Hebron, July 27 - An area activist for Palestinian indigenous rights, whose own ancestry as attested in his last name places his clan’s origins in Africa, insists on referring to the native-born prime minister of Israel by the czar-imposed Polish name his family carried until Hebraicizing in the 1920s upon immigration to the Holy Land, to highlight the “foreign pedigree” of Jews returning to the ancestral Jewish homeland.

Mahmoud al-Masri, a 44-year-old activist and frequent social-media commentator, has spent the past several years insisting that all references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu render his surname “Mileikowsky.”

Al-Masri, whose own family name is the standard Arabic term for “Egyptian,” calls the issue a matter of historical honesty. “People need to know the truth,” he posted on X this week. “This man is not some indigenous Middle Easterner. His real name is Mileikowsky. His family came from Europe. Calling him Netanyahu is just propaganda, as if those European Jews have some connection to the language, land, and culture that they preserved in Europe for thousands of years.”

“It’s ridiculous, compared to what we Palestinians bring to the table,” he continued. “Prevalent surnames among our clans give irrefutable evidence of indigeneity to Palestine: surnames that place our ancestors in the Hejaz, North Africa, the Balkans, Iraq, northern Syria, and various parts of the Arabian Peninsula. You don’t get much more Palestinian than that.”

Al-Masri maintains that this genealogical detail disqualifies Netanyahu from any legitimate claim to the country. “He is a foreign implant,” al-Masri said. “You cannot change your name and suddenly become native.”

Al-Masri showed similar dismissiveness for Jewish practices rooted in the ancient geography of Israel. “We Palestinians are the same people who were here thousands of years ago,” he asserted. “The Jews are aliens. That’s why Jews maintain a calendar, liturgy, and laws centered on attachment to, longing for, and practices based on, a living connection to this land, whereas Palestinian culture is functionally indistinguishable from that of the Levant in general, and the Arab world at large, with nothing specifically ‘Palestinian’ about its lore, demographics, or religious observance. It’s a slam dunk who’s indigenous and who just happens to be here now.”

Al-Masri also observed the unbreakable connection to the land manifest in the large-scale flight of Arabs at the prospect of war with the Jews in 1947 and 1948, while the obviously-alien Jews showed their true colors by staying to fight.

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