(RNS) — As is true for Palestinians across the West Bank, life in the small Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair has become increasingly precarious.
In addition to ongoing demolitions of their homes by the Israeli military, the Bedouin Palestinians living there, most of them shepherds, have been denied access to their grazing lands by encroaching Jewish settlers who have encircled them in an increasingly tight vise.
Two of the village’s leaders, Awdah Hathaleen, and his cousin, Eid Suleiman Hathaleen, were recently invited to talk about their plight to Jewish and Christian congregations in the U.S.
But when they arrived at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday (June 11), U.S. Customs and Border Protection revoked their visas and put them on a plane back home the following day.
Phillip Weintraub, a member of the Bay Area synagogue that was to host the two, was at the airport to greet them Wednesday afternoon. He waited for hours.
“As I understand it, their visas were canceled,” said Weintraub. “I don’t know when they were canceled. We don’t know why they were canceled. Basically it was an act of cruelty beyond imagination for folks coming out of humanitarian vision to thank their friends and raise funds for their children’s village summer camp.”
Jews, Christians and Muslims rallied Thursday, June 12, 2025, for the release of two Palestinians who were denied entry at San Francisco International Airport. (Photo courtesy Ben Linder)
Other Jews, Christians and Muslims who spent all of Thursday agitating for their release were outraged.
“If we can’t have peace activists from Palestine come to the U.S., after they’ve been screened by the U.S. embassy and given visas, what does that mean for the ability to have communication?” said Ben Linder, a volunteer with the Silicon Valley chapter of J Street, the American Jewish organization dedicated to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It’s really a silencing of speech.”
The two Palestinian men live in Masafer Yatta, a region of the South Hebron hills recently featured in the Oscar-winning Israeli-Palestinian documentary “No Other Land.” Awdah Hathaleen, 51, teaches English in a local school and contributes stories to the news outlet +972 Magazine. Eid Suleiman Hathaleen, 42, is a photographer and self-taught artist. His father, Haj Suleiman al-Hathaleen, was a town elder who was run over and killed by an Israeli police truck in 2022.
In an interview with Religion News Service in the village of Umm al-Khair on May 25, both men said they were committed to nonviolent resistance.
“These are our neighbors,” said Eid Suleiman Hathaleen, speaking of the Jewish settlers who live just yards away. “With all my pain, with all my problems with them, with all the violence they do against me, with all the demolitions, I say they are neighbors. I have no problem with them living nearby. My vision of the future is to be equal like them in everything: rights, construction, planning, living in peace.”
Eid Suleiman Hathaleen holds a model of a Caterpillar D11 bulldozer that he built in the West Bank. (Courtesy photo)
The Hathaleen cousins and many others from Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the West Bank, have formed enduring ties with Jewish and Christian peace activists, including members of the Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, California, which adopted the town in a kind of allyship.
In 2022, the synagogue formed a group, Face to Face: Jewish-Palestinian Reparations Alliance. Members of the group met with the two Palestinians via Zoom on a regular basis.
Members of the Kehilla synagogue visited the village and contributed to a summer camp for its children.
Earlier this year they began planning a trip to the U.S. for the two Palestinian activists in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and other groups. They planned to travel to Boston and Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress.
House demolition in Umm al-Khair village in the West Bank in 2016. (Photo by Martin Barzilai)
Weintraub and other interfaith partners, including Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, were able to call on the Bay Area congressional delegation, including former speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, to issue a statement calling for a congressional inquiry into the revoked visas.
“We had a beautiful show of interfaith solidarity over the course of the day and hundreds of people came through. We had a press conference, an interfaith vigil, a rally,” said Billoo. “Unfortunately, we were not able to change the outcome for these two men. They were denied access to counsel during the whole ordeal, and they were returned home.”
On Friday, the two men were scheduled to arrive in Doha, the capitol of Qatar, en route to Amman, Jordan, and then back home to the West Bank.
