to stay inside with doors locked. We don’t expect that in Burlington any more than people in Lewiston did a few weeks ago. But we know guns are everywhere, and the law is weak. (The accused shooter reportedly bought his firearms legally.)
The three young men who were shot are poster children: college students, one of them studying to be a doctor, all graduates of a Quaker school in Ramallah. They are Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Hisham Awartani. Two are U.S. citizens, the other a permanent resident. The photograph they took shortly before the shooting shows their open, young faces and the affection they have for each other.
And yet, to the shooter, only one thing seems to have counted: according to police affidavits, they were speaking a mix of Arabic and English, and two were wearing their keffiyeh scarves.
One moment, the three were walking down a picture-perfect New England street, with prosperous century homes on either side. They had just celebrated Thanksgiving with an uncle, that quintessential but contradictory American holiday. They had returned from the most innocuous possible event, a birthday party for eight-year-old twins. How could they be more innocent? Then, with no warning, the alleged shooter approached them without a word, and the shooting began. All three were hospitalized; Awartani may never walk again.
As someone who has researched the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and its devastating consequences, the level of hate that is pouring out of both Israel and Palestine now terrifies me. I find myself horrified by the violence on both sides. On the one hand, of course I want to support my Jewish friends of many persuasions, but I find the actions of the current Israeli government appalling (as do many of them). On the other hand, I want to support my usual progressive allies, but their pro-Palestinian positions sometimes border on antisemitism and question the existence of the state of Israel. The situation is so endlessly complex, as Thomas Friedman pointed out in the NYT “The Rescuers.”
Because my sentiments are so divided, I can’t believe in anything but peace, and only a miracle will produce it. Both sides are behaving in a way humans only behave when we believe our survival is at stake. The incessant and wide-ranging cruelty, the massacre of children in particular — the horrors seem endless.
I did not realize that the poison was deep enough, toxic enough and widespread enough to reach from Gaza to a mile from my home in Burlington, Vermont. Violence against Arab Americans and Jews is rising since the Oct. 7 attacks, but hate crimes of all kinds have been rising for years. We must remember that race and ethnicity are still the biggest category by far. Our public figures and media (social and otherwise) have a great deal to answer for in creating the atmosphere where people feel justified in, even compelled to, commit hate crimes.
The white supremacist menace is surging. If it’s in progressive Burlington, it’s everywhere. Just as there is no escape from tempests and the legacies of slavery, hatred and dictatorship can capture us just as easily in Vermont as anywhere. There is no protection, if there ever was. The good news is that we can get to work now, right where we are, in Vermont or elsewhere — even if securing peace in our own divided country feels just as impossible as in Israel/Palestine. It is up to us to make the miracle, to invent ways to create unity. It has been done, and in our time: Liberia and South Africa come to mind. They too had to start small, and to persist for decades.
So can we, in this beautiful place where the snow should already cover the ground, and where everyone should be able to live in freedom and dignity.
