Why Israel's 1948 displacement of Palestinians still hurts-especially amid the war in Gaza.

The Holy Land and its syzygy of faiths has no natives, only interlopers. Nobody calls holiness home—although, ironically, doing so is an all-too-human habit. Of the millions of interlopers over millennia in what is today Israel-Palestine, two matter most to me: a pair of 12th-century brothers who lived a day's trek from Venice and pilgrimaged—crusaded even, since it was during the Third Crusade—all the way to Bethlehem to serve as tarājmeh (interpreters) between priests and pilgrims at the Church of the Nativity. Those brothers, their names lost to time, began my Palestinian family line: the Dabdoubs. For centuries, they were…