Remembering Hind Rajab

Hola, Meteor readers,

I have to apologize to everyone reading this because I failed to acknowledge the start of a very important season in the celestial calendar. Happy Taurus season, baabyyyyyyy!!! Enjoy the grounding and reliable energy of this season while it lasts.

In today’s newsletter, we revisit the story of Hind Rajab, a tragedy you may have missed. Plus, a spot of joy for trans people in North Carolina and West Virginia.

It’s gonna be May,

Shannon ♉Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Who is Hind?: On Monday night, protestors at Columbia University overtook Hamilton Hall, a building on campus, and unfurled a banner renaming it Hind’s Hall. The action came hours after the university made good on a threat to begin suspending students if they did not leave the growing encampment. In an Instagram statement, the students occupying Hind’s Hall say they plan to remain there until Columbia completely divests from Israel. (Columbia’s president said that the university would not do so, but “would develop an expedited timeline for review of new proposals from the students by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers divestment matters.”)

While pundits debate the validity of the takeover—which has happened in this building before—we are answering a different question: Who is Hind?

HIND RAJAB, A BEAUTIFUL LIGHT SNUFFED OUT BY VIOLENCE (VIA INSTAGRAM)

In January, a six-year-old girl named Hind Rajab, members of her family, and two paramedics were killed by what would later be confirmed as Israeli gunfire just outside of Gaza City. The family had been attempting to exit an evacuation zone and return to their home in northern Gaza City when their vehicle was surrounded by the Israeli army, which then opened fire. The initial gunshots killed five of the seven people in the car—leaving Hind and her cousin, 15-year-old Layan, the only two alive. Layan called for help; in an audio clip published by The Washington Post, she can be heard explaining the situation and breaking off into screams as gunfire drowns out her voice. The call drops.

Emergency services called the number back, and Hind answered. Layan had been killed. Badly injured and the last person alive in the car, Hind described to the dispatcher the Israeli tank that was closing in on her. Dispatchers stayed on the phone with Hind for over an hour, at one point patching in her mother—who had not traveled with the family—as they tried desperately to keep her conscious. She just needed to wait for an ambulance that was getting permission from the Israeli military to travel to her position.

But that ambulance would never arrive. Despite having permission to travel on a specific road, displaying lights, and sounding its siren, the ambulance also came under Israeli fire; the paramedics inside were killed. It would be nearly two weeks before Hind’s uncle could recover the bodies of his loved ones from the bullet-riddled vehicle. The Post describes the moment: “We were only able to deduce their identities,” he recalled.

The student protests at colleges and universities around the country have sparked a furious discussion in part because, as Lydia Polgreen writes in The New York Times, “the way you understand these protests depends on your perception of what they are protesting.” But the banner hanging from Hind’s Hall should remind us of where our attention needs to be focused: on the lives we’ve lost and the horrific ways we’ve lost them.

AND:

• The Oklahoma legislature is considering a new law which would allow judges to offer reduced sentences to domestic abuse survivors who are charged with harming their abusers. One of the women pushing for it, April Wilkens, who served 26 years after fatally shooting her ex-fiancé, wrote recently in Ms., “I testified in my own defense at trial, telling the jury, ‘I had no choice—there was no choice.’”

• On Sunday, WNBA legend Candace Parker announced her retirement from professional basketball—at the ripe old age of 38. Parker is one of the most prolific, influential, seven-thousand-more-adjectives-that-mean-important basketball players of my generation. I would say she’ll be missed, but Parker made it very clear that just because she won’t be playing doesn’t mean she’s walking away from the game: “This is the beginning…I’m attacking business, private equity, ownership (I will own both a NBA & WNBA team)…” Consider me first in line for those tickets.

• Tony nominations are out and the delightful “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” scooped up a whopping five nominations including Best New Play, with Alicia Keys’s musical “Hell’s Kitchen” snagging 13 nods and the Hamiltonesque “Suffs” getting six. Take a look at the full list here.

• Advocates for gender-affirming healthcare (otherwise known as just: healthcare) just won big. On Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that in North Carolina and West Virginia, state insurance plans have to cover the costs of gender-affirming care for trans people, like mastectomies, which were covered in the cases of breast cancer patients. Why? It’s “obviously discriminatory” not to, said the court.

• A new study out of Puerto Rico has found that the island can “feasibly transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050,” but it’s going to take a lot to get there. Journalist Jillian Melero (sister of the much beloved Shannon) breaks it down.

• In this month’s episode of my podcast Who Asked for This? (which only exists in my mind), we are discussing the new upcoming Disney live-action film Mufasa, a prequel to The Lion King, exploring the fatherly lion’s rise to power. Unnecessary! Like all great dead Disney dads, Mufasa’s power as a character lies not in his life but in his untimely death. He was a vehicle for someone else’s story, and seeing as how he is a cartoon lion, there’s nothing wrong with that! Let the dead rest.

• And in podcasts that do exist: Forty years ago, the iconic Vanessa Williams became the first Black woman to be crowned Miss America—but was stripped of her title after a nude photo scandal. On In Retrospect, hosts Jessica Bennett and Susie Banikarim revisit the moment, the racism it revealed, and the last laugh Williams finally got to have. Listen here.

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