Amira Rayan, 35, of the West Bank and a Muslim Girl Scout Scout: “You are a baby killer,” she told her mother
I was a deeply religious, Modern Orthodox yeshiva student from the West Bank and a supporter of the Israeli army, but now am an activist with the movement opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine after spending three weeks in the Gaza Strip.
“My life and my extremely bright future as a 15-year-old activist will not be defined by the failures and harm enabled by Dianne Morales,” Amira wrote in the 2021 letter, which went viral and helped end Ms. Morales’s campaign. Amira said that she wrote a college essay about that.
By Monday, it had been confirmed that relatives of Ms. Rayan had been killed. When I asked Ms. Rayan who she lost, she said all of them. There’s no one left.” Thousands of Palestinians are estimated to have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza in recent weeks. A death toll is kept by the Gaza Health Ministry, run by Hamas, and cannot be independently verified. Six cousins and their children, as young as 2 years old, were among the people killed in her family. Other relatives living abroad told her the cousins died beneath the rubble of their home.
In the past two years, Amira has become a veteran organizer. She joined an antiwar protest last weekend. She needs to get her latest Girl Scout award, this one for photography. That will mean satisfying her mother, Abier Rayan, who happens to be Troop 4179’s leader. “She’s tough,” Amira assured me.
I’ll do my best to be honest, fair, friendly and helpful, respectful and caring, and responsible for what I say and do and to respect myself and others.
At a meeting of the Muslim Girl Scouts of Astoria, a woman came into the room and asked if her fellow scouts were able to get tickets to the concert. The scout said she was the Taylor Swift of our generation.
“This lady looked at me, and she was like: ‘You’re disgusting. You are a baby killer. Amira told me that I was an antisemite. Her signature spunk faded when she talked about it. “I just kept saying, ‘That’s not true,’” she said. I am on my way to school. I was not wearing an accessory.
Amira was born in Queens in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. As a child, she participated in demonstrations at City Hall in New York that were meant to help make school holidays during the holy month of Eid al-Fitr.
Amira, a Palestinian American who is not related to any of the attackers, said that she has experienced for the first time the full fury of Islamophobia and racism that her friends and relatives have told her. There has been an increase in both anti-Muslim and antisemitic attacks in the city.
She said that police officers are suddenly asking for identification and stopping and frisking Muslims in Queens. (New York City has stepped up its police presence around both Muslim and Jewish neighborhoods and sites within the five boroughs.) She said that the most painful part was the idea that Palestinians’ lives don’t matter as the US supports Israel.
Many New York City kids have a worldliness about them, a certain telltale moxie. Amira, a self-proclaimed Queens kid, can seem unstoppable.
Amira was only 15 when she wrote a letter accusing an ultra progressive candidate of violating child labor laws while purporting to promote the working class in New York.
“I think it could be worth it”: The tragic events of Beit Hanoun, Gaza during the June 11, 2001 Israeli-Israel Warfare
I left his funeral last week crushed, knowing we had lost such a righteous soul. To me it’s clear. My friend fought against Hamas while he was still alive to make sure his friends and family were taken care of.
They told us that they could eliminate the threat of Hamas through a military operation, and that was the lie being repeated today. Hamas has grown stronger even after the death and destruction we wreaked on Gaza.
Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.
At one point, I scribbled some thoughts on a piece of paper. I wrote that some members of my team had been tallying the number of soldiers killed and discussing whether this operation was worth the losses. “I think it could be worth it,” I wrote, “as long as we decisively eliminate the threat.”
We heard a roar of Air Force fighter jets overhead as we left Beit Hanoun and saw huge stacks of debris and smoke from Al-Burrah. I later learned that in those moments, the airstrikes killed eight members of the Wahdan family, mostly women and children, whose home soldiers from my unit had occupied for days while the family was there.
Like the invasion that the Israeli military has said is imminent, that campaign was precipitated by atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists. On June 12 of that year, Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers; soon after, Israelis murdered a Palestinian teenager. The horrific exchange escalated into a larger conflict; ultimately some 70 Israelis and 2,250 Palestinians were killed over seven weeks. The Israelis were told that we were going to destroy Hamas.
We had to clear the perimeter in the northern Gaza Strip to enable combat engineers to identify and destroy tunnels that lead into Israel. We would take up positions every night in new houses because we never wanted to be stationary and easy targets. The house that I found the Kalashnikov rifle in was the one that had to be cleared. At one point, I was so scared that my radioman of soldiers from my unit would report that they had been injured and killed when a missile hit a house they had taken over.
Even today, I remember how the ground shook from the constant explosions as we moved into Gaza at dusk at the start of the ground invasion on July 17. As we marched into the village of Umm al-Nasr, our Merkava tanks plowed through the fields next to us, and the aerial and artillery bombardments created relentless thunder and lightning — what we jokingly called the sound-and-light show.