Our Palestinian Casualties Are Always Your Footnotes

Omar Suleiman is a Palestinian-American imam, civil rights leader, and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. This is his second conversation with Lex Fridman: the first was about Islam; this one is about Gaza and Palestine. Asked what he felt in the days after October 7, he does not claim shock. One Israeli casualty, he says, routinely becomes hundreds of Palestinian casualties, a cycle he has watched for years: checkpoints, expanding settlements, aggression at Masjid Al-Aqsa, Palestinian death that barely registers, then rockets from Gaza, then Western coverage, then a wildly disproportionate Israeli response.

Fridman reads a statement Suleiman published on October 9. "Our Palestinian casualties are always your footnotes," it begins. Occupation's daily humiliation is ignored, he writes; so is the annihilation of entire families and the devastation of whatever scraps remain in Gaza. Anyone waking up to a sudden interest in the region should "dig a bit deeper than two weeks" and read past headlines that have been dehumanizing Palestinians for decades. The attack, he tells Fridman again, was predictable.

He pulls the clock back. Human Rights Watch's 2021 report *Threshold Crossed* called Israel an apartheid state; Amnesty International's 2022 report reached the same legal conclusion. Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead in 2022; once Israeli responsibility was established, he says, the United States did nothing, and her funeral was attacked. In 2023 came a plan for 13,000 settler units, the most extremist Israeli government he has seen, and more than 600 Palestinians already killed before October 7. American media, he argues, shows the American public something the rest of the world is not shown. The United States issues statements against settler violence while writing a $3 billion check and blocking accountability at the United Nations.

You cannot disconnect Gaza from Palestine, he says, or the West Bank, or Jerusalem, or the human story from the political one. Fridman has interviewed Mohammed El-Kurd; Suleiman asks what the world did when settlers walked into historic Palestinian homes. Palestinians, he argues, are erased in peace and in war: absent from the Abraham Accords that claim to settle their fate, and reduced in wartime to "Israel-Hamas," as if millions of people were not being removed from their land or tormented on it.

What are Palestinians in the diaspora feeling? Deep frustration, anger, sadness, Suleiman says. Every Palestinian now knows someone killed, is part of a story of displacement, or has a relative missing a limb or a loved one. Being away can hurt more, because you watch your people starved and slaughtered and cannot do anything, while the television around you justifies it. People are being killed over there, he says, because they look like him. He recently spoke to a doctor who had lost 75 relatives in Gaza and only wanted to get in and use his medical skills. He could not.

Suleiman is someone who usually rushes toward a crisis. Not being able to go to Gaza, he says, is extremely hard. If they have made Palestinians faceless, they cannot make those speaking for them voiceless. Casualties have been reduced to a number: hundreds a day, over 30,000 people, averaging 10,000 a month. Calling for a ceasefire has been recast as radical. He reaches for Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam: if America succumbed to spiritual death, the autopsy would read Vietnam. Now, Suleiman says, it would read Gaza.

Fridman asks about Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Gaza City, who has been hospitalized. "If Wael Al-Dahdouh wasn't Palestinian, he'd be on the cover of Time Magazine right now," Suleiman says. He would be the most celebrated journalist in the world. Instead, more than a hundred journalists have been killed, more than in any conflict in history, and international watchdogs have found sufficient evidence that some of the targeting is intentional. Al-Dahdouh was on air when a strike killed his wife, two children, and a grandchild. He went to the scene, mourned on camera, and said they were taking it out on the children.

He went back on camera the same day, Suleiman says, because his story was not unique in Gaza. Then he was targeted himself. His cameraman, Samer Abudaqa, bled out in front of him for hours; snipers, he says, shot at aid workers trying to reach them. Al-Dahdouh's arm was wrapped, and he was back on air the next day. Weeks later another child was killed in a strike on a car. He led the funeral prayer and returned to the microphone with a dignity Suleiman holds up against the cartoon of Palestinians as beasts. Most people, he fears, will never learn Al-Dahdouh's name. That, too, is erasure.

Gaza has been called the world's largest open-air prison: unemployment, blockade from every direction, no airport, even fishing restricted. Suleiman thinks the prison metaphor is already an injustice, because inmates are not routinely bombed with the world's most sophisticated weapons. Every person in Gaza has lived through multiple bombardments. He grew up with the image of Mohammed al-Durrah murdered in his father's lap more than twenty years ago; in this round, he says, Mohammed's brothers were killed and the father has been on the run. Israeli ministers have called the routine bombardment "mowing the lawn," language that treated Palestinians as insects before it treated them as animals. About 60 percent of Gaza's population are refugees who fled other occupied territory and now live piled on one another, able to see opportunity on the other side of the wall and unable to reach it.

Fridman asks how anyone flourishes while waiting for the next round. You always know, Suleiman says, that the next bombs are a matter of time. If you are in Gaza, you are waiting for your death. Elsewhere, people dream of education and economic opportunity. "In Gaza, your idea of opportunity is an opportunity to see the next year." If the public only hears about Gaza on October 7, that ignorance is part of the problem. Why, he asks, is the plight of Gazans not raised until an attack happens on Israel?

Fridman mentions a destroyed school he saw in Ukraine. Suleiman answers with a ledger from Gaza: more than a hundred destroyed mosques, every university demolished, TikTok videos of soldiers laughing as they press the button, schools reduced to rubble. He calls it a cultural genocide. Imagine returning to school missing limbs, burned by white phosphorus, parents and siblings dead, pulled from the rubble. In his own extended family in Gaza, he says, an airstrike killed all of his father's in-laws except an elderly aunt who emerged a day later. Commentators who say Palestinians could have turned Gaza into Singapore, he argues, are recycling the old bigotry: that Palestinians are the authors of their own destruction.

Do children growing up there have almost no choice but to hate Israel? It is human, Suleiman says. Any child under that oppression will hate the oppressor. His problem is how the question is posed: as a problem of Israel's future security, so that Palestinian lives matter only as a threat. Talk about whether children will grow up at all, he says; two-thirds of the 30,000 civilians killed are women and children. When Fridman relays Elon Musk's suggestion of conspicuous acts of kindness, Suleiman is blunt. "You don't pass out candy in a concentration camp, you end the occupation." Apartheid is not cured by the occupier's benevolence. Self-determination means not depending on crumbs. A ceasefire is the bare minimum; occupation and apartheid have to cease, because the global arena, largely through American obstruction, permitted a genocide without accountability.

Is violence an effective method of resistance? Suleiman starts with King: peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice. Occupation and apartheid are violent even in their most benevolent forms, and the default of resistance to them is justified, though resistance can still transgress. His moral frame is Islam. The Prophet Muhammad, he says, was outraged when he saw a woman or child dead on the other side. Occupied people have a right of self-defense under international law. Israel is the occupier. That is where he begins.

Palestinians are told to find better ways to resist, then demonized for every way they try. He recalls the Great Return March, when Gazans walked toward the wall in a non-violent demonstration and snipers took out their legs. Associated Press documented soldiers keeping "knee counts"; one claimed 45 knees. Boycotts modeled on South Africa are called antisemitic. Under every Israeli government, settlements expand and Palestinian land shrinks, while ministers speak openly of wiping Palestinians off the earth. Using the language of peace to suffocate the work of justice, he says, is ugly. King had a sermon about when peace is obnoxious: the word is often used to keep people complacent in a miserable status quo.

Fridman presses the point about transgressions. Suleiman agrees violence can go too far. What he wants is effective international bodies that can rein in any party, assign blame, and hold them accountable. Israel, he argues, has been made invincible in that arena by the United States, which is why global anti-American sentiment rises: not because of American freedom, but because Washington is participating. Israel has violated more than 63 United Nations resolutions, expanded occupation, and killed more than 600 Palestinians before October 7 without being held to account. If terrorism applies only to non-state actors, he says, it is a word without function, one that justifies more terror rained on civilians.

Fridman narrows it: does violence become terrorism when women, children, and non-combatants are killed, no matter who is doing the killing? "Absolutely, absolutely," Suleiman says. Children should not be killed. Non-combatants should not be targeted. The missing piece is not the principle. It is an investigative and accountability system that can execute its findings on every party, including the ones that currently cannot be touched.

In America, Suleiman says, the moment feels like the days after 9/11: dehumanization, surveillance, people losing jobs, berated on campuses and in grocery stores, and people being killed. He went to the funeral of Wadea al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy stabbed 26 times in his home in Plainfield Township, Illinois. It was ruled a hate crime. The attacker said, "You Muslims must die." The killing fell on the first Saturday after October 7. The Friday before, media had been calling imams about a supposed "global day of jihad." Suleiman told a local reporter it was the first he was hearing of it, while families in his community had already lost relatives and no one had called about that.

The attacker was the family's landlord. He came in with no emotion, Suleiman says, and first stabbed the mother, Hanan, seven or eight times with a military-grade knife. She fought him off and called 911. While she was on the phone she heard Wadea run toward the man calling him Uncle Joe, because the landlord had given the boy toys. Wadea went to hug him even though the knife was already bloody. Hanan did not think he would hurt the child. The last thing she heard was Wadea saying "Oh no," and then the stabbing, 26 times, and the line about Muslims having to die. Usually police hesitate to call something a hate crime. This one was classified the same day.

Who filled that man's head, Suleiman asks, so that murdering a six-year-old felt like an act of good? He argues Uncle Joe was motivated by President Joe Biden repeating a debunked claim of 40 beheaded Israeli babies. The White House walked it back in a statement nobody reads. Suleiman got the news at a Dallas protest. At the funeral, Wadea's casket was wrapped in a Palestinian flag; relatives shouted that Joe Biden had done this. The next day, CNN buried the story in a last section over ads. If the roles had been reversed, he says, a Palestinian landlord stabbing a six-year-old Jewish boy would have been the front page, and rightly so.

He contrasts that with the stabbing of Detroit synagogue president Samantha Woll, which immediately led the news with implications that Muslims had lost their minds. It turned out not to be a hate crime. People who had justified the killing in Gaza then offered him private condolences for Wadea. He asked what the difference was between Wadea and a boy in Gaza, or between Wadea and himself: if his parents had not made it out of Palestine, those same people would be justifying his murder. Anti-Palestinian bigotry, he says, is an extension of Islamophobia. Protecting a mosque here while standing in the way of a ceasefire as soldiers bomb mosques on TikTok is hypocrisy. Masks are falling. At Christchurch he had seen anger inside profound sadness, because the world could still say the shooting was wrong. Gaza is called a genocide by most of the world, he says, except in this American bubble, where Palestinians are told they did this to themselves, the same logic that drove 700,000 people from their homes in 1948.

Fridman asks what role American politicians play. Suleiman cites James Baldwin: Israel was created as an extension of United States policy, a colonial entity at the gates of the Middle East, a military base. The United States is not an honest peace broker and never has been. It has guarded Israel from international accountability and made it invincible. Washington funded the arsenal, he says, and gave Israel the most sophisticated weapons to test on the most desperate population, a bipartisan project. Inconsequential condemnations sit beside a veto of international law. Americans, he thinks, are tired of paying for other people's war crimes while homelessness and inequality rise at home. Joe Biden could have had a ceasefire long ago; instead he has bypassed Congress to replenish the arsenal.

Where has Biden fallen short? Suleiman says that would take another podcast. The first time Biden seemed to find the word Palestinian, he used it to accuse Palestinians of lying about the death toll. That accusation, Suleiman says, was false. Multiple international bodies treated Gaza Health Ministry figures as an undercount, and Israeli intelligence put the civilian death toll higher. Biden and Antony Blinken have spoken with passion about Israeli devastation and shown nothing of that sort toward Palestinians. Suleiman does not even want the rhetoric. He thinks Biden is under a delusion that Muslims and people of conscience will forget by November. You cannot tell people you are better than Trump's Muslim ban while carrying out a genocide primarily against Muslims and expect their votes.

Has Biden lost Palestinian and Muslim hearts in America? Suleiman is not sure he ever had them. He was never a fan. The system, he says, is always a choice between lesser evils. A democracy that offers only Donald Trump and Joe Biden is already a failed democracy. Biden's disposition toward Palestine and the Muslim world, he argues, has long been terrible; a segregationist past sometimes surfaces in how he talks. Come November, politicians who turned their backs, especially in swing states, will pay. That is not only a Muslim view. He cites figures: 67 percent of the country wants a ceasefire, three-fourths of Democratic voters, half of Republican voters. Only a handful of more than 500 members of Congress will say the genocide should stop.

Republicans, he says, have rushed to outpace Democrats in unapologetic support for Israel. Progressives get a nickname: PEP, progressive except Palestine. They talk about policing at home and ignore who trains many American police departments; they talk about the border here and not the assault on people at the border there. More people are getting news outside legacy outlets, because you cannot hide that many dead children. Meanwhile Netanyahu comes on television and says, with bitter irony, "from the river to the sea," promising Israeli control and pushing Palestinians into Sinai. Trump's first words, Suleiman notes, were that he would be worse: deportations, revoked student visas for protesters. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem. This is a bipartisan problem. They are under no illusion that Trump is a savior. They are going to penalize Biden.

Suleiman spoke at the November 4 Free Palestine March in Washington. What he remembers first is the absence of news coverage. Four hundred thousand people, one of the largest marches in history, were nowhere in mainstream media. Between two huge Palestine rallies, a Stand with Israel event drew members of Congress bused over from the Capitol, both parties, high-profile celebrities, and live streams. The International Court of Justice hearings, he says, may have been the greatest display of American media bias he has seen: outlets live-streamed Israel's defense against the genocide case and omitted South Africa's presentation of Israel's crimes the day before.

What he also remembers is the crowd: the most multi-faith, diverse turnout he has seen for Palestine, with a pronounced Jewish presence from Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and even former Israeli soldiers, plus Native American and Indigenous groups. Under-35 polls, he says, show a generational gap. On campus protests, every demonstration he attends has the same tenor and the same message, plus one or two people nobody knows, who arrive alone with a sign that contradicts the protest, after which every camera turns. At Columbia, he says, two former IDF soldiers sprayed Palestinian protesters with skunk water, the same tactic used on worshipers walking to Al-Aqsa. One student had showered eleven times and still could not get the smell out.

Former IDF soldiers, he notes, come back to the United States or the United Kingdom without stigma for participating in apartheid, while Palestinian students are doxed, put on watch lists, and lose law-firm jobs over decade-old tweets. Go to a protest, he tells listeners, and listen. In 400,000 people you will find four stupid ones, because protest scenes are messy. The overwhelming call has been freedom, liberation, ceasefire, an end to occupation and apartheid. Jewish groups have been at the forefront of some of the most visible actions, including takeovers of Capitol Hill and train stations, with slogans like "Not in our name" and "Never again means for anyone."

So is the average sentiment anti-occupation rather than antisemitic? Calling anti-Zionism or anti-occupation antisemitic, Suleiman says, is incredibly lazy. Palestinians are themselves a Semitic people. The American Muslim community, he adds, has stood in front of synagogues and with Jews when they are attacked. This is a story of a colonial entity driving people from their homes, a pro-freedom movement, not an antisemitic one. Do protests go too far? Sometimes a speaker runs off the rails. Judging the whole movement by those incidents, while ignoring that the object is a genocide, is unfair. In the course of their conversation, he says, it is not an exaggeration that 30 or 40 people would have been killed: they are averaging 135 to 150 deaths a day. Everything else is secondary. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both rising, and both should be condemned. Synagogues should be protected. The priority, still, is ending the genocide.

Has Suleiman's view of Benjamin Netanyahu evolved? No, because this is who Netanyahu has been from the beginning of his career, and people have not been listening. He campaigned on the promise that there would never be a Palestinian state, that Gaza would be wiped out, and that Arabs rushing to the polls must not "infect" policy. Statements from the 1980s onward already pointed toward ethnic cleansing. He is now manifesting the message. Suleiman thinks he is also trying to save his seat, driving the war because his days in office are numbered. The deeper trouble is that the message resonated enough to put him there. Security of Israel as the primary concern, Suleiman says, is a dishonest claim in Netanyahu's mouth. He is a narcissist and a tyrant, despised even among many Israelis, and hostage families know he does not care about them. The problem of the occupation, though, is the occupation. Yair Lapid, the supposed moderate alternative, drove just as bigoted an agenda from the Palestinian point of view.

Does Israel have a right to defend its borders? Suleiman recasts the question. Israel has a responsibility to protect those it occupies. Legal scholar Noura Erakat, he notes, has written that Israel is bound by occupation law. John Kerry once said Israel must choose whether to be a Jewish state or a democratic one; it cannot be both. Israel wants to occupy and deny, Suleiman says, and still be treated as a normal state. Those borders were drawn across occupied land and have been expanding. Critics who say Gaza is not occupied because troops pulled out years ago, he argues, let Israel set the terms and then define them. By any international legal standard it remains an occupation: control of movement, air, sea, imports and exports, no airport because Israel destroyed it. Either lift the occupation or protect everyone under it.

On Houthi attacks on shipping and the American and British bombing of Yemen, Suleiman draws a hard line: he does not support the Houthis or their general policies. He also thinks the episode proves the United States cares more about shipping lanes than Palestinian lives. The Houthis, he says, have seized ships and blocked lanes, have not killed anyone in that campaign as he describes it, and have said they will stop if a ceasefire is reached. Washington bombed Yemen instead of securing the ceasefire. He then turns to the late Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, one of the few co-sponsors of Betty McCollum's bill to penalize Israel for detaining child prisoners. Thousands of children, he says, have been arbitrarily detained, sent to military courts, held in solitary, with sexual violence documented by human rights groups, and no repercussions. Conditioning aid so Israel does not indiscriminately bomb civilians has found no home in mainstream American politics. Pro-Israel resolutions pass both chambers quickly.

The language of "Israeli hostages" and "Palestinian prisoners," he argues, already implies that one group's suffering is visited upon them and the other's is deserved. All 2.2 million people in Gaza are hostages, as is every Palestinian under occupation, and so are the prisoners picked up without fair trial or even a line to their families. During a four-day truce, about 150 Palestinian prisoners were released; Israel then picked up another 135 in the West Bank. That is what he means by not addressing the root. As for the Abraham Accords, he is unsparing: they slap Abraham's name on arms deals so countries can pursue unholy interests while erasing the primary victims. If large agreements were honest about Palestinian suffering and the roots of the problem, he would support them. Peace cannot be used to silence. Settlements kept expanding under the peace process. Netanyahu is telling what Suleiman calls a clear majority of the Israeli public that there will never be a Palestinian state. Is Israel going to remove 700,000 or 800,000 settlers and change its tune?

Fridman puts the classic fork on the table: Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violence versus Malcolm X's any-means-necessary. Suleiman says the fork depends on sanitizing King and vilifying Malcolm. When he taught a course at Southern Methodist University, he gave students unlabeled quotes; they always assigned them to the wrong man. King's *Beyond Vietnam* speech sounds radical next to the postcard image of him. Malcolm never took part in violence himself. He found it hypocritical to bind the oppressed to non-violence while leaving the oppressor unrestrained, and Suleiman agrees. Focus energy on restraining the colonial power. Malcolm was the first major African American leader to speak on Vietnam; King followed. Malcolm went to Gaza in 1964, to Khan Yunis, and wrote on Zionism as connected to American imperialism. James Cone, Suleiman recalls, wrote that Martin tried to liberate white people from their racism while Malcolm tried to liberate Black people from its effects. Both roles matter. After 75 years, Palestinian consciousness has only grown. That, he suggests, is what frustrates those who sought erasure.

What about the seeming fact that a majority of Palestinians support the October 7 attacks? "You have to see the world, their world through their eyes," Suleiman says. You cannot see their world through yours. Occupation, checkpoints, expanding settlements, families thrown from homes, routine airstrikes, no passport, subpar education, and from the side that dominates every element of your existence, promises of complete erasure. In 2023 alone he had already cited 13,000 new settlement units. Anyone who claims they will get you out of that misery will draw sympathy, whether you agree with their methods or not. He turns the question around. Israel holds the power. Before October 7, he says, polls showed a majority of the Israeli public favoring an end to a two-state solution and not caring about Palestinian plight; after the genocide, a vast majority do not favor a ceasefire. Bassem Youssef put a human story to Piers Morgan: a child who has lost limbs and parents, been made a refugee two or three times, with no future, will listen to someone who says they will fight back.

So he is calling, as Malcolm did, for the asymmetry in violence and moral reasoning to be named. Malcolm's knife image is the one he uses: if you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out six, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and you are not willing to acknowledge the knife is there. Those who will not acknowledge what international human rights groups, and even Israeli groups such as B'Tselem, have named as apartheid, occupation, and now unfolding genocide are not partners for peace.

Fridman says it hurts to think how long healing would take even if it began now. Generations. People do not forget murdered parents. Suleiman's answer is among the hardest lines in the conversation. The trauma of the past does not justify the murder of the present, and the fear of the future does not justify the murder of the present either. The world's urgency should be ending the atrocity. He believes in healing, and he believes in the heart of his people: resistance, resilience, courage, even the ability of tormented young Palestinians still to laugh. He does not see darkness in those hearts. He sees light. The urgency is that they have a life, and that they stop being killed.

Why can't neighboring countries take in Palestinian refugees? Suleiman hears the smear inside the question. He cites Nikki Haley asking, with what he calls a deeply disturbing laugh, why no one wants to take Palestinians in, and Ben Shapiro claiming Israelis like to build while Arabs like to bomb things and live in sewage. The implication is that Palestinians are ungovernable. Jews fleeing the Holocaust heard a version of that, he says: in 1939 some 300,000 Germans applied for refuge in the United States and only about 10,000 were allowed in; ships were turned away as a national security threat. Palestinians in diaspora have become scientists and doctors wherever they have gone. The right question is not why neighbors will not open their homes. It is why these people were driven from theirs.

People in Gaza are blockaded from every direction. There is nowhere to go. And the reality, Suleiman says, is that they do not want to leave. They want to live on their land, in their homes, and continue a culture handed to them. Those who have gotten out for medical treatment or because they hold another citizenship talk about going back and rebuilding. "You can't bomb Palestine out of our hearts. You cannot starve Palestine out of our hearts." That, he thinks, is Israel's critical mistake: believing that if every building is wiped out, no one will want to return. Fridman calls Palestinians a proud people. Suleiman points to East Jerusalem, to the tenacity of walking back into a home where the state has installed an intruder in the living room and still saying you are not leaving. Those in diaspora will not let Palestine leave their hearts; those still there will not leave their land. The world should make the occupier more accountable, not tell the occupied how to cope.

Fridman asks a personal question: if Suleiman's family had not fled, and he were living in Gaza now, what would he be doing? He thinks about it all the time. At the first D.C. protest he told the crowd about a news alert just before October, with his own name in it. He gets those alerts often. This one was a 16-year-old Omar Suleiman murdered in the West Bank. He held up the photograph and realized that could have been him. He wonders why God chose him not to be there, and hopes those who are not there were chosen to be a voice for those who are. He is grateful for the chance to speak, and guilty that they bear the brunt of the hatred that displaced his parents.

Palestinians often invoke Indigenous people, including Native Americans. What works in the analogy, and what does not? Suleiman finds a powerful connection to Indigenous peoples who have been wronged, in the United States and elsewhere. Americans, he says, live on stolen land drenched in Native blood and built with the labor of enslaved Africans, an evil that has to be reckoned with; that is the power of solidarity, visible also in Canada and Australia. Where the analogy may not do justice is scale. From the river to the sea, he says, is less than one five-hundredth the size of the United States. The original lie was a land without a people for a people without a land. The problem was that there were people on that land, and they were forcibly removed, and they continue to be brutalized on a tiny piece of earth.

Why is Palestine a holy land? It is the land of prophets, Suleiman says, with deep significance for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the land of Abraham, a history that connects multiple peoples. History tells a story of tragedy over that ground, and also a story of sanctity. Islam, as he defines it, is submission to one God and peace in that process, the way of life all prophets brought: monotheism. The Quran says Muslims do not distinguish between the prophets. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad are addressed with the same blessing of peace. Moses confirmed Abraham, Jesus confirmed Moses, Muhammad confirmed Jesus. God did not change. Muhammad described prophethood as a house, each prophet a brick, himself the last brick.

Fridman asks whether Jesus emphasized love in a way the others did not. Suleiman reaches for the King and Malcolm comparison: some difference, but exaggerated. He does not think Moses skipped love, or that Muhammad did. Legislation changed; the divine spirit did not. No prophet, in his telling, betrayed the message that came before. They are part of one teaching: harmony with the creator, guidance from that source, and a greater existence on earth when people live that way.

Suleiman has long had friendships across faiths. How has October 7 affected that? "Complicated, very complicated." It is not only Muslims and Jews. Christian Zionism, in his view, sits at the root of America's unshakeable, unconditional commitment to Israel. That is devastating for Palestinian Christians: Israel can bomb some of the oldest churches in Gaza, bar Palestinian Christians from the Holy Sepulcher, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, while many Christians in the United States turn their backs. He expects more from people in the face of a genocide. Some have told him they want to speak and cannot. That, he says, is not good enough. He would rather focus on the morally consistent voices that rose than on those who failed. Allies against Islamophobia cannot extend anti-Palestinian bigotry. He recommends Reverend Munther Isaac's Christmas sermon "Jesus in the Rubble," and mentions Lutheran pastor Mitri Raheb. Justin Amash, a Palestinian Christian and former Republican congressman, posted about family dying in a church bombing. The philosophy of hate driving the policy, Suleiman concludes, is secular at its root, not religious.

Critics point to Quranic verses and call Islam a religion of war. Objectively, Suleiman says, a percentage comparison finds fewer verses about war in the Quran than in the Old or New Testament, and studies exist to that effect. Deeper than the count is context: revelation over 23 years, in response to persecution of the Prophet. If Muslims believed they had to kill people wherever they found them, mankind would not exist; there are two billion Muslims. The history he claims is contribution, medicine, science, math. Muslims have fallen short of Islamic standards, but they do not account for a greater portion of violence than other faith communities. Why do the opposite narratives hold in the United States? Because they allow greater violence against Muslims at home and abroad. Wars against primarily Muslim countries, surveillance programs under both parties: Islamophobia is convenient, and it distracts from other violence, including the government's own.

Al-Aqsa matters, Suleiman says, because Muslims honor all the prophets who walked and worshiped there. It is where Muhammad led the other prophets in prayer on the night of Al-Isra' wal-Mi'raj, the night journey, before ascending and returning. It was the first qibla, the first direction of prayer, toward Jerusalem, before Muslims faced Mecca. Islam has three sanctuaries: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Watching soldiers stomp worshipers, spray skunk water, teargas during Ramadan, and bar people by ID class or age is painful. And still, the sanctity of one human being is greater than the sanctity of any place of worship. The Prophet, he says, told the Kaaba itself that a believer's dignity is worth more than the structure. One child in Gaza, one Wael Al-Dahdouh, is greater to him than even Al-Aqsa. The mosque remains at the heart of Muslim identity and of the Palestinian cause. It is a place of prophets, and it should be treated prophetically.

Since October 7, Suleiman has seen young people in the United States take an interest in Islam, including a Quran TikTok trend of first-time readers. He thinks they are looking at Gazans living through hell on earth and still speaking with faith rather than profanity or despair, and asking what the secret is. He has never seen more people become Muslim, and many more simply gain an appreciation for the "engineering" of that faith. For an introduction he points to whyislam.org and yaqeeninstitute.org, then says there is nothing like going to a mosque. Step out of your comfort zone, let your world get complicated, listen to a sermon, meet people, ask questions. Muslims love being asked about their faith because they are sick of hearing other people talk about it. Palestinians feel the same about Palestine. Conversion, he jokes, takes 20 seconds: no pool, no baptism, only the Shahada, testimony to one God and to Muhammad as final messenger, which implies the six articles of faith, including belief in Jesus, Moses, and Abraham. Then come prayer, Ramadan, zakah at 2.5 percent of retained earnings, and Hajj if one can. The beauty many people find, he says, is simplicity: one God, one humanity, one body of prophets, one community.

For a Palestinian-American, this Ramadan will be especially hard. Suleiman hopes for a ceasefire before it, a turn toward rebuilding. Every Ramadan, aggression against Palestinians seems to grow; incursions on Al-Aqsa in the last ten nights sour the month for the Muslim world. This time, if the killing continues, they walk into a continued genocide. The mood in the community is somber in a way he has never seen. Every sermon since October 7 has had to include it. People around him have lost 20, 30, 40 relatives. If refugees begin arriving, or patients come through Egypt, it becomes more personal still. The verse he returns to is from the chapter of Mary: "Your Lord does not forget." Hope is not in creation but in the creator, not in this life but in the afterlife. God will restore everything, if not here then there. Gazans have that eternal flame, he says, because they were never hostages to the material world; they never really had it. "You can't survive hell on earth unless you believe in paradise outside of it."

Forty or fifty years from now, what does he hope to see? He does not answer with borders. The nation-state and nationalism, he says, are becoming unsustainable under growing refugee populations, fanaticism, fascism, and climate displacement. The world will have to function as a world, not as nations that treat everyone outside the border, and everyone different inside it, as a threat. People will have to start seeing people as people. What gives him strength to keep walking through fire? He does not believe anyone grants him success or failure except by God's permission. He does not seek fuel from audiences. He wants to be part of a greater plan. He is inspired by the resilience of Gazans, of his parents and grandparents, of Palestinians who have refused erasure. Energy from above; examples all around. Fridman thanks him for private notes of kindness in hard seasons, and closes with King: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.