Watching Gaza through Chapel Hill
A well-timed documentary puts an old story into a new light
The Israeli government and Hamas have a tentative ceasefire deal: four days without bombing, shooting, or rocket launches. In exchange, they’ve negotiated a prisoner swap—fifty Israeli women and children freed from Gaza in exchange for 150 Palestinian women and children from Israeli jails. The deal can reportedly be extended for up to ten days, pending the release of more hostages.
It is not an end to the war, much less the wider aggressions. As my friend Spencer Ackerman notes, the deal applies only to Gaza, and Israeli anger could easily be channeled into further attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank—which had already seen the deadliest year for Palestinians at Israeli hands in two decades in the nine months leading up to Oct. 7. It also comes as the escalatory spiral keeps ramping up between the United States and Iran. There have been two U.S. airstrikes reported against Iranian proxies in the past 24 hours in Iraq—a return to an old theater of fighting between the geopolitical rivals—as well as drones shot down by the U.S. Navy from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. (Until now, Iranian proxies had been attacking U.S. bases in Iraq, but the U.S. had been responding only against Iranian forces in Syria.)
Still, the deal is, as Mohammad Alsaafin writes in the Nation, “a ray of hope” after forty-six days of indiscriminate slaughter. It’s also a reminder that the killing could have stopped—and could still permanently stop—at any time, if the people in charge wanted it to.
While I was waiting for the latest on the ceasefire, I had a chance to watch a new documentary about an old story. 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime details the February 2015 murders of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—Deah Barakat, his newlywed wife Yusor Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha—at the hands of an Islamophobic neighbor, and the ongoing fight for justice by the victims’ families.
Watching the documentary, which premiered this month in New York, was a sort of homecoming. I covered the massacre for the New York Times and got to know members of the Abu-Salha and Barakat families. I later went back to North Carolina to witness the 2019 sentencing of the murderer, Craig Stephen Hicks, finding myself seated in the courtroom directly behind the killer’s pasty neck. (Thanks to that seating, I make an extended uncredited cameo in the film’s final act.)
As you may recall, the Chapel Hill massacre was instant international news. In fact, I learned of the murders almost instantly—not through my sources in North Carolina, but through Twitter accounts I followed to keep tabs on Israel and Palestine. It seemed obvious to many right off the bat what had happened: an angry white man had gunned down his Muslim neighbors, two of whom were young women who wore hijab. But almost immediately, the Chapel Hill police tried to contradict that idea, saying that they believed the killings had emanated from a “parking dispute.” It took me three weeks to chase down and marshal evidence into a story showing that the counter-narrative could not have possibly been true, by which point most of the country had moved on. It took four years to learn that fictive counter-narrative had come from the killer himself—in a jovial, lie-filled police confession aimed at preserving his racial innocence.
36 Seconds would be a searing watch under any circumstances. Director Tarek Albaba’s team does an excellent job conveying both the horror of the murders, as well as both the pain and strength of the Abu-Salha and Barakat families as they tried to preserve the memory of their loved ones and the truth of what happened to them in the apartment complex two miles from the campus of the University of North Carolina, where Deah attended dental school. (Yusor had been admitted to the dental school and was slated to start studying there that fall.)
But watching it against the backdrop of Israel’s war on Gaza brings out layers that no one could have anticipated. For one thing, Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha’s parents were Jordanian immigrants of Palestinian descent. In 2014, during a previous rain of Israeli bombs on Gaza that killed over 2,200 Palestinians, Razan painted doves bearing the red, green, white, and black of the Palestinian flag, and donated the proceeds to Gaza’s relief.
Deah’s parents came from Syria; before his death, he volunteered with an NGO mission to provide free dental care in the West Bank. That volunteer trip was sometimes cited by Americans on social media as a reason for suspicion of the victims. (The Times of Israel prominently noted Deah’s “links to a Palestinian charity” at the time.) By contrast, the documentary spotlights the humanity of that trip, including a sweet found-footage scene of Deah joking with a Palestinian child in somewhat strained Arabic, and a photo of a beaming Deah in front of Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. There were also several photos of Deah in North Carolina with his black and white checkered keffiyeh scarf—a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. I remember seeing that keffiyeh in Deah’s car after the murders.
On a deeper level though, taking these stories together tells us something about the nature of dehumanization, colonialism, violence, and heartbreak, and different ways to process the pain of losing those we love.
Hicks, the murderer, was also obsessed with “the Middle East problem,” as a meme he posted to Facebook that year called it. He was a militant atheist, of the Sam Harris variety, who denigrated both Islam and Christianity—in at least one case by likening it to fundamentalist Islam. In a January 2015 post, he declared that renouncing religion was the solution to the crises in the Middle East. Fellow atheists, especially white men who felt or feared they might be socially implicated in Hicks’ crime, were quick to point out that Hicks also publicly argued for freedom of religion in a Jeffersonian mode, that he once posted in favor of allowing Muslims to build a mosque (actually an Islamic cultural center) near the site of the former World Trade Center, and was apparently in favor of same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and rescue dogs.
Hicks also apparently liked cosplaying as an anti-colonial fighter—even a Muslim one. He’d spent the hours before the murder playing Assassin’s Creed, a video game series whose playable protagonist is a white guy who accesses his ancestors’ memories through his DNA, most notably that of “Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad,” a fictional Levantine Arab—i.e., a Palestinian—who in the original game fights against the Crusades.
As both the families’ testimony and the documentary make clear, that was all beside the point. Hicks was a