Ten Lost Tribes Challenge - India: News from Amman - the first stop en route to India

Due to a maddening airport worker's strike, we were delayed at Ben Gurion Airport for three hours before our flight to Amman, Jordan, the first stop on the way to India.

Some observations about Jordan:

For me, it was the first time flying out of Amman, and seeing where else Royal Jordanian can take you in the Middle East was a tantalizing, yet ultimately disappointing thought. Like many Israelis I know, the thought of traveling to places like Oman, Muscat, Damascus and so many other places is an ingrained hope; maybe one day.

Our guide Eyal says there is a sociology professor at Haifa University who came up with the theory that the reason so many young Israelis travel to India and Thailand after the army is that they're in essence looking for the concept called 'the East' - with its exotic and mystical locations. And because 'the East' is so close to us - in Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad - andwe cannot experience it in these places, we are forced to search for it further afield. Don't know what I think of that theory yet.

It was also my first time flying an Arab airline, and hearing the captain speak Arabic first was interesting. While walking through the airport with Eyal, I noticed how the Jordanian airport security warmed to him when he spoke Arabic to them. I think it's really important that Israelis learn to speak Arabic. We live in an Arabic neighborhood for God's, and Allah's sakes - we should be able to talk to our neighbors one day when they agree to talk to us. Quite funny how Jordanian airport security men talked back to Eyal in Arabic even though he was wearing a kippa on his head.

Even funnier was how the security guard at the metal detector frisked every man's kippa and even tried to look under a few when the men on my expedition walked through the detector.

The flight from Ben Gurion Airport in Lod to Queen Alia International Airport in Amman takes roughly 25 minutes. It takes longer to get on the plane, find your seat, place your carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment, watch the little security video and get an explanation from the air stewards about the emergency exits  - than it does to get there. Flying there basically entails taking off, gaining altitude, and then in an arc, beginning a descent. Up, over and down - and you're there. And from Amman you can fly anywhere in the Middle East.

The Jordan Times was reporting the following stories:

The International Labor Organization reports that unemployment in the Arab World in 2006 stood at 11.8%, twice as much as in the rest of the world. If that's true, and those numbers were not likely to have changed much in a year, then not only the Arab world has a big problem, because as we have seen, unemployment, discontent and radicalism in the Middle East is not confined to that region alone.

There is a campaign, launched in Jordan but spreading out in the Middle East, which would codify national laws here to make it easier to prosecute and punish people convicted of insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammed. The campaign, called "Messenger of Allah Unites Us" aims to codify conventions [some lax, some strong] that would criminalize insults such as, according to many Muslims, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammed's turban as a bomb, which caused an international uproar two years ago. Once the convention is finalized it will be presented to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, and then the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

On a tangential note, Petra is hosting the Fourth International Moderation in Islam conference.

There is violence in Jordan's schools, so much so that the Education Ministry has established a hotline for citizens to report acts of violence.

There are 190 gas stations in Amman, the capital. Last week a fuel shortage was created when gas station owners refused to sell gas to people because the price had been dropping steadily for several weeks, and the owners were incurring losses. The gas station owners are putting pressure on the government to regulate changes in fuel prices and to steady it out, stagger it, and perhaps only have one gas price reduction per month, instead of just lowering the price at the pump whenever the price of oil on the markets drops.

I'd love to see them try that in Israel - they would get crucified.

Amir Mizroch is the News Editor at The Jerusalem Post, a writer and an award-winning blogger. For all of Amir's blogs and articles, visit his personal blog Forecast Highs.

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