Mahmoud Kasem hands out piping hot pieces of freshly fried falafel to customers standing in line at his Al Aqsa bakery and restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
“It’s Palestinian falafel,” he tells The Independent on Monday afternoon. “The best.”
Behind the warm welcome, Mr Kasem is a ball of pent up energy. Since the 7 October terror attacks by Hamas and the subsequent bombing of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defence Force, which combined has claimed more than 4,400 lives, he has barely slept.
Mr Kasem said his car, which bears a Palestinian flag, was spat on while he was driving to work earlier in the week. He is now fearful every time his wife Sojood leaves the house wearing her hijab.
The murder of 6-year-old Palestinian boy Wadea Al-Fayoume in Chicago, allegedly carried out by the family’s 72-year-old landlord, has devastated him.
“Where the hell is this man’s heart, to stick a knife into a child?” Mr Kasem, the father of two young sons, asks. After hearing the news on Sunday, he went home that night and wept as he hugged his children, 5-year-old Shoib, and 1-year-old Hani, tight.
His mother, who lives with his family in Queens, had been visiting relatives in Gaza just before the war broke out. She has made it to the relative safety of East Jerusalem, but Mr Kasem’s cousin’s home in Gaza was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. His family members have been left to scavenge for scraps of food and water after Israel imposed a complete blockade of the Strip that is home to 2.3 million people.
Mr Kasem, 36, came to the United States in 1999 and opened his restaurant in 2018.
His staff cook the taboon flatbread on the premises, the hummus is made fresh each day. A Palestinian flag flies prominently outside, and signs declare Palestine is “not for sale”.
Mr Kasem is fiercely proud of his US nationality, but says the violence he had hoped to escape in the Middle East now appears to have arrived in the US.
A Palestinian flag flies outside of the Al Aqsa bakery and restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn— (Bevan Hurley)
Images of violence and destruction trigger painful memories of witnessing the murder of his father Hani in an extortion plot at the family’s wholesale distribution center in Ozone Park, Queens, in 2017.
As Mr Kasem chain smokes outside the eatery on Monday, he pauses to greet numerous passersby with a “habibi”, which translates to “My love” in Arabic.
“I wish people knew how Palestinians are as human beings,” he says. “They’re good people. Very hospitable. But people look at us as if we are terrorists.”
After watching this conflict his entire life and hearing about it from the generations before him, Mr Kasem fears what will happen next to Palestinians in Gaza. “I’m really, really scared,” he says. “Is anyone going to come up with a solution to let them live?”
New York is home to around 800,000 Muslims, and an estimated 1.6 million Jewish people, the largest of any city outside of Israel.
The city’s small Palestinian diaspora is mainly concentrated in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Astoria in Queens.
Since war erupted when Hamas terrorists launched surprise attacks by sea, land and air on 7 October, more than 1 million people have been displaced from Gaza. There have been heated, but largely peaceful demonstrations in New York, and isolated reports of hate crimes.
A pro-Palestinian demonstrator holes up a Swastika on their phone at a rally in Times Square— (Stuart Meissner)
In Bay Ridge, a group of suspects in three cars waving Israeli flags and shouting anti-Palestine statements allegedly attacked a group of three men of Arab descent who were walking along 86th St last Wednesday night.
A few hours earlier, a 34-year-old man holding a Palestinian flag was attacked in Williamsburg, police said. No arrests have been made and none of the victims were seriously hurt, according to the NYPD.
Republican pro-Israeli councilwoman Inna Vernikov was arrested on Friday after carrying a gun at a pro-Palestine peace rally.
Anti-semitic attacks have also been on the rise. At a rally in Times Square on Sunday, a protestor held up an image of a Nazi swastika on their phone. The Anti-Defamation League has warned of widespread support for the Hamas terror attacks at demonstrations across the US.
On Sunday, FBI director Christopher Wray warned of a sharp increase in reported threats against both Jewish and Muslim people. In response, officials have met with leaders from both communities.
For New Yorkers of Palestinian origin, the rhetoric coming from city and national lawmakers is fuelling the divisions and hate.
Arab American Federation chairman Zein Rimawi says Palestinian-Americans feel under siege after ‘inflammatory’ remarks about the war in Israel by US lawmakers— (Bevan Hurley)
A block away from Al Aqsa bakery at the An-Noor Social Center, Zein Rimawi, the chair of the Arab American Federation, tells The Independent Palestinian-Americans feel abandoned and ignored by US political leaders.
Mr Rimawi, 69, has lived in Bay Ridge for decades and used to host a monthly meeting with New York City mayor Eric Adams during his tenure as Brooklyn Borough President.
Since the Hamas terror attacks, Mr Adams has spoken at a “New York Stands with Israel” rally, met with Jewish education leaders and attended shabbat services at the Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side, according to media statements from his office.
Mr Adams has made no efforts to reach out to the Palestinian community, Mr Rimawi said.
The mayor’s statements proclaiming that “Your fight is our fight” at the 10 October rally were inflammatory and effectively inciting violence against the Muslim community, Mr Rimawi said.
“Shame on you Eric Adams,” he said. “You want to bring the war from there, here to America.”
As the Israeli government cut off food, water and electricity to the entire Gaza Strip, it felt like the whole world was “clapping them on”, Mr Rimawi added.
Tensions rose over the weekend, after a Hamas leader called for a “global day of Jihad” and NYPD officers swarmed the streets on high alert.
But there was no violence, and no appetite for trouble among Palestinian-Americans, Mr Rimawi told The Independent. The heavy presence of law enforcement merely added to the sense that they were being besieged.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Independent that Mr Adams had held several public and private security briefings with the city’s Muslim community in the past week.
The spokesperson added that Mr Adams had consistently denounced hate and violence towards any community in New York City — “whether Jewish or Muslim, Israeli or Palestinian, or any other ethnic or religious group”.
“Hamas is a terrorist organisation that Mayor Adams has made abundantly clear in no way reflects the Muslim community in our city or Islam around the world,” they said.
On Monday, worshippers gather at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge draped in Palestinian flags. Images of babies atop piles of rubble in Gaza appear on a nearby TV screen.
Ramzey Ahmad says that US lawmakers have failed the Palestinian people— (Bevan Hurley)
In a flat upstairs, Ramzey Ahmad told The Independent his family were on high alert. A shelter in place order had been issued at a Muslim school where his daughter teaches after reports of a man with a gun on Monday.
Mr Ahmad was born in the US, and identifies as a conservative and “was a card carrying member of the NRA” as a young man.
He says that decades of Palestinians being dehumanised and treated as “the other” has led to the point where their suffering is not recognised as equal to Israelis.
On a recent visit to East Jerusalem, Mr Ahmad said he was nearly shot dead at a checkpoint when he thought he had been waved through by a soldier. A sniper had his sights set on him, he says, and was about to shoot until another officer intervened.
“People die for silly things, for miscommunications,” Mr Ahmad says.” As an American, you think you’ll never take that. But those people don’t have the luxury: if they lift their head up, they get a rifle butt in the head. It’s a military occupation.”
