Memorial to Adnan Khalil

I wrote this letter to the editor of The Miami Herald last night in response to the article headlined: Two clerks killed in Pompano Beach store.

Jaweed Kaleem’s article from October 25, “Two clerks killed in Pompano Beach store,” reports a truly horrific event. I cannot even bring myself to imagine that I, or anyone I am close to, could ever die such an unexpected and violent death, and yet I knew Adnan Khalil, one of the victims of this double homicide. Though I grew up in South Florida, and I am currently visiting his country of origin, I never met Mr. Khalil face to face. Less than two weeks ago I wrote a letter on his behalf to the Consulate General of Jerusalem and the U.S. State Department through my volunteer work with the Right to Enter Campaign, a grassroots campaign based in the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Mr. Khalil is an American citizen of Palestinian descent. He was born in Palestine and his wife and three children currently live in a village near the West Bank city of Tulkarem. Mr. Khalil’s wife, Manal, is not an American citizen and so when they married close to ten years ago, Mr. Khalil applied for a residency permit under a family unification program in order to live legally in the country of his birth. Since 1998, Mr. Khalil had been living intermittently in the West Bank on Israeli tourist visas. His residency application had been pending at the mercy of Israeli authorities, who are the ones who determine who can or cannot live in the West Bank. The West Bank, however, is not Israel. It is a small territory roughly the size of Delaware, which is becoming a series of enclaves where Palestinians live in between the spaces occupied by soldiers and settlers-masked-as-civilians who are living here in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention with Israel’s military, legislative and financial support. I wrote the letter on behalf of Mr. Khalil requesting that the United States intervene with the Israeli authorities on humanitarian grounds to allow him to enter the West Bank to live with his wife and three children. Not only was he unable to exercise his rights that most of us take for granted – to live with one’s family in one’s birthplace – but during the past several years, Mr. Khalil’s life had become even more heartbreaking. He had been unable to fulfill his duty as husband to his wife who had been diagnosed with atrophy of the cerebellum and had become disabled to the point of full paralysis. Nor has he been able to be a present father to his three children who have been witnessing their mother’s health rapidly deteriorate over the past few years.

On October 21st, Mr. Khalil informed the Campaign that things were taking a turn for the better. The U.S. State Department contacted him and, without making any promises, they offered to intervene. We will never know whether Mr. Khalil would have ever been able to join his family in life, and now we are shifting our efforts to repatriate his remains so he may join them in death. Mr. Khalil never should have been in the Port Five Star Food Mart in Pompano Beach the morning of October 24th, he should have been at home with his family in Palestine. His death, and the death of Sabri Khaleq, whose story I don’t know, is unacceptable on so many levels. Unfortunately, I do not only feel like I know Mr. Khalil solely because of the letter I wrote for him. During the two short months that I have been living in Ramallah, I have met many people whose lives share the tragic traces of Mr. Khalil’s. I feel like I know him because I know many others like him. His story is the sad ending of one that Israeli authorities controlled from the beginning. I hope that we can understand the complexity of the lives of those who appear ever so briefly in the daily news, and take action when we see injustice occur.