The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the long-entrenched and systematic oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population, using non-violent, direct-action methods and principles.
 Founded in August 2001, ISM aims to support and strengthen the Palestinian popular resistance by being immediately alongside Palestinians in olive groves, on school runs, at demonstrations, within villages being attacked, by houses being demolished or where Palestinians are subject to consistent harassment or attacks from soldiers and settlers as well as numerous other situations.

If you want to know more click here

The global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights was initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005, and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), established in 2007. BDS is a strategy that allows people of conscience to play an effective role in the Palestinian struggle for justice.

For decades, Israel has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination through ethnic cleansing, colonization, racial discrimination, and military occupation. Despite abundant condemnation of Israeli policies by the UN, other international bodies, and preeminent human rights organisations, the world community has failed to hold Israel accountable and enforce compliance with basic principles of law. Israel’s crimes have continued with impunity.

In view of this continued failure, Palestinian civil society called for a global citizens’ response. On July 9 2005, a year after the International Court of Justice’s historic advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel’s Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), a clear majority of Palestinian civil society called upon their counterparts and people of conscience all over the world to launch broad boycotts, implement divestment initiatives, and to demand sanctions against Israel, until Palestinian rights are recognised in full compliance with international law.

The campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is shaped by a rights-based approach and highlights the three broad sections of the Palestinian people: the refugees, those under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinians in Israel.

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This article was written in 2000.

Introduction

For almost a century, Palestinians have been struggling against the colonization of their land. They have  had to contend with loss, exile, occupation and violence. In response, they have resisted, and armed  struggle. But Palestinian gains and victories, although far from insignificant, have so far failed to deliver an independent state; as a result, feelings of inadequacy and resignation have taken root. Although women have been involved in the liberation struggle and have shared the objectives of men, on the whole their strategies have differed.

In this paper, I will argue that resistance, in the Palestinian case, has been strongly influenced by a sense of appropriate gender roles. This assertion contains historical, psychological and political dimensions. The conservative nature of Palestinian society has meant that the liberation struggle has been unable to distance itself completely from the Islamic traditional practices, which govern day-to-day life.

Secondly, in the patriarchal environment of Palestinian society, men-who bear responsibility for the honor of the community-tend to regard themselves as having failed to protect their land, their society and their women. Now that the struggle appears to be moving towards some kind of resolution, existence is beginning to fragment. Women find themselves having to confront not only the oppressive practices of the occupation but also some of the policies being put in place by their own government. Thus, their resistance strategies are being channeled into new avenues.

In the context of this paper, “resistance” will be used in the broadest meaning of the word. To resist means to combat the forces of oppression, wherever they occur and whatever means. Resistance is defined as “the power to resist something, an influence that hinders or stops something, a secret organization resisting the authorities, especially in a conquered or enemy-occupied country. 1 However, the notion of resistance “carries not just its common-sense implications of ‘acting opposition’ but reflection of the ‘potential for subversion and contestation in the interstices of established orders’…there are many forms of gendered resistance and…women’s collective actions do not axiomatically take the form of opposition to the exercise of violence by men, whether against other men or against women.”2

In the Palestinian case, resistance is usually understood to mean a struggle for survival and for preservation of a distinct national identity. But if we broaden the definition, it can include not simply attempts to resist colonial domination, but also undesirable practices against women on the part of the Palestinian regime and in the home. I will argue that, in all these spheres, Islam plays a central role, whether women use it as a conscious tool of empowerment or relegate its influence to private life.

Questions

The specific questions to be explored here are: firstly, given the perception of the female in Palestinian nationalist thought, what forms has women’s resistance taken?

What have been the objectives of their resistance activities? And how, in the light of the ongoing debate between nationalism and feminism, have these changed over time? Finally, how has the Islamic cultural and social environment, together with shifting male and female self-perception, influenced, inspired or constrained women’s participation in the movement for national liberation? In order to answer these questions, I will begin with a brief history of women’s participation in the national liberation struggle and then explore ways in which their resistance evolved and expressed itself as something other than a support system for men’s nationalist aspirations.

Theoretical framework

It has been argued that when conflict “intrudes into the society- as in the case of invasion of colonialism- it may become very difficult to maintain traditional social order, and boundaries, such as those of gender may well break down”. 3 At such times, women may be empowered by assuming hitherto unfamiliar or non-traditional roles. But there is also a danger of violence spilling over from the battlefront to the home front.

According to a feminist perspective on conflict, “women tend to make connections between the oppression that is the ostensible cause of a conflict (ethnic or national oppression) in the light of another cross-cutting one: that of the gender regime. Feminist work tends to represent war as a continuum of violence from the bedroom to the battlefield, traversing our bodies and our sense of self. We see that the ‘homeland’ is not, never was, an essentially peaceful unitary space.”4 There is a risk here of conflict in women’s minds as they struggle to reconcile the violent chaos taking place on the streets with the peace and sanctity which are supposed to prevail within the private sphere. The former pits one’s own people against the enemy, while violence in the home is harder to deal with.

Massad argues that Palestinian nationalism conceives of nationalist agency in masculine terms.

Nationalist masculinity, he believes, is a new type of masculinity, which has little to do with “tradition”. He suggests that “Palestinian women may have more to say in Palestinian politics in the…future, but given their discursive construction in nationalist thought, they will be able to do so not as Palestinian women struggling for Palestinian women’s rights, but as Palestinian women struggling for discursively constituted rights, where Palestinian is always already conceived in the masculine”. 5 I believe that one must challenge such assumptions, which disregard the fluidity of the current situation.

Background

From the beginning of the 20th century, what may be termed “resistance” activities by Palestinian women have passed through several stages. They began as charitable and social welfare work by a small group of upper and middle class ladies. After the First World War, women took part in demonstrations against British policies. The official “women’s movement” in Palestine was launched in October 1929; its inaugural event was the convening in Jerusalem of the Palestine Arab Women’s Congress, which as attended by more than 200 women from all over the country.6  Fleischmann argues that, although Palestinian women’s activity during the British Mandate period has been described as “politically unaware”, these women “established an organized and often militant movement that was actively involved in social, political, and national affairs.”7 She reports that women’s “frequent participation in demonstrations signified their willingness to engage in ‘unladylike’ and even violent behavior, thereby defying cultural norms that prescribed limited public visibility of women”. 8   In the 1930s, the uprising of Shaykh Izz al Din al-Qassan, through its use of Islamic symbols and

language, encouraged the participation of the mass of people in social action; Qassam’s ideology has been described as “Islamic populism” and was aimed at all levels of society, 9 including women. It was inspired by a sense of desperation at the rapidly deteriorating situation and the threat to the Palestinian national entity. Yet, even though women took some part in the 1936 Revolt, they tended to be protected from the general violence and insecurity that was besetting the society.

After the catastrophe of 1948, when the State of Israel was established and hundred of thousands of Palestinians forced to flee from their homes and their land, resistance activities had to assume new patterns. The Palestinian community, scattered throughout the Middle East and beyond, was in a state of shock. Women “describe the first decade of exile in terms that evoke death and a state of mourning.

The loss of country and home and a refugee status were akin to the loss of a loved one.”10 Losing Palestine, in the words of one exile, “was like losing a husband or a son.11 In this environment, women became the principal symbols of what it meant to be Palestinian. As time passed, organized resistance intensified. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964, and under its umbrella in  1965, the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW). During this period, the character of the resistance was militantly masculine. But women were not standing idly by. For example, in the West

Bank, in 1965, the Society for the Resuscitation of the Family, In’ash el-Usra was founded by Samiha Khalil. The “objective of this organization was to help women, especially single of households, to increase their income.”12

In the wake of the 1967 war, in which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip and thousands more Palestinians were displaced, women organized themselves to provide support services to the population. Women were also actively involved “in resisting changes imposed by the Israeli military government such as changes in the school curriculum, and women’s participation in demonstrations carried out against the demolition of homes”. 13 In addition, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, according to Cockburn, brought “a more intimate form of oppression as the occupying forces entered homes and harassed even women and children”. 14 This, in Mayer’s words, “intensified Palestinian nationalism in gendered ways by provoking a politicized response to the invasion of the private sphere”. 15

A small number of women became fighters; for example Leila Khaled, who carried out military operations as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the late 1960’s. In her autobiography, she says: “I realized that my historic mission was a warrior in the inevitable battle between oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited. I decided to become a revolutionary in order to liberate my people and myself”. 16 She was, she adds, greatly inspired by Shaykh al-Qassam, the leader of the 1930s revolt, “a man who embodied the spirit of resistance and who organized the first working class and peasant revolution in the Arab homeland.”17

In the occupied territories, Palestinian women in the 1970s developed new organizations, affiliated to the four main political factions. They departed from the welfare organizations, which were on the whole run by urban middle class women. The “younger generation of women felt that welfare organizations did not stress independence and women’s issues, focusing instead on assistance programs. The women’s work stressed forming cooperatives for food processing and for agricultural products… Most importantly, they engaged women and women’s rights”. 18

With the intifada in 1987 came unfamiliar-although equally urgent-roles for women. They early days of the intifada were, in many ways, an exhilarating time for women as they participated in fundamentally necessary ways. It seemed to many that the struggle for women’s rights was proceeding hand in hand with the national struggle; a few women began to engage in feminist debate. During this period, suggests Sharoni, “the large-scale political mobilization of Palestinian women was not perceived as a challenge to social stability but rather as a necessary and valuable contribution to the national struggle.”19 But it was also an exhausting period in which Israeli repression grew increasingly harsh, and collective punishment routine.

The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) “ began organizing demonstrations, strikes, and other acts of resistance to the occupation…Key in mobilizing the population were the UNLU-and PLO-issued communiqués and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, issued by the PLO in November 1988 from its Tunis headquarters”. 20 According to Massad, the UNLU, which issued the intifada communiques, seemed “at times ambivalent, while at others, fully complicit in continuing the earlier tradition of conceiving the masculine”. 21  Communique No. 29,for example, congratulates women in their role as mothers. It salutes “ the mother of the martyr and her celebratory ululations, for

she has ululated twice, the day her son went to fight and was martyred, and the day the state was declared”. 22 Communique No.5 describe Palestinian women as the soil on which “manhood, respect and dignity” grow. On the other hand, Communique No. 35 of 1989 declared its admiration for the Palestinian woman “for her heroism in the national struggle”. 23 Women are also praised, “as detainees of the occupation authorities, 24 and mourned when they, along with children and old people, are killed by Israelis”. 25

An informal system of organizations, the Popular Committees, emerged, to which members of the women’s committees contributed their skills and expertise. Women were involved, for example, in the construction of alternative educational facilities, as schools were closed down all over the occupied territories, and they developed methods of food production to replace Israeli products. Girls and women also took part in spontaneous confrontations with Israeli troops on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

By the early 1990s, in the view of Hamami and Kuttab, two negative trends began to emerge.

The first was the negative social effects on women of the intifada in terms of control over women’s mobility, constraints on women’s behavior, and a tendency towards earlier marriage for girls. Secondly, it was becoming apparent that the national issue could easily be hijacked “by an ideology that saw women’s political activism not as a contribution to national liberation but as threat to it”. Women activists were being physically attacked by young men in the name of religion and Islamic dress was being imposed on women.26

In September 1993, before an astonished world, the Prime Minister of Israel and the Chairman of the PLO unveiled an agreement which would give Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip limited autonomy and control over some parts of their land. Many believed that this represented a decisive move towards the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories. The Palestinian began to organize their own government. Planning failed, however, to take into account women’s aspiration for equal rights of citizenship. The new Palestinian Authority (PA) was almost exclusively male and the proposed constitution ignored women.

In response, women began to organize on their own behalf. They produced a Declaration of principles on Women’s Rights, which stated: “We, the women of Palestine, from all social categories and the various faiths, including workers, farmers, housewives, students, professionals, and politicians, promulgate our determination to proceed without struggle to abolish all forms of discrimination and inequality against women, which were propagated by the different forms of colonialism on our land, ending with the Israeli Occupation, and which were reinforced by the conglomeration of customs and traditions prejudiced against women, embodied in a number of existing laws and legislation.”27

As the conflict has persisted, there is evidence of an increase in domestic violence against women, although no figures are available. This has resulted from the lack of an independent judiciary and-until recently- a police force, combined with men’s perception of their own powerlessness, which seeks a release in aggression against weaker member of the family. Palestinian society, “like patriarchal societies, discriminates between the sexes, for example, the upbringing of girls and boys”. 28

Unfortunately, “when a woman is physically abused by her husband and ask for support and protection from her relatives, her relatives often force her to return to her husband under the pretext of the children’s welfare”. 29 Workshops organized by the women’s centers help women to deal with what is happening to them and, as far as possible, to combat the situation.

Modes of Resistance 

Resistance can take many forms. It can be active, violent, passive, constructive or subversive. For Palestinian women, resistance has ranged from the provision of support services to violent confrontation with the enemy. It was been influenced by models of appropriate female behaviour, which have changed over time. Yet it has also subverted conventional expectations. This is a result, on the one hand, of the desperation of their situation and, on the other, of a determination to create a “women’s movement”, which is distinct from male coping mechanisms.

During the struggle, women have been active participants “in all sectors of the Resistance- military, political, and social. They [did] however, have a more concentrated presence in the social field (mass work, education, information, and health) and/or in the lower echelons of the administration, serving as secretaries, clerks, telephone receptionists, etc. They appear[ed] least in higher-level political  positions and the military. Their participation in the contemporary national movement dates from the origins of the movement in the 1960’s.”30

For women-as for men-the are acceptable modes of resistance. It used to be a matter of honour that girls and women should be protected from direct contact with the enemy. This has become increasingly difficult to sustain. After the initial breaking down of barriers in 1967, women started to be deliberately targeted by the Israelis, as a way of humiliating men. Later, as women grew more confident, they chose to confront the Israeli army, in demonstrations and to protect their children. Eventually, women began to be arrested and imprisoned; while in prison, they were sometimes subjected to physical and psychological torture, including sexual threats or actual abuse.31

The new political situation, it has been suggested, “needs new strategies and answers-one of them being new ways in which the women’s movement links gender liberation to national liberation (both strategically and ideologically). Central to this new program is the need to understand democratization as the link concept and strategy between national liberation issues on the one hand, and the achievement of women’s social and economic rights on the other”. 32

Role of Islam

For many Palestinian women, identification with Islam has proved empowering. The Islamic movement developed “in the context of occupation and resistance, subjugation and struggle in which the hijab is ideologized and transformed into a symbol of resistance”. 33 It has been suggested that this is less true in the Palestinian case, where the women’s movement evolved along decidedly secular lines.

Nonetheless, a parallel and equally determined Islamic women’s movement exists alongside other forms of women’s organization.

There was concern in the early 1990s that “instead of being one for national liberation that would end  in the founding of a democratic secular state in which all citizens would be equal…[the Palestinians]  were suddenly struggling towards a theocratic state in which there would be no room for pluralism,  difference of democratically expressed ideas and one in which women’s needs would be defined by  Islamicists”. 34

One can discern a degree of ambiguity in the approach taken by the Palestinian leadership towards Islamic groups. While, on the one hand, such groups are dismissed as marginal, and even divisive, on the other, there has a reluctance on the part of the leadership to publicly condemn the Islamists and  thereby create dissension in the Palestinian ranks. After all, support for the Islamists is estimated to be as  high as 40 per cent in the Gaza Strip and 20-25 per cent in the West Bank.35

Groups such as Hamas offer the people of these areas “a vision of an all-Islamic Palestine, to be realized  only through tireless work in spreading Islamic consciousness all over the Arab and Islamic worlds and through mobilizing Muslims everywhere to join the ranks of the fighters for Palestine”. 36 But this highly  idealized, and some might argue unrealistic, vision is balanced by a strong social programme. “In line  with the spirit of Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has from the outset supported a network of mosques,  schools, social clubs and other social and educational facilities”. 37

In common with Islamist movements elsewhere, one of the most striking signs of the success of Hamas has been its impact on women. According to the Hamas Charter: “The Muslim woman has a role in the  battle for the liberation which is no less than the role of the man, for she is the factory of men”. 38 There is no doubt that, for many women, the current popularity of militant Islam is welcome since it offers what  they regard as the proper environment in which to lead their lives. For others, though, it is perceived as an imposition.

The so-called “hijab campaign “ in the Gaza Strip in the early part of the intifada is an illuminating example of what many women regard as the removal of choice. Since the late 1970s, Islamic groups have been seeking to re-impose some kind of hijab, or head-covering, on women, even though many Palestinian women had chosen to dispense with this. Hammami describes it as “fundamentally an  instrument of oppression, a direct disciplining of women’s bodies for political ends”. 39 although a lot of  women in Gaza prefer to cover their heads-indeed, Palestinian women or rural origin have always worn  some form of head-covering, partly as a sign of their status and partly their socio-economic conditions

did not permit the adoption of so-called “modern dress”. 40- others do not and, until the early part of the intifada, “social space continued to exist for women not wear any form of hijab”. 41 However, by December 1988, it had become impossible for a woman to appear in the streets of Gaza without a head-covering. This was achieved “through a mixture of consent and coercion”. 42

Hammami argues that the Islamists used the hijab as an instrument of social pressure. It is clear, she says, that the “intifada hijab” is “not about modesty, respect, nationalism or the imperatives of activism but about power of religious groups to impose themselves by attacking secularism and nationalism at their most vulnerable points: over issues of women’s liberation”. 43 A climate of fear was created in Gaza,  in which many women dared not to go out of doors without a head-covering in case they were attacked  religiously-motivated young men, reminiscent of the “morals squads” in post- revolutionary Iran. This form of intimidation appeared cruelly ironic in the sense that women were forced to fear not only actions  by Israeli military personnel but also by the youth of their own community.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the “hijab campaign” was the initial apparent disinclination of the UNLU to act on behalf of women. Many suspect that “certain element within the Unifies Leadership actually supported the hijab campaign, and that Fatah, in particular, was trying to form an alliance with religious groups.”44 Others were of the opinion that the issue was either “too divisive or, even worse… secondary”. 45

Whatever the reasons, it took the leadership a whole year to issue a statement condemning the imposition of the head-covering. Hammami attributes the “inability (or reluctance) of activist men to deal with the hijab campaign [to] both the weakness of the left and of feminist agendas in the West Bank and Gaza”. 46

Nonetheless, for some women, the idea of secular state is unappealing. Some Palestinian women have been influenced by trends elsewhere in the Muslim world, for example the “Islamic feminist” movement whereby women, believing that Islam is the best system by which to govern day by day affairs, seek to reclaim its meanings for themselves. Many Muslim women “have begun to take an active interest in theological arguments regarding women. They claim the right to interpret laws and religious texts themselves and to learn the skills necessary for such interpretation; they challenge androcentric and misogynist interpretations of texts; and they are determined to find in Islam justifications for demanding

individual freedom and women’s rights. They have, in other words, joined the political struggle over the right to make their religion work for them”. 47 It is natural, suggests one commentator, “that contemporary Muslim feminists, when they look at the history of their religion, are very skeptical when assured that Islam, which initially aimed to remove the disabilities women had suffered in pre-Islamic Arabia, provides the rationale for keeping women in a subjugated, inferior status”. 48

Conclusion

To conclude: At the beginning of the 21st century, the Palestinians continue to seek peace with justice. They still do not have a state of their own; and many remain in exile. Seven years after Oslo, Palestinian women are still engaged in resistance activities. They continue to resist the Israeli occupation of part of their land and the failure of Israel to honor its agreements, and they continue to struggle towards eventual statehood; but they are also fighting the Palestinian Authority itself. Perceived as corrupt and unrepresentative, the PA has failed to reflect the democratic aspiration of the Palestinian people, women

and men, and many feel a sense of betrayal. Today, according to Hamami and Kuttab, “the main issue confronting the society remains the occupation (on all levels) but with the added crisis and complication of the presence of an undemocratic governing leadership inserted between the mass of the population and the occupation.”49

However, not only do women have to resist the occupation and some of the policies of the PA, they must also tackle the issue of violence within the family, which is believed to increase during situations of conflict; at such times, according to feminist literature, there tends to be a spillover of violence into the home. But it is equally possible that this kind of violence may intensify once the conflict has been resolved. In a post-conflict situation in which women begin, firstly, to learn more about their rights; secondly, to seek to put those rights into practice; and, thirdly, to benefit from a process of empowerment, it is not inconceivable that men will take out their sense of frustration and powerlessness on family members.

In the Palestinian context, there are several ways of dealing with this. Firstly, as we have seen, through legal and constitutional channels; secondly, by resorting to the Islamic model of an ideal society; and, thirdly, by assuming it is a temporary phase and that things will improve once the sate is up and running.

In a paper, which explores the transition from conflict to post-conflict situations, Sharoni asks whether peace is more conductive to gender equality than conflict. What happens, she wonders, “to conceptions of masculinity, grounded in militarism and acceptance of violence is outlawed”. 50 She concludes that “the meanings assigned to begin a man or a woman in a particular context are not fixed or static but rather changing over time and in relation to particular political developments”. 51

Therefore, in order to challenge “the narrow formulations of peace, which inform the Oslo Accords”, 52 the leadership must come to terms “with the formation and transformation of gender identities and roles and with the ability of ordinary men and women to transform their own identities and act as agents of social and political change”. 53

Today, there is not a single “women’s movement”. Rather, a number of trends exist within the society. These have been present for some time and each contains its own mode of resistance. They also differ in terms of objectives. The danger of fragmentation among women means that there is little overall consensus about possible ways forward. One can no longer speak of a conflict between nationalist and feminist discourse.

As women have become better educated, they have grown more aware of their rights and have begun to articulate certain demands and aspirations. A variety of organizations have been established by and for women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including research centers, training institutes, legal centers, and others. Women are now represented in most sections of society: they are university lecturers, poets, doctors, business leaders, and members of the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC).

It is clear that women’s resistance activities have changed over time. They have evolved in response to changing circumstances but also to ideological currents within the society and in the wider region. Now women are coming to grips with political exclusion and marginalization, and with the day-to-day business of survival in a patriarchal and still dangerous environment. The history of Palestinian women’s involvement in the resistance movement and their evident organizational ability gives one confidence that they will eventually succeed in linking national liberation with gender liberation.

* Maria Holt  is a Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. She has a long involvement in Middle East politics, both as an academic and a lobbyist, and has published a number of books and articles on Arab Muslim women and violent conflict.

Footnotes:

1 The Oxford Paperback Dictionary

2  Jacobson, Ruth, Jacobs, Susie, and Marchbank, Jen, “introduction: States of Conflict” in Jacobs.

3  Macdonald, Sharon, “Drawing the lines-gender, peace and war: an introduction”, in Macdonalds,    Sharon, Holden, Pat and Ardener, Shirley, -editors, Images of women in Peace&Wae: Cross-    Cultural l& Historical Perspectives, London: Macmillan, 1987, p.9

4 Cockburn, Cynthia, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict,     London: Zed Books, 1998, p.8.

5 Massad, Joseph, “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism”, The Middle    East Journal, Volume 49, Number 3, Summer 1995, p.483.

6 Fleischmann, Ellen J, “The Emergence of the Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1929-39”, Journal of Palestine Studies XXIX, no 3, Spring 2000, p.18.

7 Ibid. p.16.

8 Ibid. p. 24.

9 Johnson, Nels, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism, London: KPI, 1982, p.54.

10 Peteet, Julie M, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement, New York:    Columbia University Press, 1991, p.26.

11 Madame Haddad, a middle-aged woman from Jaffa, quoted by Pateet, ibid.p.26.

12  Sabbagh, Suha, “Palestinian Women and Institution Building”, in Sabbagh, Suha, editor, Arab Women: Between Defiance and Restraint, New York: Olive Branch Press, 1996, p, 108.

13 Ibid. 107.

14  Cockburn, The Space Between Us, op.cit.p.118.

15  Mayer, Tamar, “Heightened Palestinian nationalism: military occupation, repression, difference    And gender” in Mayer, Tamar, editor, Women and the Israeli Occupation: The Politics of Change,    London: Routledge, 1994, p. 63.

16  Khaled, Leila, My people shall live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, edited by George Hajjar,    London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973, p. 22.

17 Ibid.pp.26-7.

18  Sabbagh, “Palestinian Women and Institution Building”, op.cit.p.109.

19  Sharoni, Simona, “Gendering Conflict and Peace in Israel/Palestine and the North of Ireland”, Millennium,  Vol 27, No. 4, p. 1064.

20  Massad, “Conceiving the Masculine”, op.cit.p.474.

21 Ibid.pp.474-5.

22  Communique No. 29, “The Call of the Wedding of the Palestinian Independent State”, quoted by Massad, ibid.  p.474.

23 Ibid.p.476.

24  Communiques No. 17 and 22, Ibid.p.475.

25  Commniques No. 21, Ibid.p.475.

26  Hamami, Rima, and Kuttab, Eileen, “The Palestinian Women’s Movement: Strategies Towards Freedom   & Democracy”, News From Within, Vol XV, No. 4, April 1999, p.3.

27 “General Union of Palestinian Women, Jerusalem-Palestine: Draft Document of Principles of Women’s Rights (Third Draft), in Sabbagh, editor, Arab Women: Between Defiance and Restraint, op.cit.p.259.

28 Ibid.p.5.

29  Yahya, Mohammad al-Haj, “Violence against women leads to oppression”, Sparks, April 1992, p.5.

30 Peteet, Gender in Crisis, op.cit.p.147.

31 See, for example, Thornhill, Teresa, Making Women Talk: The Interrogation of Palestinian Women Detainees by The Israeli General Security Services, London: Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, 1992.

32 Ibid.pp.4-5.

33 El Guindi. Fadwa, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, Oxford & New York: Berg, 1999, p. 174.

34 Hamami and Kuttab, “The Palestinian Women’s Movement”, op.cit.p.3.

35 Ozanne, “The shanty town fundamentalists”, op.cit.

36 Taraki, The Islamic resistance Movement in the Palestinian Uprising”, op.cit.p.175.

37 “The Challenge of Hamas”, monitored from the BBC World Service, 19 February 1993, quoted in AJME News (Beirut), February-March 1993.

38 “Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) of Palestine”, Journal of Palestine Studies,  Volume XXII, No 4, Summer 1993, pp.127-9

39 Hammami, Rema, “Women, the Hijab and the Intifada”, Middle East report, May-August 1990, p.25.

40 Moghadam, Modernizing Women, op.cit.p.163.

41 Hammami “Women, the Hijab and the Intifada”, op.cit.p.25.

42 Ibid.p.25

43 Ibid.p.28.

44 Ibid.p.28

45 Ibid.p.28.

46 Ibid.p.28.

47 Afkhami, Muhnaz, and Friedl, Erika, “Introduction”, in Afkhamia and Friedl, editors, Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation: Implementing the Beijing Platform, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997,p.xiii.

48 Mayer, Ann Elizabeth, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, Boulder and San Francisco:  Westview Press and London: Pinter Publishers, 1995,p.94.

49 Ibid.pp.3-4.

50 Sharoni,”Gendering and Peace”, op.cit.p.1062.

51 Ibid. p.1088.

52 Ibid, p.1088.

53 Ibid, p.1089

erene Husseini Shahid´s autobiography, Jerusalem Memories, was published in 2000.

Childhood:

I have written these pieces about my childhood and family life in Palestine for my children, and for the later generations that may never know about us, or our way of life. Keeping the memory of those long-ago days is important, I think, and the hope of better days to come for all of us can only be based on the true knowledge of the past.

I often go back to Jerusalem in my dreams. My inner journey is not always one of sadness and despair; sometimes the pure joy of being there fills me with a deep warmth. I close my eyes and dream in the privacy of my soul. I choose the company I wish to keep, the places I want to visit, and the people I want to see. Sometimes they are old, sometimes young; some of them have been dead for many years, some of them are still alive.

Often I visit my grandparents, both maternal and paternal, whom I loved so much and who loved and spoiled me and my siblings.

I have discovered that my happiest recollections are of places rather than of people. After all, people die and take away a part of us with them, while places live forever. So I close my eyes and go to Jericho in winter, Sharafat in summer, and Jerusalem in spring. It is always spring in Jerusalem for me.

Our house in Musrara was on top of the slope which led from the Russian compound to the center of the old city. We could hear the bells of the Russian church and the calls to prayer from the nearby minarets. I also loved to hear the footsteps of people casually going downhill in the street outside, beyond the iron gate of our house.

Like all houses in Jerusalem, ours was built of heavy stone. Two steps led down to the garden. In my dreams I seem to go back to that garden more than anywhere else in Jerusalem. In spring it was a carpet of green. The upper level swayed with pine trees, which spread aromatic breezes into the house.

Summers were spent in Sharafat (a village near Jerusalem). We were the only city family living in Sharafat, so I was eagerly received by the girls and boys of the village. They took me to their homes and I brought them to mine, and we played in the garden for hours on end. There was so much to discover and enjoy. Often the hakawati, the village story teller, sat with his rababi, playing the instrument as he told stories of bygone days.

Early each morning me and my friend Abed would run out to pick ripe figs in the soft light and sweet morning air. Then mother would call us to come and have a proper breakfast of zaatar (thyme) and olive oil with country bread, and an egg to make us grow stronger. Later we would join our other friends in the village for more fun and games. Climbing to the very top of the oak tree, I would stand on the highest, thickest branch and call at the top of my voice to Miriam, my friend: ”Hey, ya Miriam, hey!”

”Ounich!” she would answer, ”I’m coming!” in the village dialect.

The long summer days passed quickly. We children grew taller and became a little more self-conscious. The years passed, and eventually I learned that Miriam was engaged to be married. Village girls were married much earlier than girls in the town.

Years after these events, our lives were shattered when our lands and our houses were occupied and our people scattered round the world. Under the United Nations plan for the partition of Palestine, Sharafat remained Arab, and its inhabitants, feeling safe, stayed on their land.

Decades later, I was living with my husband in Beirut when one evening we heard on the radio: ”Sharafat, a small village west of Jerusalem, has been attacked. The house of Ali Mishaal, the mukhtar, has been blown up, killing him and his family.” (Ali Mishaal was Miriam’s father).

Later we learned more details. Miriam and her little daughter had been buried up to the waist in the rubble for a day before being rescued. They were taken to hospital, but died soon after.

I think of Miriam sometimes and my heart cries out, ”Hey ya Miriam, hey!”

We always spent our winter vacations in Jericho, where I developed a special relationship with the fields when they burst into colourful life after the first rains.

The mountains in the background changed colors with the morning sun, from soft pink at dawn to the yellow of the afternoon. The Dead Sea lay further in the distance, silent and blue.

One of my favourite walks was with my father to the Mount of Temptation. One early afternoon he said:” Lets go to the top today.” I jumped up immediately, and eagerly followed him.

After a long dangerous walk up the mountain, we stood at last at the gate of the monastery, and as I walked behind father, I felt a strange sensation enveloping me. I had suddenly become aware that this was the place I could see from my bedroom window in Jericho every night, a faint light at the top of the steep mountain, so high up it seemed almost to touch the sky.

Friendly men in dark robes moved about in this exotic space between heaven and earth. One of them recognized father and welcomed us in. It was difficult to remember that the space we were in was carved within a cave, within the very rock. The walls of the corridor leading into the monastery were naked rock, mellowed only by time. Icons hung on the rocky walls of this corridor, which led to a large chapel in which were exhibited the visible elements of piety and mysticism. The altar, the candles, the incense, and the Orthodox attire of these Russian monks were all familiar to me, along with the symbols of the other Palestinian churches.

I stood at a big window with iron bars. Looking through it I saw Jericho, crowded with houses and dotted with gardens of oranges, bananas, palms and flowering trees, surrounded by far away mountains, with the Dead Sea shining like a silver carpet under the sun stretching between the town and the mountains beyond.

The priest must have seen my amazement and said ”Wait till I take you to the peak where the Temptation of Christ took place.”

As he led us up, the church bells started ringing, the same bells I had been used to hearing everyday from a distance. Now, I thought, I am near the bells that echoed in the fields and wadis of Jericho and I am in the room whose light twinkled like a star in the night, far away in the distance, neighbors to the sky.

The next time I saw the Mount of Temptation, or ”Korontol” as we Arabs call it, was a half a century later. The Israeli army now occupies this strategic spot, which dominates the area around and beyond. I looked up at it from below, from the fields of Jericho, where our house still stands.

Life under the British Mandate:

My families political activities during the 1930s brought me, probably earlier than most girls, to political awareness. I remember especially the rude shock I experienced when the British arrested my father.

The modern, experimental Islamic high school to which I had been sent closed in 1930, and my parents had to find an alternative for me. By then I was ten and a half years old. I was sent to a boarding school in Jerusalem along with my younger brother and sister. We enrolled at the American Friends School in Ramallah.

We had teachers from Lebanon, the United States and Holland, as well as those from Palestine.

Ramallah was beautiful in all seasons. Grapevines covered the slopes and there were wild flowers in the valleys. But this easy happiness of my childhood days was to be rudely interrupted by the harsh realities of Palestine. The time I am describing was, after all, the mid-1930s, and the situation in Palestine was coming to a boil. Even in our protected school environment, we knew about the demonstrations and strikes and began to think about politics.

Father had become the leader of the Palestinian Arab Party in 1935 and was also responsible for a political newspaper called al Liwaa’. I asked for the paper to be delivered to my school, and after classes my friends and I would rush to the outside gate to collect it, pouring over it and passing it on from one group of ardent readers to another.

One afternoon I came out of class later than the others. I looked for my friends, but when I found them their eyes seemed to avoid mine. I asked about the newspaper. There was a moment of hesitation; then one of them said they had not seen it that day. I was surprised, but not for long, because I saw one of my friends holding the paper behind her back. I rushed to take it from her, but she ran away and I ran after her, while all my other friends ran around the campus. Finally I caught up with her, snatched the newspaper from her hand and rushed to hide in a nearby lavatory.

The girls waited outside for a long time until I came out, trembling with shock and drenched in tears. My father had been arrested! For us, the word ”arrest” was synonymous with shame and guilt. We thought that only criminals were arrested. My father arrested? In prison? Not until days later did we discover that arrest was not only for criminals, and that Arab resistance in Palestine was being punished by the British. For us school girls, this was our political awakening and our childhood gave way to early maturity.

The days were bright, the nights were warm, and life was sweet when we were children in our home in Jerusalem. Our house was our world. Though we went away to school, we would come back to the house with such happiness. The small garden surrounding it was full of flowers. Three steps led up from the garden to the verandah, where we would stretch lazily in the long chairs under the perfume of the jasmine bushes that crept up its walls.

I remember this particular summer, when life seemed to be taking a new turn and our garden was no longer a magical, childish place.

Having been awakened to it at school, I had gradually become more and more aware of the situation in the country and became very interested in the political news. There would be a demonstration one day, a strike the next; I read of arrests, political meetings, and violence. Sometimes I read the names of some members of our family, and often my father’s.

The six-month strike of 1936 was about to begin. Arab Palestine, under British Mandate, was experiencing the pressure of large-scale Jewish immigration. Feeling that their very existence was being threatened, the leading Arab organizations declared a general strike, challenging not only the rapidly increasing Jewish presence, but also the Balfour Declaration and British authority in Palestine. The whole country responded to the call for the strike, and there followed demonstrations, clashes with the police, fiery speeches in mosques and churches. All this filled every home in Palestine with apprehension and anxiety.

Mother was involved in the women’s movement and took part in the many women’s demonstrations as they marched through the streets to the British High Commissioner’s headquarters to protest Jewish immigration.

Hassan, our only brother, was about nine or ten years of age. He was the darling of the guards in the garden: it had become too dangerous for Father not to have personal protection. Hassan joined the boys of the neighborhood in bringing the circulation of traffic to a standstill. The only cars which continued moving about were those driven by British soldiers around the city. The boys did their bit for the revolution by spreading the small nails which they carried in their pockets around the streets, causing the puncture of the tires of any vehicle that might be passing.

In Jerusalem, as demonstrations and confrontations continued, and armed struggle led to greater and greater numbers of casualties, the British government, in the brutal wisdom of its mandate, declared an emergency law. Any home found to contain arms, even so much as a knife a few inches long was to be blown up and the entire village punished.

The fires of the revolution spread fast throughout the cities and countryside. British rule grew crueler by the day. Many houses were blown up and many villages destroyed.

One story especially circulated throughout Palestine- the story of Aysha. Aysha was from a small village near al Bireh, not far from Jerusalem. Her son had gone of with some of the village men to join the demonstrations. One day, a confrontation took place between the British army and the Palestinian fighters not far from Aysha’s village. She heard from her neighbours that the British had suffered casualties and that a Palestinian had been killed. As had become customary, British soldiers brought the body to the nearest village to be identified. This enabled them to single out the house to be destroyed and the village to be tormented.

Now they came near to her village. Everyone was forced out of their homes and brought, one by one, to pass by the body of the young man, to look at it, to study the face and identify it. Aysha, standing in the long line, looked around, her heart crying out for the mother who was to see her son lying dead on the ground.

What mother was to suffer? What village to be destroyed?

At last her turn came. She looked down and saw her son, Abed, lying dead before her. The tremors which shook her body alerted the soldiers. She swayed and staggered, then let go, sinking down beside her boy.

” You bitch!” they cried, ”so he is your son!”

” My son?” she moaned. ”Who said he is my son? He is every mother’s son. I weep for his wasted youth. I weep for his mother! For every mother! That is why I am weeping!”

She had slipped out of their hands. She had saved the village from destruction. She went home and buried her grief in silence, while the British took her son’s body and buried it alone, far away from her.

Living in exile in Beirut, Lebanon:

One autumn day in 1936, I was sitting by myself on the porch of our house in Jerusalem. Time seemed to be standing still, despite the tension in the city and the growing confrontation with the mandate government. Father was down in Jericho, working on the banana gardens down there while trying to keep the British authorities confused as to his whereabouts. Mother, constantly worried, was indoors.

It was almost twilight when I heard footsteps scuffling over the wall near the entrance door. Then a tall man in a cloak came up the three steps and asked to see my father, Jamal Husseini. I said that he was not home. The man looked hard at me and said in a clear, deliberate tone: ”listen carefully. Tell him, if you can, that he must not be at home tonight.”

The stranger left as hurriedly as he came, and I rushed in to tell mother what had happened.

Just as darkness fell, father walked in. We gave him the stranger’s message, but he did not want to heed it. He had had enough of hiding and would not go away for any reason. Mother was frantic, and they had an argument. Eventually he gave in, and went through the door to the backyard, jumping over the fence to the neighbors’.

Very early the next morning there was a knock on the door. I rushed from my bedroom and watched as mother opened it to face a group of British soldiers. The senior officer said politely that they had an order to arrest Mr. Jamal Husseini. Mother said he was not at home. Unconvinced, they searched the house. The search ended and the officer announced that his men would remain in the garden to watch the house. Looking out the window, we could see that the garden was swarming with soldiers.

Mother had decided that I was to play an active role in the continuing drama. We had to inform father as soon as possible not to come back home. I was to dress quickly, carry my schoolbooks and pretend that I was going to school. Then I was to do the rounds of my uncles and aunts, find him, and inform him of the morning’s events.

As I approached the very first house on my list, my aunt Nuzha rushed out to tell me that father was at the house of Aunt Amina. I rushed over there, and when I arrived, the door opened almost before I had knocked. I had the feeling that not only the house but the entire neighborhood had eyes watching from behind the curtains.

I entered the house and was led to a bedroom where I saw father sitting on the edge of the bed. It had clearly not been slept in, and he seemed exhausted. He looked at me tenderly and said that as soon as he could, he would get in touch with us. As I hugged him and said goodbye, he asked me especially to look after my mother.

That was the last I saw of him for some time. We heard later that day over the radio that other political elders had been taken to a ship waiting at sea and had gone into exile in the Seychelles Islands. We did not know what had happened to father, only that he had disappeared.

We left Jerusalem very soon after father disappeared. The understanding between us had been that, should we ever be divided and separated from Jerusalem, we should meet in Beirut.

It was an early autumn morning when we started our six-hour drive to Beirut. Mother sat in the front seat of our car, near the driver. She was quiet and seemed distant, dazed by the turn of events. I had seen her brush a tear away, but knew that, being a true woman of Jerusalem, she would not allow herself to show any more outward signs of the deep pain she was experiencing.

At last, in mid-afternoon, we arrived in Beirut and drove straight to the Hotel Bassoul. Though we were young and excited by our new surroundings, each one of us felt the seriousness of our situation. We did not ask mother questions about our future, nor did we discuss the matter with each other. What images passed between the blackness of the night and our dreams remained locked in each of our hearts.

Although we did not understand this at the time, a new way of life began for all of us the very day after our arrival in Beirut form Jerusalem. It is only looking back at it from the distance of the decades that have passed since then that it becomes so clear that we had crossed the fateful border between life at home and exile. At that time, we saw our journey only as a temporary inconvenience that would certainly pass, and there was no question in our minds that eventually we would be restored to Jerusalem.

The Palestinian struggle against injustice had been embraced by the entire Arab world, and so it was quite natural that when the time came for us to leave, we would go to another Arab country. Beirut was the closest Arab capital to Jerusalem, and being there among so many other Palestinians who came at around the same time, made the whole trip less terrible than it might have been.

As time passed and it became more and more clear that we were not to go home soon, all those Palestinians who had come to Beirut and had taken rooms in hotels, began to look for more permanent, less expensive accommodations.

Mother, who suffered from rheumatism, decided to take advantage of Beirut’s excellent medical services. It was, in fact, at the American University Hospital during this time that I first met my husband to-be, Dr. Munib Shahid. He had come to Beirut with his family from Haifa.

It was some weeks before father joined us in Beirut. That was when we found out how he had managed to elude the British authorities. He had joined a family of veiled women and their father, who had hired a car to drive them out of the country. The women sat in the back seat wearing their millayas and covering my father, who lay on the floor of the car hidden beneath the flowing folds of their millayas.

By the time my father came, it had become clear that our stay was going to be a long one. As that realization dawned, my parents moved us to a smaller, less expensive hotel. Later, we moved to a pension. It was not until our second year in exile that they took the fateful step of renting an apartment.

At first we did not have the means to furnish our flat properly. At night we slept on mattresses laid out on the floor, and during the day we sat on kitchen chairs. Later, our situation improved, when some of our income from Palestine was forwarded to us. Eventually Beirut was to become our home.

I enrolled in the AUB (the American University of Beirut). I was very strict with myself, perhaps, looking back at it, too strict. I was haunted by the unhappy events in Palestine. How could I go to the cinema when people were being killed in Palestine? How could I go on a picnic when young men of my age, including many of my cousins, had to terminate their education and join the resistance? All work and no play may have made me seem dull, but at least I concentrated on my studies.

In my freshman and sophomore years I met girls of many nationalities, including Palestinian Jews. The presence of the Jewish girls forced us to confront difficult situation: how were we to behave towards one another? In the end, our youth and the traditional practice of our people overcame political ideologies, and the Jewish girls became part of our lives, like everyone else.

The news from Palestine became more serious by the day, and events there more and more dangerous. More and more Palestinian families wanted by the British mandate came to live in Beirut and some in Damascus. When the Second World War began however, it seemed that our cause became a minor issue to the world. The Palestinian revolt and the quest for Palestinian rights was drowned out by the larger turmoil.

For us Palestinians however, the struggle continued, as it does to this day.

In 1939, my family, along with several other Palestinian political families, moved to Baghdad. The British were gaining ground in the area, and there was fear that they would come to Lebanon.

When exiled Palestinians first went to Iraq in 1939, the Iraqi authorities were very cooperative. Unfortunately, this friendly Iraqi attitude did not last long: eventually the British took over Iraq, and the Palestinian exiles there became once again a target for them.

1948:

I was married to Dr Munib Shahib and living in Beirut when mother returned to Jerusalem in 1946. We had a few years of almost normal life. My husband and I visited Jerusalem with our first daughter and invited my parents to stay with us in Lebanon.

In 1948 the Palestine war took place and most of the country was occupied by the new Jewish entity, Israel. That part of Jerusalem in which our home lay had fallen to the Israelis. My family, along with hundreds of other Palestinians, became refugees. The world looked on, accepting the fact.

Beirut was now flooded with several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees. The poorest took shelter in refugee camps and shacks, living from hand to mouth on food dispensed by charity.

For my family, as for all Palestinians, this was a time of immense stress and reflection. What now? How long would this exile last? How would we survive? What should we do?

RETURN TO JERICHO: 1972

Mother went to live with her brother, uncle Musa, in Jericho. Because he had remained in Jericho, since 1967 under Israeli occupation, he had the right, under the law of ”family reunion” (jam al shaml) to ask that his sister be allowed to join him in his home.

Some time later, by virtue of that same law of family reunion, my brothers, sisters, and I, were also allowed to come to Jericho to join our mother, whose health was failing. And so it was that twenty-five years after we left I came back to it, back to our winter home in Jericho.

As I stepped down from the car and entered the gate, my heart pounded. Th same feeling of anguish and despair surged in me as when I had crossed the Allenby Bridge earlier that day. Would I let this experience shatter me? I remembered what the boy carrying my suitcase over the crossing had said when he saw my emotion that morning: ”Lady,” he said, ”you must not show them your weakness.” Hearing that from a young boy who worked for his living in the shade of the occupation, I pulled myself together.

And so that morning in Jericho, I raised my head high and walked towards the house on a narrow elevated path that separated the orchard from the building, as the scent of the orange blossoms wafted from the trees. I removed my eyeglasses, which had misted up with my emotions, and found myself in the shade of the rubber tree on the path to the house. How it had grown!

As I walked a few more steps, I looked up and saw the house. I was overcome by a profound sense of loneliness and despondency. Our home in Jericho. The same dark green shutters, the same slanting red roof, wooden balcony, jasmine pergola, and the orange trees beyond. Only the mud walls were peeling. Walking by my side was the old gardener and caretaker, his shoulders bent, his body shaking, a long way from the man I had known years ago.

The old man slowly opened the door to the main house, and I stepped inside. I stood for a moment, absolutely silent and still. It only took a few moments of stillness before the memories came surging forth, and the empty house was filled again with voices, people, bustling activities. They all come back: Mother, Father, Grandmother and all the others, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends. They all rose to life again and filled the house from the depth of my memory in perfect clarity.

My grandmother, Im Musa, came first. After all, this house was built for her by her husband at the turn of the century. Family and friends loved to come to visit her and spend the day in the warmth of the sun and enjoy her renowned cooking. Happiness welled in my heart at the thought of these memories.

In the rush of all the memories, my mother suddenly appeared in front of me, young and strong.

Hours after I had first re-entered the house, after I had wandered around and relived the past in so many images, my heart was full of happiness. Then the silence about me awoke me to reality, and to the fact that I was the only visitor here. Again, I went from one room to another, paused in the library with its shelves of books rescued from our Jerusalem house many years earlier, read the titles of the books, walked round the garden, and touched the leaves of the orange trees.

Gradually my happiness ebbed away, and it was time to leave. I closed the door with the keys I so cherished, walked out of the garden, and went through the iron gate. I left behind in the house the generations of those I had loved, and was comforted only by the spirit of the boy on the bridge.

After a few days in Jericho, settling in and reliving the past, our thoughts turned to Jerusalem.

In Jericho, we had not much noticed the Israeli occupation. We stayed in the same old house, saw our aunts and cousins who were staying there for the winter, and the few non-Arabs we saw in the streets gave the impression that tourism was flourishing as it had before 1948.

But in Jerusalem, things were different. Since 1967 the entire city had been occupied by the Israelis.

My cousin Najwa drove us (my Mother and her four daughters) up to Jerusalem. She drove us around the city, passing familiar sites along the way. None of us mentioned going to look at our own house in Musrara.

But at last mother asked Najwa to drive us to our old home. we four sisters, sitting in the back of the car, objected. ”It isn’t the right moment; let us not go now; we’ll go later,” we all said, as though in one voice. Spontaneously, without having discussed the matter, we had each felt that we could not bear to see our home, which was no longer ours, again. We knew it was occupied by an Israeli family. but mother, with the authority of her eighty years, insisted on her wish to go, and Najwa obediently drove us to our old home.

In our hearts we had each eagerly searched for it from the distance of Bab el Amoud. Now as the car drew up outside the front door, none of us could move. Each of us tried to hide our tears, and our deep, silent grief. Looking up from our former home, apparently unchanged, with the same balcony, the same old tree, the same bedroom windows looking up to the Virgin and Child in the Dominican compound against the blue sky, I felt the years of separation, and they set me trembling.

Mother, the only one of us undaunted, got out of the car. Leaning on her cane, she walked up the three steps leading up to the main door and, with her stick, knocked on the door three times. The door opened and a middle-aged Jewish woman appeared. From the car we heard mother say politely but firmly ”may I have your permission to see the inside of my house?”

”Your house?” the woman gasped. ”But we bought it!” Mother said: ”I did not sell it.”

The woman spoke with an Iraqi accent. Realizing what this sudden confrontation meant, she said ”Damn them. We had our house in Iraq. We didn’t have to come and face a situation like this.”

As the woman led the way into the house, mother looked back for us, but none of us had the heart to follow her. The door closed behind them, and while we sat and waited for mother to return, not one of us uttered a single word.

Finally the door opened again, and mother and the Jewish woman emerged. Talking together as though theirs was the most normal kind of communication in the world, they walked slowly around the house, mother following in the footsteps of the other woman. Finally we heard mother thanking her. She turned and very slowly descended the three steps down to the street. She stepped into the car, and Najwa drove us away. None of us said a word. The charge of emotion in the car was enough to blow it up.

At last one of us asked mother what they had talked about, and she recounted parts of the conversation.

She had asked the woman if her family was alone in the house. ”Alone!” the woman laughed sarcastically. ”There’s a different family living in each room.”

The woman had asked mother who had built the house. When mother said her father had done so, the woman had wondered if it had been intended to serve as a school. Mother told her that it had been built for his own family.

As mother continued her account of her morning’s visit, my deeply emotional state settled into a calm admiration for mother’s courage.

Her attitude became for us a model of courage and made the remainder of our return home a little bit easier to bear. Sometimes with one or all of my sisters, sometimes alone, I set out to explore the city I have loved so much, from which I had been separated for so long. At every turn we were confronted by the Israeli military occupation, and at every turn we were confronted also by our memories. Our emotions were so intense that we hardly spoke to one another. Had we tried to talk, our emotions would have certainly overflowed, and silence was our best defense. We also felt that we had no time to waste, that we had to soak up the precious memories and store them, and that emotional talk would have distracted us.

Fragments of life in Palestine become precious treasures many years later. One day recently, about to throw away an old suitcase which had been around the world with me, I checked to see if I had forgotten anything in its folds. Sure enough, from the corner of one of the torn pockets, I pulled out an envelope, frayed with the passing of time. I opened it and found inside an old, faded photograph of a family group. In the small figure at the center I immediately recognized myself as a child of two. Surrounding me in the picture sat my grandmother Zuleikha, her mother Asma, and my mother Nimati.

I was delighted to find the photo, but a little shock ran through me when I thought how it had remained hidden and undiscovered over the decades, and how the suitcase itself had crossed so many borders, and how the whole thing had ended up here at last, in my hands, in my house so many years later.

I sat and looked at the picture, and as I did so, I was engulfed by memories surging up from a forgotten well deep in my unconscious mind. As I stared at it, I allowed myself to enjoy the warmth and the sadness, as the memories washed over me.

Of the four generations of women sitting for the photograph that afternoon, I think my mother’s generation suffered the most. She had had to live in exile in several Arab cities with five children to look after, usually on her own, because her husband was either exiled or attending a conference abroad. She often had to wait for money, which came only after long periods of anxiety; she lived in societies that, knowingly or not, deliberately or not, did not take her into account. Nor was she alone in this plight: every Palestinian was an extra number, a burden on the society in which he or she lived in exile.

It is true that her children went on with their lives and education, and yet she never had the peace of mind to enjoy her everyday life with them, as previous generations had done.

I remember a tear that seemed always to sparkle in her green eyes, and I believe that she never forgave the world for being so cruel.

Finally, I looked at myself in that old photograph. I was born in September 1920, almost a century after my great grandmother, and in the picture I sit close to her. As I scrutinized my image as a small child, I could not help thinking about my life and theirs. After allowing myself to float away on a sea of memories, I asked myself: what does it mean to be looking at four generations of Palestinian women?

For my grandmother, Jerusalem, with its small winding alleys, was the world. she rarely moved from its walls. Yet she must have been the queen of her house, in her own city and in her own country. To her there was no shadow of doubt where she belonged and what spot of earth belonged to her. She lived and died part of a whole that represents the security that every human being needs.

Her daughter, who had almost the same degree of security even while being more open to the world, suffered greatly only during the last two decades of her life, after events in Palestine sent her into exile. She passed away in the heat of the desert on her way from Baghdad to Jerusalem. Today, she lies in a lonely grave in a Baghdad cemetery.

But for some knowledge of the Koran, both my great grandmother and grandmother were illiterate. Mother, on the other hand, spoke four languages. I earned a university degree and traveled around the world. yet it seems to me that the time of great grandmother Asma was better than mine: she never had to be a refugee, looking for a country to accept her, begging for a passport, and longing for an unambiguous identity.

Where am I now in my twilight years? How can I ever know what their life was really like? Don’t we all take our grandparents for granted, not realizing that time flies and that the time to ask questions and probe the past goes, never to return? It seems to me that the changes which took place between the time when great grandmother was born in the early nineteenth century and my time, a century later, were perhaps unprecedented in history.

I could not bear to look at the old family picture for very long that morning when I first found it. The past is heavy sometimes. But I often go back to it, and remember.

Serene Husseini Shahid was born in Jerusalem in 1920. With her family she lived in exile in Lebanon. She married Dr. Munib Shahid in 1944

Excerpted with permission from In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Verso Press, London, 2002.

On the night of January 4, 1948, three days before Christmas, we went to sleep as usual. It was raining heavily with occasional bursts of thunder and lightning. Fatima was staying with us that night and was sleeping on her mattress on the floor of our bedroom. Suddenly, at some time in the night, I awoke from a deep sleep and found myself in the middle of a nightmare crashing with thunder and lightning. For a few seconds, I could not distinguish dream from reality. The bedroom seemed to be full of strangers until I realised that they were my parents. There was a tremendous noise of shattering glass, shootings and explosions which seemed to be coming from our back garden. Rex was barking wildly. My mother dragged me off the bed and sat me up with Ziyad against the bedroom wall. The floor was cold against my warm body. She sat in front of us, her back pushing against our knees. The room was strangely lit up and as I twisted round towards the window I saw that the sky was orange, glowing and dancing. “Is it dawn?” I asked. “Is that the sun?” No one answered and I could feel my mother’s body shaking in her nightdress. My father was on the other side of Ziyad, sitting against the wall with Siham and Fatima squeezed in next to him. They all stared ahead and Fatima was intoning in a whisper the words of the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran, over and over again:

I thought that my mother was whispering something too, but I did not know what it was. A shattering bang shook the windows as a great clap of thunder exploded overhead. And then I knew that I was afraid, more afraid than I had ever been in my life before. As Ziyad turned his face towards the window, I saw that his eyes were enormous but he never made a sound. After who knows how long, the noise outside began to abate. And with that, my mother started to move forward. “Stop!” my father hissed. “There may be another explosion.” He made us wait a little longer until the sky stopped being so red. It now had a far-away glow, like the embers in our charcoal stove. My leg was numb and the palm of my hand hurt where I had pressed it against the floor. We got up and groped our way out into the liwan. It was about two o’clock in the morning. Torrential rain lashed against the shutters. Fatima made coffee, but neither I nor Ziyad wanted anything, and our mother made us go back to bed. Siham followed soon after, but I don’t think our parents slept at all the rest of that night.

By morning, when we got up, jaded and tired, we found no one in the house and the street looked deserted too. Everybody had gone to the scene of last night’s explosion, the Semiramis Hotel in the road directly behind ours. This hotel was owned by a Palestinian Greek and had been fully occupied on the night when it was blown up. We decided to go and see for ourselves, walking through the wet, slippery streets in a howling icy wind with Rex close on our heels. The windows of several houses in the vicinity gaped, their glass shattered by the explosion of the night before. There was a great crowd around the devastated building which was still smoking and there was a strong smell of kerosene. Their faces were cold and pinched and many people were crying.

Municipal workers and British soldiers were trying to clear the rubble and still dragging bodies out. Some of these were very dark- skinned, Sudanese kitchen workers. As the crowed surged forward to see the bodies, in case there was a relative or friend amongst them, the soldiers pushed them back. Because Ziyad and I were small, we had got right to the front and they shouted at us to go back home. All the dead and wounded who were accessible had been taken away in the small hours, but the search was now on for others still buried beneath the slabs of concrete and stone and unlikely to be alive. An elderly couple next to where we were standing pressed forward repeatedly to get close to the digging. “They must find him,” the man kept saying. But she said, “No. It’s no use, he’s gone. He could have been alive, standing and watching just like these people, but he’s not.”

We pulled away to go back and noticed for the first time that amongst the debris on the ground was a large quantity of headed hotel stationery, some of it grubby, and stacks of wet envelopes. Ziyad bent down and started to pick it up and I followed suit. “Stop that!” cried Siham but we kept hold of what we had picked up. Neither of us could take in the enormity of what we had just seen; to us this was an opportunity for play and mischief. But the images would remain to haunt us one day. Later that morning, it emerged that it was the Haganah which had planted the bombs in the hotel, thinking that it was being used as a base for an AHC unit, “a hotbed of armed Arabs,” as they called it.

In fact, this was not the case, although Arab journalists were in the habit of staying at the Semiramis and it was a well-known meeting place for activists of all political persuasions. Some thirty people perished in the bombing, amongst them the hotel owner and the Spanish consul. The rest included several families all of whose members were killed, except in one case where the parents died and their three children lived. We saw them wandering about in the rubble looking dazed.

The Haganah command expressed condemnation of the incident and regret and said that it had been carried out without its knowledge by a splinter group. But everyone around us said, “Liars and sons of dogs!” People demanded that greater protection be provided by the AHC or from the Jaysh al- Inqath (the army of salvation), which consisted of volunteer soldiers from Arab states recruited by the Arab League. The AHC had national committees in the towns all over the country, but the defence of Jerusalem was part of a special force. A unit of this force arrived in Qatamon at the beginning of the year and took up residence in Abu Ahmad’s house in the road above ours, which had stood empty ever since he and his family had left for Egypt.

It was headed by a man called Ibrahim Abu Dayyeh who had a reputation for bravery, but the men he commanded were few in number and poorly armed. Jewish soldiers, who were better armed and better trained, frequently chased them around and, though they assured everyone that they would defend us against all odds, it was obvious to everyone that they did not have the capacity. One evening, we even found one of them hiding in our garden shed, having been chased by an armed Jewish unit. He was very young, not much older than Siham, and trembling with fright. “It’s no good. We can’t compete with the Jews. They’ve got more men, more arms and more money,” everyone said.

We heard that the men of the area met at the house of Khalil Sakakini to discuss what security measures ought to be taken. After the devastating attack on the Semiramis, it was clear to everyone that we were vulnerable and alone. The men decided to put up barricades at both ends of the roads and to have them manned. But only five people had guns and the rest did not know how to use weapons. There was consternation and in the end they drew up a rota of the people with weapons whose job it would be to guard the defence posts every night. Our father did not share in this rota, but he and others who did not take part paid a monthly fee towards the costs. This effort did not last long, however, for one night, Jewish gunmen shot and killed the man on duty.

There was terrific shock and mourning and then recriminations. “For God’s sake, who is there left to guard anyway?” asked Daud Jouzeh sadly. He said this because in the days which followed the bombing of the Semiramis, there was a panic exodus from Qatamon. The months of instability and fear, culminating in this incident, had finally broken people’s resistance. Those of the Arabs who were still holding out murmured, “They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They’re doing just what the Jews want them to.” The National Committee tried to persuade them not to go. They had received orders from the AHC on no account to allow anyone to leave. “If you go, the Mufti will only order you to return,” they warned. “Or he will bring in Arab fighters to take your place. So, better for you to stay.”

Whether because people heeded this or not, they first tried moving only from one part of Qatamon to another, hoping it would be safer, but others like my mother’s friend Emily went to the Old City for the same reason. Yet others went out of Jerusalem or Palestine altogether, and often in such cases the women and children were evacuated first and the men stayed behind. But as the danger grew without any visible support from anyone, least of all the AHC and its local committees, many of the men followed their families and the majority left Palestine. “Fine for them to talk, but who will care when our children get killed?” they said as they came to say goodbye to us. “Still, it won’t be for long. Just until the troubles die down.”

But far from dying down, the troubles continued to get worse. It was as if the Jewish forces no longer felt restrained from unleashing all-out attacks against our neighbourhood after the small number of Jews who had lived amongst us departed. The Kramers went to Tel Aviv at the end of 1947 in the wake of the turbulence which followed the partition resolution, but the Jewish doctor hung on into the new year. When Arab snipers shot at him as he walked along the road soon after the Semiramis bombing, he left for Tel Aviv too.

At the end of January, the Haganah blew up another building in our vicinity, this time the big Shahin house on the edge of Qatamon. The Shahins were a wealthy family and had a beautiful villa standing in open ground at the top of Qatamon; no one could think why they had been targeted, except perhaps that the house might have been used at one point as a base by Arab snipers. Ever since one such sniper had shot dead a Jewish cyclist in Rehavia, the Haganah had instituted a policy of blowing up any Arab house which they suspected of harbouring gunmen. As February came, the sound of gunfire in the air was a frequent occurrence. From time to time, it was punctuated by explosions which vividly brought back the memory of the Semiramis. We had found this difficult to forget and whenever anyone even banged a door shut in the house, Siham would jump and start trembling.

Word came to my father at his office from a family friend of ours in Tulkarm, Hamdan Samara, urging him to move his books out of Jerusalem. “I will store them for you in Jenin where they can be safe,” he wrote. Jenin was a town to the north of Tulkarm. “You may be forced to leave your house, and you never know, the Jews might pillage your library.” My father had an extensive and unusual collection of books in Arabic and English, lovingly bought over the years, which he treasured. “Will you take up his offer?” my mother asked. “No,” he laughed. “We’re not going to be leaving and no one is going to harm my books.”

By now, Ziyad and I were told not to go out onto the road because it was too dangerous. He and his friends took no notice of this, however; they found the whole thing rather exciting, especially when they went out on patrol with Abu Dayyeh’s men like real soldiers looking for Jewish snipers. They never found any, but usually came back with a collection of the spent cartridges and used bullets which had been fired by the snipers. These had foreign markings, Belgian, French, Czech and others, and Ziyad would line them up excitedly according to shape and place of origin. “What do you want with those horrible things?” our mother said. “Get rid of them!”
At other times, he went out on his own with Rex in tow, apparently unafraid. On one such jaunt, he ventured as far as Talbiyya which was a mixed Arab-Jewish neighbourhood. As he walked down a street which, unknown to him, was mostly inhabited by Jews, he saw a foreign-looking man on a balcony above him suddenly spring up and aim a rifle directly towards him. Rex started to jump up, barking and growling, and the man shouted out in broken Arabic, “Go away! Get out!” He was so threatening, and the street so empty, that Ziyad turned and ran off as fast as he could. He arrived home, panting with fear. After that, he never tried going to Talbiyya again.

The assault on our part of town was especially concentrated because, in company with other West Jerusalem neighbourhoods like Talbiyya, Sheikh Jarrah, Romema and Lifta, we formed the “seam” with the Jewish areas to the west of us and thus came under repeated attack by the Jewish forces. All these districts were either mixed or predominantly Arab, and the news which reached us from there was all grim. Because of the attacks, people were frightened and were starting to leave their homes. All through January and February, long queues of cars packed with people and luggage filed out of the streets on their way to safer places. The AHC were worried; they issued threats through the local committees and imposed punishments against anyone leaving. But as had happened in Qatamon, no one took any

*Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian doctor of medicine, author and academic. She writes frequently on Palestinian issues in newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Nation andJournal of Palestine Studies. She is a fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Arab & Islamic studies at Exeter University.

This article was published in 2006.

The Christmas tree came to the Middle East in the second half of the nineteenth century; and, although up till then it had played no part in the traditional celebrations of Christ’s nativity in the Arab world, the lovely German-inspired custom of decorating a tree for Christmas was enthusiastically adopted by many of the three million Christians of the area, and by many Moslems as well. To Moslems, Jesus Christ is a revered prophet. Two generations of Christian Arab children have grown up with the Christmas tree, brilliantly decorated with gossamer balls and bells, miniature birds in full plumage, a tinsel star at the top, little fragile angels, a small Santa Claus with jolly red cheeks and a long white beard, with spangles and snow-flakes and real candles which are lit on Christmas Eve. To many children in the Middle East, Christmas has also come to mean Santa Claus (minus the reindeer), gifts piled under the Christmas tree, and stockings hung up at the bottom of the bed in readiness for Santa’s bounty. Basically, however, Christmas continues to be a time for worship and family reunions.

In our family, a typical middle class family of Jerusalem, the excitement would start building up weeks before Christmas, reaching a climax on Christmas Eve, which was the children’s special evening. For weeks, mothers would come home from shopping loaded with parcels and disappear into her bedroom. For almost a month before Christmas, the big cupboard in my parents’ bedroom would be locked. My two brothers and I would go into the bedroom on every pretext, hoping that mother may have forgotten the key in the lock. But she was too clever for us. At times the little attic room would also be locked, and we had visions of bicycles, doll-houses, small cars, little grocery stores with real scales and a cash register, and other desperately desired objects, too large to fit into mother’s cupboard.

Two weeks before Christmas the house was given a thorough cleaning. Necessary renovations were carried out, and rugs, draperies and bedspreads were washed and ironed. This was a bad time for us children for we always managed to be in the way. However we were allowed to help with the Christmas baking. A day was set aside for every house-wife of the family, when all the other women accompanied by their brood of young, would come and help her with her baking. So, for almost a week, we spent each day at a different Aunt’s or Uncle’s home, and one day, of course, at grandmothers. Two special kinds of small cakes, or rather small pastries, are traditionally baked at Christmas time. Semolina, the finest wheat flour, and samneh, (boiled butter with the froth skimmed) are used to make a firm dough, which is stuffed with two kinds of fillings: one filling consists of pressed dates, pitted, ground, and rolled into small circular strips. The other filling is a mixture of walnuts, fine white sugar, and cinnamon. A large quantity of these small cakes have to be baked for, along with Turkish coffee, they served to all visitors who come to offer the family their good wishes at this season, moreover, we children loved them and they kept well for months. It was with the decoration of these pastries that our help was sought. With miniature serrated tongs, we pinched the soft dough to make simple line designs on the cakes. This was a slow business and everyone’s services were impressed, even the men’s when they arrived after work.

A soft glow surrounds these gatherings in my memory. In the center of the living –room, sat the women, surrounding a large pan with the dough in it, two smaller receptacles held the two kinds of fillings, the women fashioned and filled the dough. The men and children competed to produce the most delicate designs with the serrated tongs. In one corner of the living room the large wood stove would crackle and hiss, letting off a wonderful warmth. The late afternoon sun would cast an orange glow upon the family circle. Later the electric lights would come on. Cookies and tea would be passed around and, when the men came, wine and arak. Our parents told stories and jokes, bantered with each other and with us, and reminisced about their childhood. How we delighted in these reminiscences, begging for more: “Please, please Uncle, do tell us again the story of how you lost you brand-new red slippers when you were a boy.”

When the cakes were filled and decorated, they were arranged on very big round brass trays, and one of us children was muffled up warmly– for Jerusalem winters can be very cold– and sent to fetch the baker’s boy, with the enjoinder: “Tell him to come immediately, before the dough becomes too yeasty.” Soon the baker’s boy arrived. The trays were placed carefully– one on top of the other– on his head, the two sections of the kitchen door were opened wide and he was sent on his way with the repeated injunction: “Now, don’t forget, tell your master to bake them carefully.” The arrival and departure of the baker’s boy was the cue for the family helpers to collect their reluctant yet weary offspring and take their leave. For, they had to get some rest for another days’ cake making.

Two days before Christmas, the tall fragrant pine-tree almost reaching the ceiling, would be standing a corner of the living room, and on that evening, we would be allowed to help father and mother with the decorations. The Christmas tree ornaments would be brought down from the top of mother’s cupboard, where, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, they had been lying since last Christmas. How carefully we handled those preciously fragile ornaments. A little pressure from a child’s hand and they crumbled to bits and pieces, like a dried ball of mud. What a large assortment of ornaments we had! They came to Jerusalem from all parts of the world: Switzerland, Germany, England, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. We couldn’t decide which we liked best, the diaphanous birds with real feathers for tails or the cluster of little opal bells with their delightful tinkle. Not all the ornaments were imported. Our most treasured Christmas possession was the beautiful hand-carved creche set fashioned out of olive wood by the highly skilled artisans of Bethlehem. This we placed on a low coffee table near the Christmas tree. The set included figures of Joseph, Mary, and the Christ-child– proportionally somewhat too big, we thought– three shepherds with their staffs, the three wise men, two little sheep and the most charming little donkey, with one ear sticking very high up in the air.

We spent the larger part of Christmas eve watching the clock, for the excitement did not begin until late afternoon, when muffled up very warmly, father, mother, and the three of us drove to the Shepherd’s Field just outside Bethlehem, to take part in the annual All Nations Christmas service and carol sing arranged by the Y.M.C.A. The Shepherds Field is a fairly small patch of grassland with olive trees where, according to tradition, the angle appeared to the shepherds and brought them tidings of Christ’s birth. The service is held in the open.

Pilgrims, tourists, and visitors from all parts of the world joined native Arab Christians in singing familiar Christmas carols, each in his own language. Standing in the icy cold air of a late Bethlehem afternoon, with the sky luminously clear, waiting for the evening star to make its appearance, rubbing shoulders with all the nations of the world, I was always overpowered by a feeling of exciting oneness with all the universe. The gospel according to St. Luke is first read in Arabic, then in English. More carols are sung. And then the simple service is over. Strangers turn to each other smiling, wishing each other a “Merry Christmas” in a score of languages. After the service, the throng of people descends into a large natured cave, which must have provided shelter to shepherds and wayfarers since time began. There, a shepherds’ supper is laid out: thin flat rounded loaves of bread, barbecued lamb, and olives from the olive-groves surrounding Bethlehem.

Sometimes at Christmas there would be several inches of snow on the ground. And then our excitement had no bounds, for snow is not a matter-of- fact phenomenon in the Holy Land. We might have a snowfall once in every three years, and then the snow lasts for three days at most. Snow had the power to send us into transports of excitement. We had not acquired the American child’s seasoned acceptance of it, nor had we acquired his skill in fashioning snowmen. However, even an American child, skilled veteran of countless snowfalls, would have admired out marksmanship in snowball throwing.

Christmas Eve, after the Shepherds Field service, was spent either at or home or at the uncle’s next in seniority to father. The whole extended family of grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins attended.

A magnificent spectacle welcomed us as we entered the living room. Gaily wrapped gifts were placed under the Christmas tree. Crepe paper streamers, colorful balloons, and paper lanterns with lighted candles hung from the ceiling. Jerusalem houses are built of a beautiful red or white stone and the danger from fire is minimal. In the center of the room stood a beautiful polished brass brazier or charcoal burner, with chestnuts resting in the grey embers, which let off a dull red glow. First we had dessert: delicious home-made fruit salad with lots and lots of cream beaten to a frothy lightness by mother and aunts, dried figs, walnuts, almonds, raisins, bananas from Jericho and juicy oranges from the northern coastland, a varied assortment of cookies and cakes, chocolate bars, small packages of candy, and of course roasted chestnuts. Red wine, locally brewed in the monasteries of Latrun and Cremisan was passed around. Wine in reasonable quantities was held to be good for us children. It was supposed to put color in our cheeks and act as a tonic in the cold winter months.

When everyone had had enough, and was maybe lingering over a glass of wine, or smoking a cigar or nargila (water pipe), it was our turn to perform. It had become a tradition for us children to sing the most familiar Christmas carols in Arabic. What a discordant din we must have produced, for not one of us could keep a tune. But the applause was always gratifyingly enthusiastic, for all the members on my father’s side of the family were tone– deaf.

As we finished our performance, the front-door bell would ring. “Who could that be?” Our elders asked the same question every year, feigning wonder and surprise. But we knew, as we rushed to be the first to open the door. On the threshold stood the fattest, jolliest Santa Claus. He would go around shaking hands with every member of the family, kissing the children, inquiring in his deep voice whether they had been good children this year, and whether they had done well in school. He made us older children and grown-ups laugh delightedly with his unsteady gait, his shaking beard and his rumbling laugh, but while we tried to tease him by pulling his beard, the little children would run to father or mother and hold tight to them, a little frightened by this fat, red-garbed man with the long white beard and strange muffled voice. “How does he get here?” we would ask father and mother. “Why he comes on camel-back across the eastern desert,” would be the answer. Santa Claus would distribute the gaily-wrapped packages which had been subjected all evening to the curious, conjecturing stares of all of us. Oh , the excitement of unwrapping those gifts to find out whether the longed-for, prayed for item was among them. Exhausted and intoxicated by the excitement, the gifts, the rich food, we were finally dragged off to bed. Christmas Eve was over. Of course, Santa would make another appearance that night, as we slept, to fill our stockings, and tomorrow after mass in St. Jacob’s Church in the Holy Sepulchre, we would have a wonderful Christmas dinner at grandfather and grandmother’s, but, and we sighed a little sadly as we dropped off to sleep, we would have to wait another year to repeat the exciting evening.

*Mrs. Joury was born in Nazareth, Palestine, and is now a Jordanian citizen. She began her education at the Beirut College for Women in Beirut, Lebanon, continued at the American University at Cairo, Egypt, and obtained her B.A. degree from Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Mrs. Joury received a M.A. degree from Haverford College at Haverford, Pennsylvania. Following the completion of her studies, she worked as an Information Officer for the Jordanian Tourist Department, as an Instructor and Assistant Dean of Women at the American University of Beirut, and in the Research and Translation Office in Beirut. She was also employed as a Librarian at the Arab States Delegation Office in New York City.

The One Million Tree Campaigns (MTC), launched by APN founders in 2001, involves replanting trees on Palestinian lands razed by Israeli bulldozers in areas where Jewish settlements and bypass roads have been built or expanded in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Thousands of acres of Palestinian agricultural land has been razed over the years by Israeli bulldozers, families have been displaced and vital transportation routes disconnected in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as Israeli occupation authorities continue to build and expand Jewish settlements and bypass roads. Nearly 1,500,000 trees were uprooted between the years 2001-2007, and most of these were olive trees: a vital source of food, income and culture for the Palestinian people. Israel’s building of the separation (Apartheid) Wall in the occupied West Bank in recent years has swallowed and destroyed significant acreage of Palestinian agricultural land. The MTC Campaign has been supported or adopted by many local, regional, and international institutions and civil society organizations, such as the Qatari Red Crescent, Eitilf al-Khair Charitable Organization, the War and Globalization Conference and the Students’ Committee at the British Leeds University.

To know more click here

Open Bethlehem is an international campaign that works to promote global engagement with Bethlehem as a real and contemporary city in the Middle East. It does so by supporting the distribution of communication tools about Bethlehem to boost international interest and awareness and by promoting visits to Bethlehem through established and specialized tour operators. The campaign also works to develop a network of passionate ambassadors for the city through the Bethlehem Passport Program.

Open Bethlehem’s vision is to support a lasting peace settlement between Palestine and Israel using Bethlehem as a doorway for global engagement. As an iconic city, and a Palestinian city, Bethlehem has both power and responsibility to act and use its global outreach to promote positive change.

Over the next two years, Open Bethlehem will focus on the distribution of a documentary that chronicles events from the last decade of life in the city, creating a portrait of Bethlehem as it has never been seen before.  The film screenings will be accompanied by an audience outreach campaign that will promote visits to Bethlehem and invite people around the world to become ambassadors for our city.

To know more about it click here

Posted on: January 2013

By Ola Anan

As part of the popular resistance movement in Palestine, a group of about 250 Palestinian activists established the new village of Bab Al Shams or “The Gate of the Sun”, on a piece of confiscated land in Eastern Jerusalem, referred by Israeli authorities as “Area E1“.

A Press releasewas published on the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee website earlier today, describing the reasons behind the establishment of Bab Al Shams. In their Press release, they said:

For decades, Israel has established facts on the ground as the International community remained silent in response to these violations. The time has come now to change the rules of the game, for us to establish facts on the ground – our own land.

In addition to the Press release, the Palestinian activists used Twitter to declare their movement, and provide updates and photographs from the ground.

Activist Abir Kopty was among the first few to declare the establishment of Bab Al Shams as she tweets:

@AbirKopty: We a group of #Palestinian women and men have established the new village of #BabAlShams on Palestinian land on what Israel refers to as #E1

She also clarifies:

@AbirKopty: #BabAlShams is a new village, not one revived but it symbolizes a lot of things including return to our land.

This movement could be considered as the first initiative to take an effective reaction to the confiscation of Palestinian land by the Israeli army, and its declaration that this area will soon be built into an Israeli settlement, which is illegal under international law.

Palestinian Pal_1948 explains [ar]:

@Pal_1948: The Israeli government recently announced the construction of 4,000 residential units and hotel rooms, and an industrial zone in the region [E1], so a group of 300 young Palestinians established the Village of Bab Al Shams.

He adds:

@Pal_1948: So far, 25 tents have been erected, with an equipped medical clinic, where there is a doctor on call and in the coming hours about 50 tents will be set up.

A few hours later, the Israeli army surrounded the area, closed the checkpoints leading to Bab Al Shams, and handed the activists an administrative eviction notice to evacuate the village. Interestingly, the Israeli supreme court issued a suspending order, which states that the village cannot be evicted for 6 days.

Fadi Arouri explains with a photo of the eviction notice:

@farouri: The [Israeli] army delivers immediate evacuation notice of Village Bab Alshams, despite the Supreme Court’s decision to prevent eviction by 6 days.

Abir kopty wasn’t surprised by the Israeli notice, and tweeted:

@AbirKopty: We were ready to the eviction order so along with building #BabAlShams we went to the court & got suspending order! We are using their tolos.

Despite the Israeli notice of evacuation and the cold weather, the Palestinian activists decided that they will stay the night at their tents in the new village. Keep following updates on Twitter on the hashtag #BabAlshams for further developments.

Source:

https://globalvoicesonline.org

osted on: January 25, 2013

By Irene Nasser

‘What made Bab Al-Shams significant was the fact that it asserted that Palestinian activists would not simply react to injustices the occupation laid at our doorstep, but that we were determined to create our own realities on the ground.’

Last week, I witnessed a remarkable victory for Palestinian unarmed civil resistance. Over a frigid January weekend, I joined hundreds of Palestinians in establishing Bab Al-Shams (literally ‘Gate of the Sun’), a new Palestinian village, erected on private Palestinian land near Jerusalem in the territory known as E1, which Israel has controversially slated for future settlement growth.

The planning, coordination and discipline that went into this action were extraordinary. The exact plans were kept as a closely guarded secret until the last moment, when they were revealed to activists who gathered for a supposed planning camp in Jericho. Those who opted to participate boarded buses and began work on constructing the village. When we arrived at the site, tents were quickly erected, electricity connected, and a media center and clinic set up. On the owners’ behalf, lawyers obtained an injunction from Israel’s High Court barring our immediate evacuation. We held discussions and strategy sessions, as Bab Al-Shams provided the rare opportunity for Palestinian women and men from throughout Palestine to meet face to face. Before long, we were met by others who had run for miles through the hills, bypassing an Israeli cordon to join us.

Forty-eight hours later, in the middle of the night, after the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office argued before the court that we posed an extreme security threat, hundreds of Israeli Police special forces arrived to evict Bab Al-Shams – proving that acts of unarmed civil resistance are often the most disquieting to those bent on domination and intimidation.

Throughout our time in Bab Al-Shams, local and international media covered our story intensively, recognizing it for the act of creative, strategic nonviolence that it was, while numerous messages of support poured in through social media, phone calls and text messages. Seeing how Bab Al-Shams brought a new sense of optimism and hope to people around the world helped us endure the bitterly cold nights and violent evacuation by the Israeli forces.

But it was not just the level of organization and discipline that set Bab Al-Shams apart, nor the media interest that catapulted our story into headlines around the world. What made Bab Al-Shams significant was the fact that it asserted that we, as Palestinian activists, would not simply react to injustices the occupation laid at our doorstep, but that we were determined to create our own realities on the ground. With our own hands, we would lay the foundation for a society that is not rooted in strength of arms or coercion, but in partnership, equality and moral determination. Though Bab Al-Shams was evacuated and destroyed within days, it was a milestone in Palestinians’ efforts to take control of their own destiny.

Sadly, we did not have long to celebrate those achievements. Two days after Bab Al-Shams was evacuated, we received word from the West Bank village of Budrus, a bastion of the unarmed struggle against Israel’s Separation Barrier, that 16-year-old resident Samir Awad had been shot and killed by the Israeli army. He was hit from behind with three live bullets, though he was unarmed and by all accounts posed no threat to the soldiers. He was the fourth unarmed Palestinian to be shot and killed by the Israeli military in five days. In the blink of an eye, the triumphant protest songs filling the air in Bab Al-Shams were replaced by cries of anguish in Budrus, a community shattered by the loss of one of its sons.

Such extreme transitions are commonplace for those who live here. All too often, the promise of a fresh idea is swept away in a torrent of blood and tears. Yet even at the height of his community’s anguish, one of Budrus’s most resilient organizers, Ayed Morrar, told me that the village remains committed to using nonviolence to resist the occupation. Moved by messages of support and condolences that came in from around the world, Ayed asserted that the people of Budrus would not allow the violence visited upon their community to taint the way they raise their children.

Whether popular resistance ultimately succeeds in bringing about a better future in the region depends on our ability to follow the lead of remarkable communities like Budrus. It will be determined, in the end, by our capacity to emerge from the inevitable setbacks and tragedies we encounter with renewed commitment to steel ourselves and try something new.

But that future will come more quickly and with less blood spilled if those around the world, and particularly those in Palestinian and Israeli society who believe in the causes of human freedom and equal rights, pay attention to our actions. That partnership and moral sustenance from afar will help us remain steadfast in the wake of each horrendous death, each crippling injury, or each day spent in a dark and filthy cell. It will allow new forms of creative resistance to take root and flourish, rather than wither in the face of public indifference. And it will help make the sum of our actions something more than a succession of minor headlines about yet another series of “clashes” in an unspecified town in the West Bank.

The residents of Bab Al-Shams have been evacuated, its tents removed. Those of Bab Al-Karameh (‘Gate of Dignity’), a second protest village founded in its wake, are now gone too. What remains is our reinforced conviction, that despite everything, civil resistance can pierce through the hard layers of indifference and animosity that prevail here. That perhaps the occupation can end without a bloodbath after all. Like so many others who have trodden this path before us, we do not know if we will succeed, through efforts like Bab Al-Shams, in beginning the process that finally delivers freedom and dignity to all who live here. But we know we must try.

Irene Nasser is a Jerusalem-based activist and multimedia producer with Just Vision. 

Source:

http://972mag.com/