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

This isn’t a story about picking sides in a distant conflict. It’s a story about whether the machinery of American diplomacy — the embassies, the consular officers, the State Department press shop — actually shows up for citizens when it counts. Too often, residents say, the answer from officials has been sympathy without follow-through: statements of concern, offers to “monitor the situation,” and little else once the cameras move on.

That’s precisely the kind of institutional drift that “America First” was supposed to fix. The promise wasn’t complicated: no American should have to wonder whether their own government has their back. If the passport isn’t backed by consequences for those who violate an American citizen’s safety and property, it isn’t worth much more than the paper it’s printed on — and foreign actors, official or otherwise, take note of that fast.

What Accountability Would Look Like

Residents aren’t asking for anything radical. They want the same protection any American would expect if this happened in Paris or Mexico City: real consular intervention, real consequences for those responsible, and real public acknowledgment from Washington when an American citizen is harmed. So far, families in Turmus Ayya say that bar hasn’t consistently been met, regardless of which administration was in office when the incident occurred.

The residents welding bars over their windows and flying flags over their rooftops aren’t asking Washington for sympathy. They’re asking for the follow-through that the phrase “America First” is supposed to guarantee. Until that happens consistently, their message to Washington will keep being the same one Yaser Alkem has been delivering for years: this passport is supposed to matter. Right now, on the ground in Turmus Ayya, too many families aren’t sure it does.