The Last OG
Some time ago, a movie came out titled “The Last of the Mohicans.” As the granddaughter of Nakba survivors from Haifa, Palestine, I could not help but make the analogy with my family. My grandfather, Karim Gedeon, was one of six siblings and my grandmother, Mikal Nasr, one of five. Until May 6th she was the last one standing. The others, may they rest in peace, have all found their way to Jesus in the past few years.
Because my grandmother was the last one alive, my cousin teasingly gave her the colloquial nickname of “The Last OG”.[i] She, too, had made the same analogy I did when recognising that our grandmother was the last authentic Palestinian Christian matriarch. Naturally, Mikal Nasr was not the last authentic Palestinian born and raised in Palestine, but to us, she is the last one in our family. All the generations after her were born and raised in exile. She was 18 years old when they fled in 1948. I was just a few years younger than that when I discovered that half my heritage is Palestinian. I was always led to believe that we were Lebanese.
It was taboo to be Palestinian when I was young. Being Palestinian meant being stateless, homeless, unprivileged: a second-class human. It meant our identity was always questioned. It took Arafat signing the Oslo Accords in 1992 for me to discover the truth about my family. That day, I watched my dad cursing the television almost as though it was this innate object’s fault that Palestine was yet again being partitioned. Only then did I understand that all these stereotypes of Palestinians being subhuman, were nothing but false propaganda to erase from this world the beauty of being Palestinian; of being the closest people to the birthplace of the greatest humanist in history. For centuries, my people shuffled down the same streets as Jesus walked on. Yet for the past 76 years they have been treated inhumanely.
We had a country. It was stolen from us. We were not homeless! In fact, my grandfather’s family owned an entire street in Haifa still carrying his name today. They now spell it Gid’on to make it look more Hebrew than Arabic. The family possessed a bakery and other small businesses, as well as most of the buildings on Gedeon’s street. They also helped in taking care of the convent of nuns that resided on the street. The convent is now an Israeli establishment.
As for my grandmother, her parents owned a couple of apartment buildings in the Jewish quarters where they lived and rented units. Teta Mikey, as we called her, always reminded me that they fled without taking anything of value from their home, not even a picture, just some clothes and personal items.
One day, in an old shoe box, I found a postcard that she had received in 1947 in Haifa. I saw the address where she lived till her late teens. I searched it in google maps. When I saw the old stones, I was certain she would recognize the buildings. She did! At the age of 94, my grandmother told me the story of all the people who rented her parents’ apartments and stores. She mainly spoke to me of the first floor, where a lot of Europeans of Jewish faith had arrived in the late 1930s, seeking refuge from the widespread persecutions of Jews in Europe at the time.
Teta Mikey spoke to me to of the shoemaker and his two daughters. They rented the first of the stores. They made the front into a workshop and the back into an apartment for they had little means. She became close friends with the girls. They came from Hungary. She remembered that they would play on the flat rooftop of the building with pebbles, old games no longer played.
The next unit was rented by a Polish family that sold nuts and candy. My grandma perfected her Hebrew language with the lady of the house – the only woman who tried to defend my grandmother when the war broke. Teta Mikey recalled how a mob of settlers pushed the candy store owner to the side as they proceeded to invade the building. My family lost everything to the very people who had found a safe haven on our properties. Five generations down, the cynicism and inhumanity of it all is still traumatising to us.
Most of these Europeans stole my family’s homes. They claimed to be Israeli – a fabricated identity and state, given to them by a people who did not even own the land. My grandmother has been naturalized Lebanese and then Canadian, but she is truly from a country called Palestine. She is our Last OG.
I was compelled to write about her a few weeks ago when she was on her death bed. I wanted to keep a record of all that she has taught me.
On May 6, 2025 my Palestinian family’s Last OG, our Teta Mikey, passed away. She was 95 years old. She was older than the creation of the settler colonial genocidal state of Israel.
The many hardships she endured made her a difficult woman to deal with. Yet I am forever grateful to her. She offered us the legacy of our culture and identity. For me particularly she opened the doors back into our roots. Her stories have forged my views, and when we got into heated arguments, she would end it by saying: “You have become more Palestinian than me!”
She may not be wrong. It is not just my right but my duty. I may never be able to touch the same stone walls she has, nor smell the sent of the jasmine bushes as she described them. The ones that grew in my grandfather’s yard and filled the night air with there delicate perfume. There are many simple basic things I may never be able to do on our homeland, as she did. But I can and I will keep talking about our beloved Palestine, not just to honour her memory but to let the world know that the inhumane injustices have not stopped since Teta Mikey has been kicked out of her home at 18 years old by a Zionist mob.
These are the reasons you will see many exiled Palestinians like me hold on dearly to our values and our traditions, proudly walking around in our Thobes[ii] as though they are the only legal certificate we have left, of being descendants of many an OG. To honour them and to claim back what is rightfully ours. We will never forget, and we will hold close to our hearts the family home key as our grandparents did.
Today’s situation in Palestine is a result of all that has happened in Europe since the end of the 1800s. A simple way to understand the truth, is to ask Israelis where they are from. More often than not, they will have been naturalized Israeli anytime between 1948 and today, and they will all have a passport that is either American, European or Canadian; some will even be Moroccan. They have the choice of being Israeli because they are of Jewish faith. We Palestinians have passports from all over the world with the exception of our natural birthplace or homeland. We do not have a choice; we are forced to be from some other place. We have never been allowed to return home. We are not allowed to simply be Palestinian.
My prayer and my hope are that through my children we will one day create a whole new generation of OGs. This way, even if the world continues to aid a genocidal state, we may ensure that sometime in the future, the west will not watch a real-life movie titled “The Last of the Palestinians.”
