Mona Abdel Jabbar felt her teenage son Tawfic should get to know his Palestinian relatives and connect with his family’s heritage.
So last spring, they put their life in New Orleans temporarily on hold and moved to their ancestral village north of Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank.
By all accounts, Tawfic’s experience was exactly what his family had hoped for. His mother says he made friends and was exploring the area as he prepared to return to the U.S. to start a university engineering program.
“He loved it here,” Abdel Jabbar told CBC News in the village of Al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. “He enjoyed riding horses. He enjoyed just being
