Calif. He is spending three months with relatives in Deir Dibwan. A prosperous town about 15 miles northeast of Jerusalem, Deir Dibwan may be the most pro-American place in the Palestinian territories. Nearly everyone here has spent time in or has relatives in the United States, connections that explain why the town is unusually moderate. Locals estimate that more than half of Deir Dibwan's 15,000 residents hold U.S. passports - part of a tradition that began decades ago when a small number of residents went to America, later bringing their relatives. Children grow up with the expectation they will go to the United States, perhaps to attend college or join a family business.
Adults sometimes return to spend their summers here, or to retire.
But even here, most residents are so exasperated with U.S. Mideast policy that they are reluctant to offer an open-ended endorsement of any action the American military might take in response to the suicide attacks in New York and Washington. He even has a bit of a Queens accent from spending his summers with his father and five brothers in the New York City borough. Yet he finds himself torn when traveling between the two worlds. Mansour said the boys at his high school were extremely upset by the death of all the innocent people at the World Trade Center in New York. But they took a very different view of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon, seeing it as an attack on the U.S. military.