The murder of Saif

A brief thought on the murder of Palestinian-American Saif Musallet

I knew Saif Musallet through Ice Sssscreamin’, the ice cream store he ran with his family in Tampa. It was founded by a different Palestinian man early in the Covid years but the business was slowing down before Saif’s family purchased it. He and his family turned the business around, and it once again became a hub of activity in its local strip mall. They returned to the business model the previous owner had begun with but seemingly abandoned of sourcing their ice cream from Yoder’s, a specialist Amish creamery in Florida, and selling it at an affordable price. There’s plenty of ice cream stores in Florida, and offering delicious Amish ice cream for modest prices was one way to stand out (nothing speaks more of the cosmopolitan nature of Tampa than Palestinian Muslims selling ice cream from Amish Anabaptists to us godless heathens in the University).

He and his family would expand upon this model by adding an assortment of new treats like waffles on a stick, or trying out new flavors like the trendy Dubai chocolate (a mix of chocolate, pistachio, and the Arab delicacy of Kadayif). Since I was often sitting outside the neighboring coffee shop writing or reading, I benefited from this constant experimentation. Every time they tried out a new dish they would have to make one to practice its creation and act as a model for their marketing materials. Once the treat had been photographed from every angle and shared on social media, they would hand it over to someone they new as a freebie. I was a beneficiary of this more than a few times.

I took my daughter and wife there more than a few times. There was another good ice cream store closer to where we lived in Temple Terrace, Florida, but we frequented Saif’s at least as often. The whole family of boys did most of the work (it was only in the past year or so where they’ve hired a couple other people), though the dad and uncle came to help a lot. Saif served us ice cream many times, and he was consistently gracious. It seems trivial perhaps to praise someone for good customer service, but the kindness always seemed authentic.

I got to know the family a bit better while working late at night outside the neighboring coffee shop. I would sit outside writing and editing, and frequently ended up chatting with them (he and his brothers always let me charge my computer in their store when the coffee shop closed too). This gave me a chance to learn more about them. I discovered their family hailed from the West Bank, that they knew the owner of the coffee shop through various family relations, and how the boys were born in the United States. I learned their stories (good and bad) from visiting the West Bank and interacting with soldiers and settlers. Occasionally, they asked me my opinions too, whether about the fate of their home country or other things.

Despite his being 20 and the eldest of the kids running it, they really did turn the business around. It was always clean, well managed, well stocked, and popular. I know I would not have been able to do such a thing at their age. In fact, they’re the only case of kids their age running a business so successfully. They actually seemed to succeed at that mythic “American dream” I love to otherwise dismiss as a fable. Perhaps the only youth I know personally to have done so.

This past Friday, Zeteo shared an article about how an American citizen was murdered by Israeli settlers. I saw the picture in the article was of Saif, and was hoping it was just a doppleganger. Then I saw it mentioned how he was a 20 year old businessman who ran an ice cream store in the Tampa area with his family. I asked around among my friends in Tampa and they confirmed it was him. I also recalled him telling me how he’d be going to the West Bank some time over the summer to be with his family.

The town, Al Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya, can be seen in this map to the north-east of the West Bank’s capital Ramallah (from google maps)

The settlers had invaded his family’s land. Being a young man visiting the home of his mother, he quite understandably came out to defend his family abode. The settlers assaulted him, and prevented the ambulance from taking him to the hospital for three hours. Another Palestinian relative was shot dead, and he passed away before arriving at the hospital. Assaulting a kid because he happens to have the wrong ethno-national heritage is hard for me to understand, but to then block life-saving medical care afterwards puts in on a different level of base inhumanity. Despite having legal rights and freedom, the people who killed him anyways reduced themselves below the level of base apes. It’s high time to step back and question what conditions lead a society to provide anyone like that with de facto impunity for such violence, let alone entire mobs of them. It might also be high time to ask serious questions about an ideology that justifies depriving the rights of millions over ethnic demographics.

The family has demanded that the US government conduct an investigation and hold people accountable. I will not hold my breath that they will actually do anything, but the fact is that as a US citizen, he at least has some more protections than the stateless, non-citizen majority living in the West Bank. As I mentioned, another relative was also killed but his status as a mere Palestinian instead of also a US citizen deprives him of any meaningful representation. What an incoherent (and by the standards of our time, deeply unjust) arrangement for people to live under.

To be clear, I did not know him through politics. Politics did come up in our conversations, but he’s not some Palestinian radical I know through some activist group. He’s just a kid with an ice cream store. This kind of meaningless, brutal violence is something I can understand in theory, but it suddenly becomes that much more alien and incomprehensible when it comes home.