Standing Alone by Asra Nomani

Author:Asra Nomani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

TRAVEL WARNINGS AND WAR CLOUDS

ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM—Just before we left the United States, the State Department had issued a travel warning. “The Department of State warns U.S. citizens to defer travel to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.” It cited “numerous civilian deaths and injuries, including to some American tourists, students, and residents. The potential for further terrorist acts remains high.” It warned Americans to stay away from restaurants, cafés, shopping malls, pedestrian zones, public buses, and bus stops in Israel. To cover any place it might have missed, the warning added “other crowded areas and venues” to the list of off-limits sites. It mentioned Jerusalem as a place in which travelers should be particularly careful.

CNN had reported that the White House raised the terrorist alert level because of the hajj and that the U.S. was pulling diplomats out of Jordan and Israel. To get to al-Aqsa, we would be going straight into the heart of the warning—Jerusalem—and we were going to be at public tourist sites and staying at a public hotel.

“Let’s not go,” my mother said quickly.

“No, it’ll be fine,” I said with no authority at all.

As we were leaving our hotel in Amman, war clouds loomed over the Middle East. Journalists from John Burns of the New York Times to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius and ABC’s Diane Sawyer had come through Amman to cover the impending war in Iraq. In Saudi Arabia the Arab News published a story with the dateline “Occupied Jerusalem” and the headline “War in Two Weeks.”

News reports said Israel had issued an emergency call-up for reservists to man Patriot antimissile systems. And tensions remained between Israelis and Palestinians. The Jordan Times reported: “The Israeli occupation army pressed on with the relentless arrests of suspected Palestinian resistance activists, netting more than two dozen in swoops on Palestinians celebrating Eid ul Adha, the festival of sacrifice.”

The front page showed four young Palestinian boys on a donkey cart in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, watching the funeral procession of two young Palestinian men who had been killed trying to infiltrate the Dugit Jewish settlement. While we were in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Gazette had included a column from the government-appointed imam of the mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, that stoked the fires of hatred for Israel and Zionism, the movement that created Israel:

The Muslim ummah is being targeted by overt and covert conspiracies of the enemies such as the Zionist whose evil actions in Palestine, and [their onslaught] against the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest place of Islam, are [clear] indications of arrogance and terrorism. Allah who protects the Holy Ka’bah and the two Harams [the sacred places of Mecca’s and Medina’s mosques] shall also protect al-Aqsa Mosque from evil machinations.

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