Eyad Hallaq Image by Twitter

Contributing Columnist Muhammad Shehada June 2, 2020

Imagine that every morning, as you help your children children get ready for school, you worry whether or not they’ll make it home alive. For us Palestinians, there’s no need to imagine. When I was a child, my mother taught me two prayers to recite every time I stepped outside. One was a protective prayer that I would be safely in God’s hands. The other was a prayer to blind the Israeli soldiers, warplanes, and tanks to my existence.

Muhammad Shehada | artist: Noah Lubin

Iyad Hallaq’s mother also prayed. And she did more than that. Her son, who was 32, was on the low-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He had trouble communicating, according to family members. So Iyad’s mother armed her son with a cellphone to carry wherever he went. She armed him with a face mask and gloves to stay safe from the coronavirus. She armed him with an ID card that explained his disability, hoping it would force people to be compassionate when they encountered him.

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None of it protected her only son from the bullets of the Israeli police officer who shot him dead behind a dumpster where Iyad had run to hide. Israel’s defense minister later apologized, and the officer said he thought Iyad was a terrorist because he was wearing gloves.

“My son is a murderer? A knife scares him!” his mother told reporters.

“He didn’t even know there was such a thing as Jews and Arabs in this country,” Iyad’s cousin told Haaretz. “He didn’t absorb things; he didn’t have the knowledge that there even was another side. He didn’t know what a soldier is or what a weapon is.”

What a blessing it must have been to see no “us” and “them,” no occupier and occupied, no Jew vs. Arab.

But this innocence endangered him. Iyad didn’t know that every Palestinian is guilty until proven innocent when it comes to Israeli law enforcement, that “every Palestinian is a terrorist until proven otherwise,” as Israeli Parliament member Ofer Cassis put it. Instead of accepting that he was a danger just for existing, he got confused at the sight of strangers outside his special needs school. So he panicked, turned and ran. And he paid with his life.

A counselor at Iyad’s school named Warda told reporters that she screamed at the policemen, “He’s disabled! He’s disabled!” as they chased him. She begged them to check his ID and see that he was autistic. It didn’t help.

The footage of Iyad’s father at the funeral is devastating. He just looks broken — completely broken.

“We are really sorry about the incident in which Iyad Halak was shot to death and we share in the family’s grief,” said Benny Gantz, who recently ran to replace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then capitulated and joined his coalition as defense minister. “I am sure this subject will be investigated swiftly and conclusions will be reached.”

We don’t want your grief, Mr. Gantz. We want meaningful change. We want Palestinian children to be able to leave the house without fear of being killed. We want Palestinian parents to be able to send their children to school knowing they will come home.

And forgive us if we are less sure that justice will prevail. The memory of Elor Azaria, an IDF soldier who shot and killed an incapacitated Palestinian attacker in the head as he lay on the ground, already shot and motionless, haunts us. Azaria spent just nine months in prison, during which time he became a widely-praised celebrity for his brutal crime.

I want you to imagine Iyad was your special needs child. Imagine that in addition to the fears related to his disability, you had to live with the constant fear that something would happen to him. You would do your best, teach him to use the phone, make sure he has it. You would also cover his face with a mask and his hands with gloves because there’s a pandemic around and you want him to be safe.

Now imagine he is shot in the street like an animal when he runs from a stranger out of fear.

Iyad’s parents will spend the rest of their lives in the Wadi Joz neighborhood of Jerusalem where they raised and lost their son. They will walk the streets and pass the school where he studied. And they will know till their dying days that their autistic son died alone and terrified.

Muhammad Shehada is a contributing columnist for the Forward from Gaza. His work has also appeared in Haaretz and Vice. Find him on Twitter @muhammadshehad2.

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