OPINION:
In the Western imagination, the pastoral West Bank village of Turmus Ayya represents iconic small-town America with a soft touch of local Palestinian color.
The community has a carefully crafted image of a “little slice of Americana,” as The Wall Street Journal put it last year. “American dual nationals … have come to retire or to raise families in a place where their dollars go further and it feels like home,” The Journal’s Omar Abdel-Baqui explained. “Many speak English as their go-to language, live in large suburban houses and eat in East Coast-style pizza parlors.”
According to estimates cited by news outlets and local officials, roughly 80% of Turmus Ayya’s residents hold U.S. citizenship. Journalists have uncritically adopted the town’s public relations branding as the Middle America of the Middle East.
“All of the people that I visited with this morning are American,” U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee said Sept. 5 after his solidarity stop at the town, which has been targeted by Israeli extremists. During the visit, the ambassador appeared next to a fluttering American flag.
Yet basic scrutiny of the Palestinian community reveals a very un-American reality. Behind the wholesome veneer of apple pie and Norman Rockwell lies a decidedly pro-terrorist element wholly at odds with American values.
Before correcting its article on Sept. 9, Reuters reported that Mr. Huckabee met Hadeel Jabara, a Palestinian American mother of two young children whose husband, Omar, a U.S. citizen, was killed by settlers in 2023.
The Palestinian officials who choreographed the visit kept from the well-meaning ambassador that Ms. Jabara was a Hamas widow. Official Hamas media channels and statements claimed her late husband as an operative after his death during the 2023 clashes.
Nevertheless, Turmus Ayya residents had insisted the Hamas activist was an innocent civilian indiscriminately gunned down. “He was just standing there, innocent. He is such a kind-hearted kid,” neighbor Khamis Jbara told The Associated Press. “He is a peaceful man.”
Contrary to Reuters’ initial reporting, Omar Jabara al-Qattin was not a U.S. citizen, but had permanent residency status, according to the anti-Israel Dawn site. Nor was he killed by settlers. Rather, he was killed by border police dispersing Palestinians who reportedly clashed with Israelis, launching firecrackers and throwing rocks.
Although Reuters clarified that Hadeel Jabara was not a U.S. citizen — and that her late husband, Omar, was a green card holder rather than a citizen killed by settlers — editors did not update the article to reflect Omar’s documented Hamas affiliation.
In its 2025 coverage of Turmus Ayya, The Wall Street Journal likewise brushed the town’s pro-terrorist tenor under the soothing Stars and Stripes.
“In the home of Amir Rabee, the 14-year-old killed in the almond grove, Palestinian and American flags hung side by side on the wall next to a memorial for the boy,” the article read — omitting the memorial’s text citing the “shahid [martyr], on his homeland, the land of Jihad, Palestine.”
The memorial’s call for violence overlaid a map of all of Israel, signaling that jihad, or the war for Islam, is to be waged across the internationally recognized territory, bringing the demise of the U.S. ally.
“For Israel, American citizenship means nothing, it is a blue book,” then-mayor of Turmus Ayya, Lafi Shalabi, said to Le Monde in 2025. Notably, Shalabi was convicted by an Israeli military court in 2021 of assisting and harboring his cousin Muntasir Shalabi after the latter fatally shot 19-year-old Jerusalemite student Yehuda Guetta.
For Shalabi and others in Turmus Ayya, the enthusiastic display of the U.S. flag is an expedient distraction from the town’s very un-American character.
In other contexts, pro-terrorist Palestinian elements take a distinctly hostile view of dual citizenship.
At Hamas’ cruel propaganda ceremony during the February 2025 release of starved and abused Israeli hostages, terrorists displayed a banner that disparaged Israeli dual nationals as foreign invaders, stating: “The land distinguishes its people from the dual nationality foreigners.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, celebrated Palestinian author Randa Abdel Fattah mocked Israeli victims of Hamas’ brutal massacre with a post on X above a scene of the slaughter: “Which passport should I use today?”
Pro-terrorist propagandists are not bothered by the inherent hypocrisy of invoking the American flag and U.S. citizenship as a handy prop to falsely recast a terrorist-linked town as peaceful American suburbia, while simultaneously demonizing Israeli dual nationals.
There is nothing American about weaponizing U.S. citizenship. It is time for journalists to look past the strategically placed American flags to the inconvenient facts of terrorism — even if it means exposing a town that is no place like home.
• Tamar Sternthal is director of media research and analysis for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and director of the organization’s Israel office.
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