On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, three Palestinian college students were shot while walking home from a birthday party in Burlington, Vermont. They had been speaking a mix of English and Arabic, and two of them wore a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf worn across the Middle East that’s become a symbol of Palestinian pride and political resistance. A 48-year-old white man was arrested and charged with three counts of attempted second-degree murder. He is being held without bail. “Although we do not yet have evidence to support a hate crime enhancement, I do want to be clear that there is no question, this was a hateful act,” Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George said after the arraignment, the Trace reports. The Vermont attack was not an isolated event. Since October 7, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been four gun-related bias incidents in the U.S. thought to be motivated by the Israel-Hamas war. On October 22, in Skokie, Illinois, a 39-year-old Chicago man fired shots into the air after being confronted by multiple people during dueling rallies for Israel and Palestine. Police presented the case to the State’s Attorney’s Office, but the man has a valid concealed carry license and prosecutors declined to bring charges.
On October 14, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Richard Kevin Blandy, 56, pointed a gun at a group of people at a rally for Palestine while hurling racial slurs. As he brandished his firearm, he reportedly said, “Is this what Hamas did?” He was charged with ethnic intimidation, terroristic threats, and simple assault by physical menace. These events come amid a surge in antisemitic and Islamophobic episodes across the U.S. since the Israel-Hamas conflict began on October 7. They follow a similar pattern to previous times in history, when war rages in the Middle East and washes up on America’s shores in the form of hate crimes and violence. Devorah Halberstam, a founding member of the New York City Police Department’s Hate Crime Review Panel, has been steadily sounding the alarm for decades about the prospect of international conflicts spilling over into the United States in the form of hate crimes and terrorism. Halberstam’s 16-year-old son, Ari, an Orthodox Jew, was killed in a 1994 mass shooting in New York City that was perpetrated in response to the Israel-Palestine conflicts.
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