The sun was beating down on my white shirt, and I finally decided that it was time to hop on a bus back to my apartment back in Jerusalem. I had been exploring a small Israeli town in the Gush Etzion region of the West Bank, but there was only so much that I could do before the heat got to me.
Crossing from Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem into East Jerusalem, and then heading down into Gush Etzion…I’m not sure that my identity ever changed just by crossing the borders. When I entered the West Bank, I remained just as American as I was before. Hopefully, if anything were to happen to me, I would be considered just as American as if I had died in, hmmm, say, the middle of Rome or on the Staten Island Ferry (God Forbid).
Only four days ago, an American Yeshiva student named Ezra Schwartz passed away after a terrorist attack in the same region of the West Bank I had visited. And it has taken these past four days for the White House to muster up a condemnation and to issue messages of condolence. Why? Does someone become less deserving of “personhood” or less “American” depending on which borders they enter or leave through?
It’s interesting to ponder. Clearly, I would hope that an American entering the West Bank during a Democratic administration in Washington would still be considered just as “American” as when they left the United States. But something tells me that most liberals in the U.S. wouldn’t think so.
I can imagine the amounts of people who want to get up on a soapbox and ask, “What was Ezra doing in the West Bank?” or explain that the U.S. has issued plenty of cautionary warnings against traveling in this highly contested region. Yes, I agree, the United States has issued warnings. But these warnings don’t justify the long four-day tarry for the President to condemn the terrorism-based death of an American citizen abroad. The existence of U.S.-issued warnings also doesn’t mean that Ezra’s death is any less of a tragedy.
In my opinion, Ezra’s life deserves to be celebrated, and his death deserves to be mourned. Obama’s comments, four days later, could have easily arrived four years later. The fact that this tragedy happened on the West Bank doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy, and it doesn’t make Ezra any less of an American who has died because of terrorism. The White House should be ashamed that it has let geography dictate the importance of an American life.
