In Nasrallah Abu Siyam’s case, though, there’s another factor: he was a United States citizen. His bereaved father, Mohammed Abu Siyam, told the New York Times his son had lived for most of his life in the West Bank, “helping him tend to his livestock and cultivate his olive trees,” but Nasrallah was born in Philadelphia. He still has family living there, and he had every right to vote in U.S. elections, if he chose to mail in a ballot. Somewhere in his effects, he probably had a blue passport with an eagle on it. Morally, of course, citizenship makes no difference. If he’d been born right there in Mukhmas, his life would be just as important, and his killing would be just as indefensible. But as an American, he also had elected officials sworn to represent him: Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator John Fetterman. He was their constituent, gunned down by foreign criminals. But Pennsylvania’s top elected leaders still can’t be bothered to say a word about it.
Other U.S. leaders have condemned Siyam’s murder. In a statement on February 23, Representative Rashida Tlaib called for “Justice for Nasrallah Abu Siyam,” saying that “the Israeli apartheid regime and its settler gangs have murdered yet another U.S. citizen in the West Bank, and our government does absolutely nothing.” She’s right about that: Siyam is actually the sixth Palestinian American murdered in the West Bank in the last two years, either by settlers or the IDF itself, and it hasn’t resulted in any serious action being taken against the settler movement. In a TV appearance on MSNOW, Representative Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia has also called for an “honest and open investigation” into his constituent’s killing, saying that “our own government needs to have the backs of its own citizens, regardless of where the killing takes place.” Representative Ro Khanna, too, is reportedly “outraged.”
Not so, apparently, for Shapiro and Fetterman. At the time of writing, if you scroll through Governor Shapiro’s press releases, you’ll find no mention of Nasrallah Abu Siyam, although Shapiro has announced an update to railway safety regulations and flags at half-staff for the death of Jesse Jackson. Likewise, you’ll search in vain for anything on Shapiro’s Twitter page about the killing, though he has tweeted about Olympic hockey and the trend of kids using AI friend simulators. It’s the same with Fetterman: nothing in his official press releases, and nothing on his social media, though he has time to go on Fox News and condemn Hasan Piker. Now, a delay of a few days would be understandable: as a public figure, you want to get all the facts before you comment on something like this. But it’s now been more than a week, and there’s been plenty of reporting on the case. Yet as far as Fetterman and Shapiro are concerned, the raid and the shooting might as well not have happened.
But it did happen, and whether they like it or not, Fetterman and Shapiro have a responsibility to address it. In fact, the single most basic responsibility any politician has is to protect the lives of their citizens, no matter where they go in the world. If a leader doesn’t do that, they are very literally useless. What kind of a message does it send, when the whole world sees that someone can gun down a Pennsylvanian in the course of violating international law, and neither Pennsylvania’s governor nor its most prominent senator will lift a finger to oppose the crime? By staying silent, they’re creating an expectation of impunity that will only endanger more Americans. Even Pete Hegseth understands this basic concept. When two U.S. soldiers were killed in Syria last December, he loudly announced that “if you target Americans—anywhere in the world—you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.” But it’s always been clear that this principle comes with an asterisk: “…unless you’re Israeli, and it’s a Palestinian American.” That’s no less true for Democrats like Shapiro and Fetterman.
At this point, John Fetterman being a total disgrace shouldn’t be surprising. Fetterman has been cheerleading Israeli war crimes for more than two years now, from the exploding pager attacks that killed and maimed Lebanese children to his loud applause during Benjamin Netanyahu’s addresses to Congress. Partly because of it, his approval ratings with the Democratic voters who elected him are now in the toilet, and he’s vulnerable to a primary challenge in 2028. But some people actually think Josh Shapiro could be a presidential contender. They keep saying so, in the various power rankings of 2028 hopefuls. But the case of Nasrallah Abu Siyam reveals the problem with that: he’s ghastly on Palestine, the defining foreign policy issue of our time.
As Seraj Assi wrote for Jacobin in 2024, Shapiro has a long track record on this issue, and it’s all bad. In college, he wrote opinion pieces about the Oslo Accords that were simply racist, saying that Palestinians as an ethnic group were “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he went out of his way to support West Bank settlements exactly like the one Siyam was killed over, invoking anti-BDS laws to punish Ben and Jerry’s for refusing to sell ice cream there. As governor, he compared anti-genocide protesters who wear keffiyehs and other head coverings to the hoods of the KKK—though he also says you mustn’t compare ICE to Nazis. It’s obvious that he has an ideological commitment to Israel that clouds his judgment on the most basic moral and political issues, up to and including war crimes. So his shameful abandonment of his own dead constituent isn’t an aberration; it’s exactly who he is, and what he stands for.
Shapiro might make a statement, eventually, if enough people pressure him into it. Right now, Jasper Nathaniel is trying to get as many people as possible to call Shapiro’s office and yell at him, and it may work. I can pretty much predict which platitudes he’d use: that political violence anywhere is unacceptable, that it’s all a great tragedy, that his thoughts and prayers are with Siyam’s family. Politicians just swap out the names in these statements, like Mad Libs. But it would all be hollow and meaningless, because he didn’t actually care when it counted, the way Rashida Tlaib or even Brendan Boyle did. And that callous disregard for life where Israel is concerned, more than his stupid Obama impression or the lingering questions about the alleged suicide of Ellen Greenberg, are why it’s so alarming to see Shapiro discussed as a potential president.
As long-time readers of Current Affairs will know, I’m from Pennsylvania myself. It really is a great state, full of extraordinary people. But politicians like John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro give us all a bad name. In their cowardice, they’ve put the word out: you can kill their constituents and get away with it, provided the victim is a Palestinian American and you’ve got a blue star on your flag. Compared to keeping Israeli colonists and their allies happy, Nasrallah Abu Siyam’s life means nothing to them. Every American should keep that in mind, the next time they open their mouths.
