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Hisham Awartani: I don't like seeing my name plastered everywhere but I condone it. It sucks to say but people here find it hard to empathize with people in Gaza than they would me.

Micah Loewinger: When a Palestinian college student was shot in Vermont, he became a media focal point. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. When it comes to coverage of Israel and Palestine, cries of media bias come from all sides but what do the data say?

Mona Chalabi: The issue here is disproportionality. Israelis were far more likely to be described as murdered, massacred, slaughtered than Palestinians.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, Mehdi Hasan reflects on what it was like covering the region from the Anchors chair.

Mehdi Hasan: My position is, this is what I want to do. To hell with everyone else. Is the result of that, that my shows seem to be a corrective to other shows in the media landscape? Maybe.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger. On Monday, President Joe Biden took questions about Gaza while licking an ice cream cone with late-night host, Seth Meyers.

President Joe Biden: My National security advisor tells me that we're close. We're close. We're not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we'll have a cease-fire.

Seth Meyers: Shame on me, by the way, for forgetting the first rule of comedy. When the Middle East comes up, put your ice cream cone down.

Micah Loewinger: Then on Thursday.

Female Speaker 1: Witnesses say Civilians were gathering around newly arrived aid trucks when gunfire erupted, triggering panic as a result, and many were run over by aid trucks and killed.

Male Speaker 1: We're hearing starkly different accounts, Chris, of what happened. Palestinian authorities called the Killing a massacre. Now, the Israeli military said that Palestinians were looting the aid and that Palestinians were killed from being run over by those trucks after those aid trucks tried to escape the crowd.

Micah Loewinger: The Gaza Health ministry's latest death toll for the war, over 30,000, and in the US, protests calling for a ceasefire have escalated.

Female Speaker 2: An active duty US Air Force member set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington protesting US support for Israel.

Male Speaker 2: In a video, 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell is heard saying, "I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest."

Female Speaker 2: He later died in the hospital.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, student protests are still making headlines.

Male Speaker 3: An event violently disrupted by protesters on the UC, Berkeley campus.

Male Speaker 4: The group of 200 protestors surrounded Zellerbach Hall where a student group was going to hear from a notable pro-Israel advocate. The protestors broke doors and windows to get into the event causing people inside to really fear for their safety.

Protesters: Free Palestine. Free, Free Palestine.

Male Speaker 5: Stanford University is evicting students who have been holding a sit-in protest on campus for the last 112 days. The students are protesting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and have refused to leave the white plaza.

Micah Loewinger: During protests at Brown University, the name of Palestinian American student Hisham Awartani is often invoked.

Protesters: Brown Corporation is a scam, no others like Hisham.

Micah Loewinger: Last November, Hisham was walking down the street in Vermont along with two of his friends, Kenan Abdul Hamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmed. All three men grew up in the West Bank and came to the US for school. They were in Burlington for their Thanksgiving break.

Hisham Awartani: We walked downtown. We watched TV shows together. We messed around. It was fun. Young men.

Suzanne Gaber: The same thing you would've done at home in Palestine?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. Palestine has more to do but we managed to have fun.

Micah Loewinger: Our colleague, Suzanne Gaber, a producer with Notes from America, met with Hisham to learn about everything that followed.

Hisham Awartani: We were walking along the sidewalk and the guy comes down from the balcony and pulls out a gun and before I know what's happening, it's like I'm on the floor. I didn't know that I had been hit until I saw blood on my phone.

Female Speaker 3: Tonight, a gunman remains at large following the shooting of three college students in Burlington, Vermont, all of them of Palestinian descent. It happened--

Hisham Awartani: I ended up calling 911. I didn't know if I was going to survive. Didn't know if my friends were alive. The main thing I was afraid is, how much blood am I losing. Whatever. Is this how it ends? It was never outside of the realm of possibility for that to happen to me but I always expected it to be in the West Bank and never in Burlington.

Suzanne Gaber: When do you realize that you're also fairly injured?

Hisham Awartani: When the EMT people come. They tell me to move my legs and I realize that I couldn't.

[audio playing]

Suzanne Gaber: Hey.

Male Speaker 1: Hello.

Suzanne Gaber: I was just checking in to see Hisham Awartani.

Elevator: Sixth floor.

Female Speaker 1: Is this Suzanne?

Female Speaker 2: Hi, [crosstalk].

Female Speaker 3: Hi, I wanted to go with--

[end of audio]

Suzanne Gaber: I've been following Hisham's story for a while. From his very first statement just days after the attack. Hisham and his mom, Elizabeth have used their newfound platform to advocate for a focus on Palestinians in Gaza. It was a decision they came to very quickly. In part because Hisham has been able to process his own injuries at a speed that seems surprising for someone so young.

Hisham Awartani: It's I guess just growing up in the West Bank and growing up under occupation, just growing up Palestinian in general it's like you learn fairly quickly that life is absurd and you just have to suck it up and keep moving forward.

Elizabeth: My children are from-- we're from a background where we have resources in Palestine.

Suzanne Gaber: Elizabeth, who's Irish American, moved to Palestine right out of college. She met her husband there while in study abroad her junior year. She's an international development worker who has worked with refugees. She's lived in the West Bank for 25 years and she's raising three kids there.

Elizabeth: They go to a good school. They have education. They have opportunities to travel. I didn't think that they would be on the front lines. I didn't think that they would be targeted because I thought that they would be somewhere safe. I think one of the things that Hisham has found and the boys have found is that I think they're less traumatized. No, they have a different type of trauma obviously, but existentially, they're not shaken as they would've been if they had been someone who didn't grow up with this. He got shot in his knee with a rubber bullet and came home that night and we never knew anything had happened.

Suzanne Gaber: When did he get shot in the knee with a rubber bullet?

Elizabeth: About two years ago and we just found out.

Suzanne Gaber: You just found out?

Elizabeth: Yes. His friend, I don't know how this came up and his friend said, "Oh, yes, and of course, when he got shot in the knee." I'm like, "What?" He'd gone out to a protest and an Israeli military sniper had aimed his knee and I think at that protest, one of his friends was also shot in the leg with a live bullet. We were very lucky. I had no idea.

Suzanne Gaber: Did you intentionally keep that from her?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. She didn't have to know about that. I was fine in the end. It was a rubber bullet.

Suzanne Gaber: Those still hurt.

Hisham Awartani: It did hurt but I was fine.

Suzanne Gaber: What are you anticipating going back to school is like?

Hisham Awartani: Who knows? I'll try to keep a low profile but it's not that easy in a wheelchair.

Suzanne Gaber: It's also not that easy when you're now like a national news story.

Hisham Awartani: Yes. Especially on Brown campus.

Suzanne Gaber: Especially on Brown campus. You're right.

[crowd chanting]

Male Speaker 6: Tonight, Brown University students grappling with the shooting of one of their own.

Suzanne Gaber: Almost immediately after Hisham was shot, he'd become a symbol of Palestinian oppression and resistance for many at Brown University where he goes to school, which not everyone on the Providence Rhode Island campus had taken kindly to, including university president, Christina Paxson.

Christina Paxson: This is how you want to honor your friend?

Student: Palestinian students told you not divesting made them unsafe. What are you doing? Not divesting. Hisham was short because of your complicity.

Hisham Awartani: I don't like seeing my name plastered everywhere but I condone it in as much as using my name and my experience can elicit more of an emotional reaction and can get the point home better than just-- like it sucks to say, but people here find it hard to empathize with people in Gaza than they would me. Palestinians in Palestine the way that people excuse it is that they're always assumed to be a terrorist. Here it's just-- It's absurd to use the same logic that the Israeli army uses on me because I'm literally in Burlington, Vermont. You can't say he was trying to stab someone. You can't say he was part of a terrorist organization even though in so many of the cases, they'd shoot people unarmed or walking away or doing nothing.

Suzanne Gaber: We head out from the rehab facility to drive straight down to Brown and when we get to Providence, I meet Hisham at a cafe just around the corner from where his new dorm will be. How was the drive for you?

Hisham Awartani: It was good. First time being in a seat.

Suzanne Gaber: For the first time, I see a more open version of him. Genuinely, how are you feeling being here? I feel like this must be kind of, I wouldn't be able to answer.

Hisham Awartani: Yes, I take it one step at a time.

Suzanne Gaber: You might not be able to tell from his deadpan delivery, but Hisham loves making walking jokes now that he's in a wheelchair. As we sipped our coffee, we talked a lot about what his new life on campus would be. The attack left him with five classes with homework or exams that he needs to take before passing. His connection to Palestine and standing up for his community is central.

Hisham Awartani: The main thing I've been focusing on is the idea of the dehumanization of Palestinians. How I feel like in my case, it was one of the few cases where I was able to escape that. If I was shot in the West Bank, no one would care. Here is another American citizen being shot in the West Bank, and no one cared.

Suzanne Gaber: He's talking about Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, who had been killed in the West Bank while visiting family, just weeks before. Tawfic had grown up in Louisiana, but was just miles from Hisham's hometown of Ramallah when an IDF soldier fatally shot him.

Hisham Awartani: No, I remember looking up his name the first few days after he was killed, it was only Middle East Eye or Al Jazeera reporting on it. I remember there was an article. They go through three quarters of article of somebody talking about October 7th, and hostages, and Israeli army and their losses, and then like as an appendix, a small footnote was like, yes, they killed someone.

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Micah Loewinger: There were a flurry of stories about Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, the Louisiana teen killed in the West Bank, but Hisham is right, there's a ton more interest in his story. There's a feature about Hisham in The New York Times magazine this weekend, and a GoFundMe set up in his name that's raised over $1.5 million.

Hisham Awartani: In Gaza it's not over. I'm getting treatment, but if the same thing had happened to me there, I'd probably be carried around on a stretcher.

Suzanne Gaber: Is that a thing you've thought about a lot in this process?

Hisham Awartani: Yes. I'm very lucky.

Micah Loewinger: Hisham Awartani spoke to Suzanne Gaber for Notes from America, a show made at WNYC, our producing station. It's hosted by Kai Wright. You can listen to the show when it airs live every Sunday evening at 6:00 PM Eastern on stations across the country or on your podcast app of choice. Coming up is Media Bias in the Eye of the Beholder. This is On the Media.