Drive into Turmus Ayya, a hillside town northeast of Ramallah, and the first thing you notice isn’t the landscaped gardens or the red-tiled roofs. It’s the American flags — dozens of them, flying over homes built by decades of hard work in places like Syracuse, Anaheim, and New Jersey. This is a town where, by most estimates, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of residents hold U.S. citizenship. And increasingly, it’s a town where that citizenship hasn’t been enough.

Dr. Hassan Shukri built his career as a respected neurologist in East Syracuse, New York. During a recent visit to the family home he still owns in Turmus Ayya, Israeli soldiers entered the property and gave the family roughly one hour to gather their belongings and leave, according to reporting from Palestinian media outlets. It wasn’t the first time. Two years earlier, soldiers had occupied the same home for days.

For Yaser Alkem, a longtime California resident who returned to Turmus Ayya after 35 years in Anaheim and now serves as the town’s head of foreign relations, the frustration has become personal and constant. After a violent settler attack left an international activist injured, Alkem didn’t mince words: Americans in Turmus Ayya, he said, feel they have nowhere left to turn but their own country — and that country has, so far, let them down. He’s said his community has asked the U.S. embassy for help “many, many times,” largely without result.

A Question That Should Be Simple

That question got sharper still after 14-year-old Amer Rabee — an American kid from Saddle Brook, New Jersey — was shot and killed by Israeli forces while visiting family in Turmus Ayya last year. His cousin Mohammed Rabee said simply that Amer believed his American passport meant freedom and protection. His family and neighbors wanted to hear directly from the White House. For days, they largely didn’t.

That silence should trouble anyone who believes, as the “America First” doctrine holds, that the full weight of the U.S. government is supposed to stand behind every citizen, everywhere — not just the ones whose cases make for easy headlines. A passport isn’t supposed to come with an asterisk. It isn’t supposed to matter whether the citizen holding it lives in Manhattan or Turmus Ayya.

Where the System Is Failing