Father of American teen killed in West Bank by Israeli fire rails against US support for Israel Conspiracy
AL-MAZRA’A ASHSHARQIYA, West Bank — The father of an American teen killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank railed against Washington’s military support for Israel, as hundreds of mourners buried the 17-year-old in the family’s ancestral Palestinian village Saturday.
The death of Tawfiq Ajaq on Friday drew an immediate expression of concern from the White House and a pledge from Israeli police to investigate.
It was the latest fatal shooting in the West Bank, where nearly 370 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza more than three months ago. The Biden administration has repeatedly expressed concern about violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in recent months.
During Saturday’s funeral, the teen’s father criticized the long-standing U.S. support for Israel. “They are killer machines,” he said of Israeli forces. “They are using our tax dollars in the U.S. to support the weapons to kill our own children.”
Tawfiq Ajaq was born and raised in Gretna, Louisiana, near New Orleans, relatives said. His parents brought him and his four siblings to the village of Al-Mazra’a Ash-Sharqiya last year so they could reconnect with Palestinian culture.
On Saturday, crowds of Palestinians pulsed through village streets, following men who held aloft a stretcher with the teen’s body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag.
Hafez Ajaq implored Americans to “see with their own eyes” the ongoing violence in the West Bank.
“The American society does not know the true story,” he said. “Come here on the ground and see what’s going on . ... How many fathers and mothers have to say goodbye to their children? How many more?”
The circumstances of the shooting remained unclear.
Ajaq’s relative, Joe Abdel Qaki, said that Ajaq and a friend were having a barbecue in a village field when he was shot by Israeli fire, once in the head and once in the chest.
Abdel Qaki said he arrived at the field shortly after the shooting and helped transport Ajaq to an ambulance. He said Israeli forces briefly detained him and other Palestinians at the scene, asking for their IDs before the men could get to Ajaq.
He said Ajaq died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Israeli police said they received a report Friday regarding a “firearm discharge, ostensibly involving an off-duty law enforcement officer, a soldier and a civilian.” Police did not identify who fired the shot, though it said the shooting targeted people “purportedly engaged in rock-throwing activities along Highway 60,” the main north-south thoroughfare in the West Bank.
Al-Mazra’a Ash-Sharqiya is located just east of the highway.
Police said the incident would be investigated. Investigations of those involved in fatal shootings of Palestinians by Israel’s police and military have rarely yielded speedy results, and indictments are uncommon.
Asked about the shooting, U.S. national security spokesman John Kirby said that officials at the White House were “seriously concerned about these reports.”
“The information is scant at this time. We don’t have perfect context about exactly what happened here,” Kirby said. “We’re going to be in constant touch with counterparts in the region to — to get more information.”
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas staged its deadly attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage, Israeli forces have clamped down on suspected militants in the West Bank, carrying out near nightly arrest raids.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says 369 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7. Most of the Palestinians were killed during shootouts in the West Bank that the Israeli military says began during operations to arrest Palestinian gunmen. In several documented instances, Israeli forces and settlers have killed Palestinians who witnesses report were not engaged in violence.
The U.S. has given military and diplomatic support to Israel’s war on Hamas, but has urged Israel to scale back the intensity of its attacks. Nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in Israel’s offensive, Gaza health officials said.
Israel captured the West Bank, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for a future independent state.
The result has been a new political terrain. What was once at the edges had worked its way toward the heart of the discourse.
To some, the fringe has gone all the way to the White House. In the Society’s offices, they’ll tell you that Donald Trump would never have been elected if they hadn’t paved the way.
“The bulk of Trump’s campaign was Birch,” Art Thompson, a retired Society CEO who remains one of its most prominent voices, says proudly. “All he did was bring it out into the open.”
There’s some truth in that, even if Thompson is overstating things.
The Society had spent decades calling for a populist president who would preach patriotism, oppose immigration, pull out of international treaties and root out the forces trying to undermine America. Trump may not have realized it, but when he warned about a “Deep State” — a supposed cabal of bureaucrats that secretly controls U.S. policy — he was repeating a longtime Birch talking point.
A savvy reality TV star, Trump capitalized on a conservative political landscape that had been shaped by decades of right-wing talk radio, fears about America’s seismic cultural shifts and the explosive online spread of misinformation.
While the Birch Society echoes in that mix, tracing those echoes is impossible. It’s hard to draw neat historical lines in American politics. Was the Society a prime mover, or a bit player? In a nation fragmented by social media and offshoot groups by the dozens, there’s just no way to be sure. What is certain, though, is this:
“The conspiratorial fringe is now the conspiratorial mainstream,” says Paul Matzko, a historian and research fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “Right-wing conspiracism has simply outgrown the John Birch Society.”
Their beliefs skip along the surface of the truth, with facts and rumors and outright fantasies banging together into a complex mythology. “The great conspiracy” is what Birch Society founder Robert Welch called it in “The Blue Book,” the collection of his writings and speeches still treated as near-mystical scripture in the Society’s corridors.
Welch, a wealthy candy company executive, formed the Society in the late 1950s, naming it for an American missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communist Chinese forces. Welch viewed Birch as the first casualty of the Cold War. Communist agents, he said, were everywhere in America.
Welch shot to prominence, and infamy, when he claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of World War II, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Also under Kremlin control, Welch asserted: the secretary of state, the head of the CIA, and Eisenhower’s younger brother Milton.
Subtlety has never been a strong Birch tradition. Over the decades, the Birch conspiracy grew to encompass the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, public education, the United Nations, the civil rights movement, The Rockefeller Foundation, the space program, the COVID pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and climate-change activism. In short, things the Birchers don’t like.
The plot’s leaders — “insiders,” in Society lexicon — range from railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt to former President George H.W. Bush and Bill Gates, whose vaccine advocacy is, they say, part of a plan to control the global population. While his main focus was always communism, Welch eventually came to believe that the conspiracy’s roots twisted far back into history, to the Illuminati, an 18th-century Bavarian secret society.
By the 1980s, the Society was well into its decline. Welch died in 1985 and the society’s reins passed to a series of successors. There were internal revolts. While its aura has waned, it is still a force among some conservatives — its videos are popular in parts of right-wing America, and its offices include a sophisticated basement TV studio for internet news reports. Its members speak at right-wing conferences and work booths at the occasional county fair.
Scholars say its ranks are far reduced from the 1960s and early 1970s, when membership estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. “Membership is something that has been closely guarded since day one,” says Bill Hahn, who became CEO in 2020. He will only say the organization “continues to be a growing operation.”
Today, the Society frames itself as almost conventional. Almost.
“We have succeeded in attracting mainstream people,” says Steve Bonta, a top editor for the Society’s New American magazine. The group has toned down the rhetoric and is a little more careful these days about throwing around accusations of conspiracies. But members still believe in them fiercely.
“As Mr. Welch came out with on Day One: There is a conspiracy,” Hahn says. “It’s no different today than it was back in December 1958.”
It can feel that way. Ask about the conspiracy’s goal, and things swerve into unexpected territory. The sharp rhetoric re-emerges and, once again, the decades seem to fall away.
“They really want to cut back on the population of the Earth. That is their intent,” Thompson says.
But why?
“Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it?” he responds. “It makes no sense. But that’s the way they think.”