Abu Nidal - Early Life

Early Life

Abu Nidal was born in May 1937 in Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv-Yafo, on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, Hajj Khalil al-Banna, was a wealthy merchant who made his money from the 6,000 acres (24 km2) of orange groves he owned, which extended from the south of Jaffa to Majdal, today Ashkelon in Israel. He raised his large family in luxury in a three-storey stone house near the beach, now used as an Israeli military court.

According to Abu Nidal's brother, Muhammad Khalil al-Banna, their father was the richest man in Palestine, with orchards in Majdal, Yibna, and Abu Kabir, near the town of Tirah. Every year, the father would supervise as his crops were packed in wooden crates for shipment to Europe on a shipping line from Jaffa to Liverpool. Muhammad told journalist Yossi Melman:

marketed about ten percent of all the citrus crops sent from Palestine to Europe—especially to England and Germany. He owned a summer house in Marseilles, France, and another house in İskenderun, then in Syria and afterwards Turkey, and a number of houses in Palestine itself. Most of the time we lived in Jaffa. Our house had about twenty rooms, and we children would go down to swim in the sea. We also had stables with Arabian horses, and one of our homes in Ashkelon even had a large swimming pool. I think we must have been the only family in Palestine with a private swimming pool.

Khalil's money meant he could afford to take several wives. According to Abu Nidal in a rare interview with Der Spiegel in 1985, conducted in a remote villa near Tripoli, his father had 13 wives, who gave birth to 17 sons and eight daughters. Abu Nidal's mother was the eighth wife, according to Melman. She had been one of the family's maids, a young Alawite girl just 16 years old when Khalil married her against the wishes of his family. She gave birth to Sabri, Khalil's 12th child. Because the family disapproved of the marriage, Abu Nidal was reportedly scorned from an early age by his older half-brothers and half-sisters.

Khalil sent him to Collège des Frères, a French Roman Catholic mission school in the Old Jaffa quarter. The school's records are not made available to journalists, but according to the school keeper they show that Abu Nidal completed the first grade. Khalil died in 1945, when Abu Nidal was seven years old, and the family turned his mother out of the house. His older brothers, more devout Muslims than his father had been, took Abu Nidal out of the mission school and enrolled him in a Muslim school in Jerusalem, now known as Umariya Elementary School, at the time one of the most prestigious private schools in the country. He attended the school for about two years.