Abdul Nasser was from Gaza, which along with the West
Bank of the Jordan River, was seized by the Israeli military
in 1967. The world refers to these areas as the “Occupied
Territories.” The United Nations, including the United
States, affirmed that Israel’s occupation of Gaza
and the West Bank violated the UN Charter and ordered
Israel to return the captured lands. But Israel chose
not to comply.
To Abdul and his family these territories are Palestine,
while many Israelis and Jews around the world claim
Gaza and the West Bank as part of Eretz Israel, the
land of Israel that belongs to the descendants of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob because it was given to them by God
as recorded in the Hebrew scriptures. According to the
theology of the Jewish people, Abdul Nasser and his
family are descendants of Abraham’s oldest son
Ishmael rather than the second son, Isaac. Nearly 3,000
years ago Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, were banished
by Abraham, so they have no right to live in the Promised
Land given to the Jewish people as a gift from their
God. Abdul’s parents say that Abraham’s Hebrew
descendents are now fulfilling the ancient directives
of this pre-historic family conflict by expelling the
Palestinians.
Abdul’s father had often told his family of how
even before the 1967 Israeli territorial expansion,
Palestinian lands had been confiscated in order to create
the Jewish nation. As early as June 1938, one of the
Jewish leaders, David Ben-Gurion, advocated the ‘compulsory
transfer’ of Palestinians to make room for the
Jews. To implement this process, on March 10, 1948 Ben
Gurion and the other Zionist leaders created the ‘Plan
Dalet,’ a six-month campaign of terror in which
531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, many Palestinians
were killed, and nearly a million Palestinians were
driven from their homes. Hundreds of thousands fled
to different countries. Palestinians call this period
the nakba, or ‘catastrophe.’ Abdul’s
paternal grandfather was among the dead. David Ben-Gurion,
the architect of the terror, became the first prime
minister of Israel.
Even after the state of Israel emerged from British
colonial rule on May 15, 1948, two-thirds of the population
was still Palestinian. So the master plan of Prime Minister
Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership was to remove
or eliminate at least 400,000 more Palestinians. The
Zionist militia in Palestine, the Hagana High Command,
gave orders to its troops using the Hebrew word tihur,
for ‘cleansing.’
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