By Josh Ruebner, contributor
“I usually wear a suit, but I wanted to represent my son today,” Siam Nawarah explained after walking the halls of Congress and meeting with the State Department earlier this month.
The 43-year-old Palestinian father and successful salon owner from the West Bank city of Ramallah, with a youthful face that breaks into a sly grin in lighter moments, sported a black T-shirt with a picture of his 17-year-old son Nadeem wearing a baseball cap backwards, a keffiyeh — a Palestinian scarf — wrapped around his neck, and an ear-to-ear smile.
Nawarah made the long journey to Washington to pursue justice for Israel’s killing of his son on May 15, 2014, convinced that the same government that may have given the Israeli Border Police the M-16 rifle that extinguished Nadeem’s brief life would now help him hold Israel accountable for the atrocity.