I used to think that living in America meant I could speak about what happens to Palestinians without fearing what my own government might do to me.
I knew people would disagree. I knew some people would think I was crazy, doubt what I was saying, or call me a liar. But I thought I could say what I believed and still trust that I would be treated fairly here. I was born here. I went to school here. Everything I have built is here.
But growing up, there was always a part of me that felt like we were going somewhere else.
My dad was born in Palestine in 1963. My mom was born in America, but her dad was born in Palestine too. So I guess that made me something like a one-and-a-half-generation American. I never really knew how to explain it. I just knew that my experience at home felt different from the lives I imagined my friends had.
We went to school with Italians, Irish, Polish, Mexican, Black, Chinese, and so many other kids. Everybody came from somewhere, but to me, most of them seemed like their families had already figured out how to be American. They had roots here. They seemed comfortable in a way I did not always feel.
We tried to fit in too. But then we would come home, and I would feel that there was another place we belonged to. Somewhere we were supposed to go back to one day.
At least that is how I remember it.
I think my dad came here believing he would make money in America and go home successful. I do not know how clearly he ever said that to us, or how long he held on to that plan. But even as a child, I think I felt it. I could feel how badly he wanted to succeed, and I understood that success as something he would eventually take back home.
We ended up staying longer than I think he imagined. Maybe life just kept happening. There was work, there were children, there was always another reason to stay.
But he made sure we did not forget who we were.
We went to Arabic and Islamic school on Sundays. He made sure we could speak Arabic, read it, and write it. He made sure we could recite the Quran. These things mattered to him, and because they mattered to him, they became part of our lives before we were old enough to decide what they meant to us.
We were American, but we were Palestinian first. That was how it felt in our house.
Every summer, we would go back to visit my grandparents. We would spend our summer break there, speaking more Arabic, being around our family, and learning things that nobody could have taught us in a classroom here.
We learned how people lived. We heard their stories. We learned about our history and about what happened in 1948, when my grandfather was there. We learned about the loss of land, about Israel, and about the struggle my dad had grown up with.
When you hear those things from your own family, they stay with you differently. You remember who told you. You remember being in their home. Years later, when someone argues with you about Palestine, you are thinking about people you know and places you have been.
Then the summer would end, and we would come back to America. I would go back to school with all of that in my head, around people who often knew very little about it.
For a long time, I did not know how to explain that part of my life.
As I got older, I wanted to understand more. I studied politics at Loyola and then at Saint Xavier. I read Mearsheimer and Walt and wrote about the Israeli lobby, its influence on American foreign policy, and the support Israel receives from both sides of the aisle.
I wanted to understand why our government made the choices it did. Why support for Israel seemed so firmly established, and why the things Palestinians were saying about their own lives seemed to have so little effect on it.
I had grown up hearing my family’s experiences. In college, I was trying to understand the politics that helped shape them.
After I graduated from Saint Xavier, I worked for about a year as a paralegal at Stahulak & Associates in the Monadnock Building in Chicago. Then I got accepted to John Marshall Law School.
At that point, I thought I was going to become a lawyer.
I went for a year. Then I dropped out and decided to start a business.
I started Five Star Vacation Rentals, renting Airbnb properties in the city. I did that for about four years. It was the business that gave me a chance to save money and eventually try something else.
In 2016, I took money I had saved from that business and invested it in Bitcoin. This was before the price took off the following year, before so many people who had never thought about Bitcoin started paying attention to it.
Eventually, I started Crypto Dispensers with one Bitcoin ATM in Chicago.
One machine. That was where it started.
I was the founder and CEO, but in the beginning those titles did not mean there was some big company behind me. I was trying to build one. I had taken money I earned from a business I started and put it into something I believed could grow.
Over time, that one machine became 60 Bitcoin ATM locations.
I spent years building Crypto Dispensers. It became the work I put my time, my money, and so much of my life into. When you start something from scratch, you remember how small it was. Even as it grows, you still carry the memory of what it took to get the first part working.
Eventually, I wanted to take the company beyond ATMs. We partnered with Green Dot Bank and developed Crypto Dispensers into an online cryptocurrency exchange through a web application. We were moving from hardware to software, building on what I had started with that first machine in Chicago.
There were years between each of those steps. Years of working, saving, learning, and putting what I had earned into the next thing.
That is the part of my life I want people to understand before they read what comes next.
Today, I am under federal indictment on money laundering charges.
I still struggle with how quickly that sentence can change the way somebody sees me. They can read it without knowing anything about the years before it. They do not know about the vacation rental business, the money I saved, the first ATM, or how long it took to build the company.
They see the accusation, and for some people, that becomes enough.
For me, everything before it is still there. I remember building it. I know what I put into it. And now I have to live with the possibility of losing so much of what I spent those years working toward.
I am also a husband and a father now. So when I think about my future, I am thinking about my family’s future too. What happens to me happens to them. That is something I carry every day.
I look around the Bitcoin ATM industry and see companies much larger than mine whose operators, to my knowledge, have not faced comparable federal indictments. I want to understand why. I want to know what makes my case different and whether the same standards are being applied across the industry.
I want those questions answered by looking at the actual conduct, the evidence, and the decisions made in each case.
And there is another question I keep coming back to, even though I know some people will doubt me for asking it.
Did being Palestinian, and speaking openly about Israel and the influence of its lobbying organizations, play a part in how I was treated?
I believe it may have. I want to know whether that belief is justified. I want to understand whether my identity or my writing entered into decisions that now affect my freedom and my family’s life.
I think about what I studied in college and what I wrote about before I ever started Crypto Dispensers. I think about how much influence pro-Israel organizations seek to have over American policy, and I wonder what that means for Palestinians here who challenge them.
Influence over the government matters to someone whose life is now in the government’s hands. I want to know how that power was exercised in my case. I want to know that my speech had nothing to do with it.
Until I have those answers, I find myself wondering whether things would be different if I had stayed quiet.
I never thought I would ask myself that as an American.
Growing up, I thought the difficult part was figuring out how to belong to two places. At home, my dad made sure we knew we were Palestinian. Outside, I was learning how to be American. As I got older, went to college, started businesses, got married, and became a father, I thought I was building a life where those parts of me could exist together.
Now I find myself reading my own words and wondering whether I should say less.
I think about my dad and the life he hoped to build when he came here. I think about how much of that hope I carried into my own work, even after his life and ours became rooted in America.
And I think about what he spent all those years making sure we remembered.
I do not want to become afraid to speak about where we came from. I also have a family to think about, and I would be lying if I said I never wondered whether silence would make our lives easier.
I want to defend myself fairly. I want the evidence examined. I want to know that I am being treated by the same standards as anyone else.
And I want to feel at home in the country where I was born, without feeling that I have to keep part of myself quiet to stay safe here.
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