Amman

Airlines threatened with fines if they fly Palestinians to Cairo.

A world heritage site is under threat from ongoing colonialism.

On the opening day of a Cirque du Soleil revue in Amman, scores of demonstrators lined the sidewalks leading to the VIP entrance to protest the group’s upcoming performance in Tel Aviv.

The pro-Israel rhetoric of some election hopefuls is so extreme that they make George W. Bush seem reasonable by comparison.

For a long time any discussion of the “Arab-Israeli conflict” has skipped one basic fact: Israel, whether one loves or hates it, was created at the expense of the Palestinians. An entire people and hundreds of communities that had lived for centuries in tranquility had to be ruthlessly and unjustly shattered to make room for the Zionist state. The story of my village, Battir, southwest of Jerusalem, is only one of hundreds. EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah recalls his village’s story.

One afternoon in May 1948, my village Battir fell under heavy fire from the opposite slopes, across the railway line to the west, which had fallen to the Jewish fighters. We carried whatever belongings we could and headed east a few miles where there were vineyards and a small spring. We thought it would be a short escape, but we camped in that vineyard with many other people from the village all summer, our hopes dimming as the heat rose. EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah recalls his village in the first part of a two-part series.

I’ll never forget his face. He held his hand to his ear listening to his earpiece as he stared right at me. He smiled as I struggled to carry all my bags, following a young female soldier with my passport in her hand. I no longer cared at that point and I stared back as hard as I could — cursing him with my eyes. She walked me to the bus stop and handed my passport to another soldier. She walked me to the bus stop and handed my passport to another soldier. I waited in the blistering heat silent and motionless.

The situation of Laura and Ibrahim is just one of many created by the latest Israeli policy to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians. As their lawyers told them, “The Israeli government wants the least number of Palestinians in the Palestinian territories.” In mid-August, they left Ramallah for Amman, thinking it would be for just a few days, in order to renew their three-month visas to stay legally in Israeli-occupied Ramallah. Their daughter was visiting them in Palestine from the US, and she stayed behind, waiting for them to come back so she could spend the last two weeks of her summer vacation with them. But when they arrived at Tel Aviv Airport, they were detained for a night.