JERUSALEM

On March 8, 1984, Israeli soldiers set up a roadblock at the Ram intersection on the Jerusalem-Ramallah Road in the West Bank. Ram is one of the Palestinian towns and villages that extend from the suburbs of Jerusalem in a residential chain north to al-Bireh and Ramallah. The intersection at the entrance to the town is a familiar checkpoint, used by the Israeli Defense Forces to close off Jerusalem to the rest of the Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The task for the soldiers was extraordinary that day, for it said to order back Palestinian women and children. The Palestinians were on their way to attend festivities held in and around Jerusalem to honor International Women’s Day. The Israeli military authorities, holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967, knew that International Women’s Day had become a yearly occasion where the PLO recognized Palestinian women. The soldiers, however, were not completely successful for on that day and the next, hundreds of Palestinian women and children circumvented the roadblock by using out-of-the-way roads to get to Jerusalem, and celebrations were held all over the West Bank. Jerusalem’s Palestinian newspaper al-Fajr, noting the barring of the women, then proceeded to report on the festivities in Jerusalem, Ramallah and al-Bireh cities and in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem.

The celebrations included the familiar spectrum of Palestinian political festivals, but it was also apparent that a great deal of preparation had gone into the programs. The newspaper said the audiences heard speeches about the current political situation and about the changing roles of women. Participants listened to commemorations of local martyrs and messages sent by political prisoners. The entertainment included folk dancing, poetry, songs, and skits. Bazaars set up for the occasion sold traditional Palestinian embroidery.

What the soldiers at the Ram intersection might not have realized was that International Women’s Day also marked the birth of an unfolding Woman’s Committees’ Movement that had begun six years earlier. It is not often that the birth of a social movement can be narrowed to a day and place.

The Women’s Committees’ Movement began at an afternoon meeting on March 8, 1978, in the old library of Ramallah in the West Bank. Some thirty women, all from the urban middle class in the Jerusalem and Ramallah areas, came to discuss how women could be organized to support the steadfastness effort. Steadfastness was the Palestinian buzzword for peaceful resistance against the Israeli occupation, and by the early ’70s it had replaced the collapsed armed struggle movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The women at the Ramallah library meeting were familiar faces to one another, as they worked together in the community volunteers’ movement that was taking shape in the mid-1970s. To an outsider, the library meeting would have been innocuous; the idea of women doing volunteer work was as old as their great grandmothers who had started charitable societies as early as 1902 in Acre on the Mediterranean coast. A closer look would have revealed the nucleus of the Occupied Territories’ incoming second and third generations of women’s leadership. These were enthusiastic young cadres who were in their 20s and early 30s and ready to make their mark for the Palestinian cause.

At the center was second-generation Democratic Front’s Zahira Kamal who, with fellow partisan Siham Barghouti, issued the invitation for the meeting and would soon form the Women’s Action Committees.

The first three groups represent the leftist current in the Palestinian liberation movement and, in contrast with the mobilization in the Diaspora of the 1970s when Fateh dominated, the leftists led in organizing women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The oldest group is the Union of Women’s Action Committees, established in 1978. Its founder and president is Zahira Kamal, who was the leading figure in the Democratic Front in the Occupied Territories until it split into two; she is now a leader of the Palestinian Democratic Union Party (Fida), Yasser Abed Rabbo’s group. For most of its history, the Women’s Action focused its recruitment on housewives, who constituted 75 percent of the membership. In 1992, however, the leadership decided to expand its appeal to include employed women. The union’s membership reached a height of 10,000 in 1990, before splitting in half in 1991 because of the schism inside its sponsoring faction, the Democratic Front, over the peace process.

The Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, affiliated with the Popular Front, was established in 1981; its leader is Maha Nassar. The size of the union’s membership is kept secret, but it is estimated to have 5,000 to 6,000 members, with a high proportion of The Union of Working Women’s Committees was also established in 1981 and is led by Amal Khrieheh. The union, which is sponsored by the Palestine Communist Party (now the Palestine People’s Party), initially focused on working women and students; its membership reached a height of 5,000. After 1990, however, the union’s grassroots organizing faltered because of lack of funds and the collapse of the Soviet block.

Consequently, the Union’s leading women became more independent from the Communist Party and are interested in a variety of women’s rights’ issues.

The last group to form was the Union of Social Work Committees, which was established in 1982 and is led by Rabiha Diab. The union is affiliated with Fateh and its membership is diverse and growing, having reached 8,000 women in 1990.

These four unions represent the tour de force of the second and third generations of leaders. These data, from 1990, symbolize the ability of women from the main PLO factions to navigate past Israeli suppression of political activity in the Occupied Territories.

Also, in creating their own organizations, these cadres had made a declaration of independence from the charitable work of their mothers’ generation.

The second- and third-generation women’s leadership in the Occupied Territories, as their comrades in the Diaspora, were never satisfied with charitable work and most, especially those in the third generation, did not partake in it. They were children of the ’60s and ’70s who believed in social change and thought charitable work elitist, holding little promise of changing the oppressive situation of Arab women. They were daughters of Nasser’s Arab nationalism and the Palestinian National Movement, and at university were rapidly drawn to student activism organized by the popular and Democratic fronts, the Palestine Communist Party, and Fateh.

The women were respectful of their mothers’ generation. “This is something one cannot ignore,” said third-generation Nassar, head of the Palestinian Women’s Committees.

“They gave and sacrificed and still do; they are part of the women’s movement.

” Second-generation Kamal of the Women’s Action Commitees and first-generation societies leader Khalil were also repotedly good friends, which might have been due to the fact that Kamal and at least one of Khalil’s sons were leaders in the Democratic Front.

Kamal agreed, saying:” The question sometimes is not a question of the woman and the man. The woman can be more oppressive than the man- I mean of the woman. The three leftist groups were especially keen on making changes in how women thought of themselves in relation to the Palestinian movement and their own status in the society.

It was all reminiscent of the leftist in the diasporan women’s leadership in Lebanon, but the political environment had changed. In place of the whirlwind of the Lebanese civil war, there was a new political order that unfolded in the 1987 uprising, the rise of Hamas, and the PLO’s diplomatic maneuvers, culminating in the PLO- Israel accord of September 1993, the Declaration of Principles.

The hubs of Palestinian politics in the Occupied Territories are located along the Jerusalem-Ramallah-Nablus urban nexus of the West Bank, and Gaza City in the Strip. The two centers are separated by a single 100 km two-lane highway through Israel. The women’s leadership lived in and around Jerusalem, and that is it started to organize.

About one-third of all Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and, of those, two-fifths are refugees. The bank is home to two-third of the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and it is also larger and more spread out than the Strip. The West Bank is 130 km north to south and 30-40 km east to west, while the Gaza Strip is only 44km in length and 4-12 km in width. The vast majority of the 495 Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories are located in the Bank, which also has twenty refugee camps. The camps can be found throughout, but about half of the people in them live in the Nablus are, which is 65 km north of Jerusalem. The city also hosted the largest and most politically volatile camp, Balata. Altogether, about one-fourth of West Bankers are refugees. The many villages and camps in the Bank reminds one of the reality that the Occupied Territories are at once home to those with ancestral roots in the area and are a place of exile for the refugees.

The Gaza Strip is logistically less accessible to the women’s leadership in the West Bank. As the southern tip of Palestine, it is closer to Egypt, which administered it in the 1948- 1967 period. The population of the Strip is concentrated in three cities-Gaza, Khan Younis and Rafah- and in eight refugee camps and a few villages. Both the Bank and the Strip have suffered from frequent curfews and telephone cut-off, disrupting communications between the two regions. The Strip, however, could also be easily cordoned off by a single roadblock at the Eretz checkpoint at the entrance to Gaza.

The Gaza Strip is also a greatly distressed community. It is distinguished by having one of the highest population densities in the world (an average of 1,800/sq. km. And as high as 5,000/ sq. km. Around Gaza city). In 1948 the Strip was already one of Palestine’s poorest regions when it lost much of its agricultural land to Israel. At the same time, it was inundated with the refugees who now constitute two-thirds of its residents.

The scarcity of resources and the political situation meant high unemployment especially among the refugees, half of whom still live in the Strip’s eight refugee camps. (It is in the largest of these camps, Jabalya, on the outskirts of Gaza that the Intifada began).

Underneath its often curfewed streets, Gaza conveyed an air of combustion ripe with nationalist and conservative sentiments. This was Fateh and Hamas country. There is a degree of desperation and anger in Gaza, unlike any other place: it is the greatest reminder of the Palestinian tragedy. Consequently, Gazanas have always been great trouble to the Israeli occupation administration. Which is why Israel wanted to unload it fast onto the PLO’s shoulders.

Gaza’s social economic and political environment presented the women’s leadership out of the West Bank with an ambiguous environment for women’s mobilization. Gaza is a society that embraced its children who resisted the occupation, including the females among them.

Local Democratic Front leader Ne’meh Helou (unrelated to Juhan and Shadia), who was sought by Israel for membership in the Unified Ledaership of the Uprising (the secret leadership of the Intifada), was able to go into hiding for years. Helou was Kamal’s counterpart in Gaza and a former commando who spent the 70’s in prison, and upon release did moblilization work for her faction. (In 1990, shortly after I met her, she was arrested and remained in prison until she was released in 1993, following the Israeli-PLO accord.) Now she is the top woman in the Palestinian Democratic Union Party in the Gaza Strip and in her party’s congress in 1995; she received the most votes for leadership among both female and male candidates. Gaza is alos a conservative society- not very hospitable to attempts to  liberalize women’s roles and that attitude hindered the recruitment drive of the Women’s Committees’ Movement.

The Palestinian social landscape is generally conservative and economically distresses throughout the Territories, as it is in the refugee camps of the diaspora, so organizers had to address in Gaza and elsewhere the very same constraints of women’s resources.

Especially stark were women’s low levels of education and economic dependency. For example, in 1987, the average housewife had less than nine years of school. This was especially a problem in the villages, where advancing above the elementary level often meant commuting outside one’s village or town, which produces fears for their girls’ reputations. In the refugee camps, UNRWA has schools for both boys and girls and most of the camps are located near cities, making education more accessible. The refugees also placed a great value on education for both sexes, as the only way out to poverty. Once out of school, however, the vast majority of women tended to marry and only a small minority engaged in employment.

As was the case in the diasporan organizing effort during the Jordanian and Lebanese periods, recruits were approached through the usual social rituals, and organizers found inroads by providing assistance and friendship. In the words of an organizer for the Social Work Committees in Gaza:

We usually try to reach the woman in her home, right in her place. We do not burden her to have to come to us. For example. I have a neighbor whose son was arrested, I then go to her at the house and tell her to give me his name and the number of his identity card and I go to inform the Cross (International Red Cross). I do not wish to give her the burden of his work. No, on the contrary, I want to make her feel that her son is like my brother. For sure, most of the aware sisters work like this.

For the three leftist groups, success required turning away from the Marxist-Leninist secret cells to the more open structure of volunteer committees. Sometimes it was also necessary to secure the support of the male elder in some of the more tightly woven village communities. It was difficult at times to gain the trust of the people. An organizer for the Women’s Action Committee in Nablus said:

Sometimes the woman becomes afraid. She agrees to join the committees but she returns after two to three days or a week and says, “My husband wouldn’t let me” or “I am afraid because you belong to a certain political current.” We try to convince her that it is her right to join a political program, even if her political inclinations are somewhere else. [We say] “you can be an active member in this framework in a very ordinary way and it is not necessary that you become obligated.”

A Gazan in charge of the Middle camps for the Women’s Action Committees, have a step-by-step account of how a women’s committee would be started. She said:

We go first to the house to visit one who is receptive to be active in the committees. She gathers the women around her. She brings them one of us who has a good idea about the program We present the program of the committees. We present what the role of women is, how we will develop ourselves and how we will take part in the national struggle, which cannot be separated from the social struggle to improve women’s social and economic conditions… After that, through our discussion-there are many people who speak and ask for explanation-we sense who is enthusiastic of the twenty, thirty, or thirty-five who attended.

[They ask] ” How could one work?”

The organizers would then take this opportunity to suggest forming a local women’s committee. She would say, Ï am from outside the neighborhood and couldn’t come to you.

The one who should work with you should be one, two or a group of you. So why don’t you choose one or two of you represent you. Afterwards, other meetings are arranged and a local committee is born. In the words of the Gazan organizers.

After that we return and have another meeting, and another, and we explain to them the basic structures of the union. We choose from them five or seven, depending on the number present- the most enthusiastic group-and we delegate to them the basic responsibility for the activities, calling meetings and so on.

Organizers day trips were occasions for interested women from different areas to meet and get away from the daily routines but, occasionally, participants had to deal with harassment from some of the men standing by in the streets. Kamal said these encounters proved to be good opportunities for leadership training, and gave the example of an excursion her group once organized for women from several West Bank villages. Kamal said some of the men in one village met the tour bus and said none of our women will go. Kamal answered them:

“Okay, we shall drive around in town and we shall take those who join us.” This they did and the outcome was a success; they had registered for one and ended filling up two.

Kamal said:

We knew how to work with the local society, I mean, instead of leaving at seven we left at nine because it took us time to debate. But in the end, the women themselves stood firm because they wanted to go on the trips…And now we have in those locations, where we faced great difficulties, the strongest of our sites. And they have great perseverance, they have high potential, very big, and they have abilities in persuasion.

Hanan Ashrawi, who lived in Ramallah, West Bank, was a longtime observer of the Women’s Committees’ Movement. In her opinion, the entry of the women’s committees into the villages was a tremendous breakthrough in the nationalist effort to involve women:

I think they are more successful than we think they are because they have managed to reach women in remote areas, women who were hitherto neglected, who were not part of the nationalist or feminist movement movements. And by creating work opportunities, by getting them involved, by giving them the channels, the avenues for self-expression and decision-making, they have politicized women even beyond their wildest dreams-because women were ready.

The three leftist groups, the Women’s Action Committees, the Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Working Women’s Committees, led the way in recruitment, through they were mainly successful in the West Bank. After the Intifada, however, the fortunes of the fourth group, the Social Work Committees, began to improve when its sponsor Fateh increased its funding, as evidenced by the many kindergartens it opened during the period 1990-1991.

In the best tradition of Palestinian political factionalism, the four women’s unions competed along familiar lines. They organized adult literacy classes for women ( in a region where three-quarters of women forty-five years and older had no formal schooling of any kind),

and offered vocational workshops in sewing, weaving and such; but mostly, they competed with kindergartens. Each union had dozens of these one- to three-room kindergartens that became the most visible measure of their success.

The kindergartens did two things, said Abla Abu Elbi, a third-generation member of the Women’s secretariat, who works out of the office of the Jordanian People’s Party in Amman. Abu Elbi was in close contact with her group (The Democratic Front) across the border. Kindergartens served women who were already active and needed child care but they also provided an opportunity, she said, “To enter the location in which kindergartens are set up so as to enter a relationship with the masses in those locations.”

In the mid-1980s, two of the unions-the Palestinian Women’s Committees and the Women’s Action Committees-experimented with small-scale income-generating projects. Almost all involved food preservation, drawing on Arab women’s traditional knowledge of homemade preservers.

The Palestinian Women’s Committees organized a few profit-sharing cooperatives. Their two main projects were located in the villages of Sa’ir (Hebron district) and Beitillo (Ramallah district). With about twenty-five to thirty women each, they produced and marketed preserves, pickles, jams and fruit drinks. The Norwegian Save the Children Fund and the Refugee Council provided the funds and Birzeit University provided the technical The central leadership of the Palestinian Women’s Committees initiated the projects and arranged for technical assistance, then turned over business decisions regarding production, accounting, marketing, and distribution of profits to the participants. It was an interesting commentary on the times for the Marxist-Leninist-oriented leadership to opt for a semblance of capitalist thinking and recognize the profit motive. Theirs was a social democratic model, however. Eileen Kuttab was in charge of the development projects of the Palestinian Women’s Committees. She said it was important to teach women that profits should be in part directed toward benefiting common interests-and gave the example of using apportion of the profit of the cooperative for a daycare center to serve the working mothers.

In contrast, the Women’s Action Committees aimed at encouraging local initiative. Their two main village projects were the Abasan Biscuit and Milks center, located east of Khan Unis in the Gaza Strip, and the Essawiya Copper Works at the northeast end of Jerusalem.

At Abasan, the local committee came up with the idea of making biscuits for comercial use and at first had to rely on a small conventional oven for the baking.

The central office in Jerusalem was then asked for commercial equipment, which was eventually provided through funds from European development agencies.

The Essawiya Copper Works was a combined vocational training and income-generating project of the leadership of the Women’s Action Committees. Started in early 1984, it was an experiment in nontraditional vocational education for young women, who were taught copper crafts. The idea was to teach them how to use hammers, wrenches, electric welders, and saws. “Men do these activities in our society,” Kamal explained, “and now it is a new experience for women.” Both unions saw their projects as catalysts of social change for the participating women. 

There was a consensus among the women’s leadership in all the groups that making decisions at the workplace enhances a woman’s self-confidence and is bounded to affect her private life. It might mean, for example, simply being able to decide who she marries, rather than having to bend to her family’s choice, as oftentimes happens in the more conservative families. The women’s leadership, however, had no illusions that these isolated pilots would change social attitudes toward women’s roles in the society. But they were small windows that the women in the villages could use to gain increased personal autonomy and self-initiative.  

At the very beginning of the Palestinian National Movement, the hope of the leftist in the women’s leadership was that women would become cadres in the factions and participate in the armed struggle. Now their goal was to provide models of how women could more widely be involved in Palestinian nation-building, however, they had to do so in ways that they were unobtrusive to the prevailing social norms, for example, having more flexible work schedules and part-time work. (Interestingly, to be sensitive to the Muslim culture, the Women’s Action Commitees’ magazine, darb al-mar’s (1991), contained a column by a Muslim scholar, who advised readers on women’s rights in Islam.)  “The work is enormous and requires great patience,” Kamal said, and both the leaders of the Women’s Action Committees and the Palestinian Women’s Committees were in it for the long haul.

The Working Women’s Committees’ struggle was focused on women’s labor rights- at best a frustrating enterprise. First, they could not, by law, unionize at sites across the Green Line (the 1948 border between Israel and the Occupied Territories). And it was there that thousands of female workers headed to fill low-paid agricultural and services jobs.

Also, some of the women were difficult to reach because they were transported directly from their villages to Israel by special buses provided by the employers. Second, the Palestinian economy was greatly depressed because of Israeli policies against autonomous Palestinian development and because of high un employment. Labor rights issues  also took second seat to the national question, especially among the male-dominated labor unions that were often preoccupied with national competitions.  

The Working Women’s Committees led a couple of campaigns against Palestinian companies to win equal wages for women and to have International Women’s Day be considered a paid holiday. Ashrawi was in the delegation that paid a visit to one of these factory owners:

“We formed a delegation of women across the broad to go and defend Women’s rights and to demand equal wages and so we sent him word that we were coming. And when he found out that we were making an issue of it, immediately he said he changed. He gave in to the women.”  

She added, “We waged this as a feminist struggle rather than as a political group struggle. ” In the end, these successes were all symbolic without the mandate of law, but they were occasions -admittedly on a small scale- for the women’s leadership to present a unified front on behalf of women’s interests.  

The Social Work Committees did not have a social-change agenda, which is consistent with its sponsor Fateh’s purely national liberation purpose. The group had a few seasonal pickling projects such as one in the village of Kufr Malik (Ramallah distict), but these were propelled by the Intifada and were meant to symbolize on of its long-term goals for the Palestinian to disengage from the Israeli economy.  

In the 1987 Intifada, known as “the uprising of the stones,” Palestinian women were shown to Western audiences through television cameras. The images were of traditionally clad women breaking up boulders into smaller pieces thrown by the children, or shielding the children from Israeli soldiers. The women stood in the streets alongside boys (and some-times girls), all challenging occupation soldiers with stones.  

The Intifada lasted several years and was sustained by a wide infrastructure of the organizations. Prior to 1987, it was common to have demonstrations and confrontations with the occupation forces against arrests, deportations, and other reminders of the occupation. The Intifada was different because of the prior development of women’s, labor, and student unions, health clinics, and new universities, which sprung up in the late 1970s.

The momentum of the Intifada meant the PLO’s nation-building effort in the Occupied Territories had succeeded. But the Intifada was as much a statement of defiance and regained dignity as it was a message of acceptance that the home of the Palestinian state was to be limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Intifada also brought a greater visibility to the women’s committees.  

The Intifada gave the third generation their first taste of public exposure; other than Kamal, heads of women’s committees were all from that generation. Women leaders were I demand as speakers at press conferences and at universities and other assemblies. The actual day-to-day leader ship of the uprising, however, was in the hands of the secret unified National Leadership of the Uprising, and it is not known if any women actually served in that body.  

Women participated in the Intifada’s popular Committees that flourished at the outset, until they were banned in 1988 by the Israeli military administration. There were home teaching committees to substitute for the ordered-closed schools, emergency and health committees to to help the wounded, and agricultural committees that experimented with growing food in neighborhood plots.  

However, women were visible absent from guard duty committees, replacing local police who had resigned in support of the Intifada.

Enthusiastic support for the uprising came from organized and unorganized women alike, but was ultimately sustained by widespread networks of Palestinian institutions-including women’s committees and charitable societies. Women’s organizations worked alongside worker and professional syndicates, students unions, merchants, and health service societies. They participated in distributing the secret communiqués of the United Leadership, delivered PLO funds for social relief, visited prisoners and their families, and performed other activities that paralleled their sister’s work during the war in Lebanon.  

Kamal felt extremely rewarded when she discovered that the women’s committees in some of the remote villages remained viable during the weeks of curfews imposed by the military.

She said:  

It showed that, indeed, our members were not waiting for the decision of the executive office. They were capable of taking decisions by themselves and of participating in the work according to the basic vision of the program and their understanding of it. Therefore, when we were able to return to see each other it was as if no interruption happened. I mean, all the work was according to the basic rules and this is something we are proud of, that we were able to realize it in spite of their difficult circumstances.  

Generally, the different unions contributed separately except when coordinating the distribution of PLO funds given to families of prisoners and martyrs. These funds were channeled through the Higher Women’s Council, the top leadership body that the women’s committees’ leadership founded in 1988 to provide just such coordination (actually, they had been meeting informally for much longer). In the language of Palestinian nationalism, the women’s organizations “ proved themselves” in the Intifada.  

The PLO praised the women’s organizations at the 19^th National Council session in 1988.

Muhammad Melhem, head of the PLO Department of the Affairs of the Occupied Homeland, said in his report to the Council:  

The event of the Intifada confirmed the central role of the population frameworks: popular committees, women’s and students’ professional and workers’ unions, merchants’ committees, societies and clubs, health committees and agricultural and others in the net of national institutions and popular frameworks that formed the arms of the national movement, its podiums and channels.  

But the cost of women’s higher visibility was high, as the detention and interrogation of activists intensified and some of their projects were attacked and their programs disrupted or destroyed.  

During the Intifada, the income-generating project went into crisis, burdened by a mix of political and economic impediments. As of 1993, the Beitillo cooperative was still unable to receive Israeli permission to build a larger facility, which the project needed if it was to become economically viable. The projects badly needed business expertise, especially in the area of modern marketing techniques, which apparently was the reason Abasan Biscuit had folded. It was also difficult to sustain the work and perform long-range planning with seasonal produce.  

The effects of the Intifada on the Women’s Committees’ Movement were paradoxical. Women were politically visible in clashes with Israeli soldiers and in leaders podiums. The Intifada sparked enthusiasm that brought thousands to the women’s committees, reaching an estimated height of 3 percent (28,000-29,000) of the Palestinian women in the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian women were engaged in politics as never before, and there was a feeling that they just might escape the specter of the Algerian  women’s experiences.

At the same time, the Intifada brought about a new political reality in the Occupied Territories that caused the Women’s Committees’ Movement to unravel.  

The first of trouble appeared in Gaza in the summer of 1988. The city was experiencing the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, as embodied in the organizations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Gaza itself is not considered a sacred place in Islam, though it is special because it was home to Imam Shafi’I, the eighth-century founder of one of the four classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and not its strictest, in regards to family law and the treatment of women. Also, Prophet Muhammad’s paternal great grandfather Hashim was buried in Gaza. But fundamentalism in Gaza had fed on the desperation of a people burdened by a great deal of unemployment and poverty, in an atmosphere of siege and nightly curfews (Jabalya and Shati refugee camps in particular had the disconcerting appearance of large concentration camps.)  

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928, with a broad agenda for return to Islamic principles by society and government. The Muslim Brothers came to Palestine in the late 1940s and fought as volunteers in support of the Palestinian cause in the 1948 War with the Jewish forces.

During the period from the 1950s-1960s, the membership of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world rose and fell, affected by the extent of support or suppression by Arab governments. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, however, the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood remained small, never reaching, more than 2,000 in membership.

In the 1970s, however, the Brotherhood and other Islamist revivalist groups benefited by the rise of the Islamic fundamentalist movement that spread throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. There is a general consensus that one of the most important causes that sparked Islamist activism was the 1967 Israeli victory over the Arabs, which was perceived as a humiliating defeat for Muslims. Another was, the rise of the conservative Arab regimes on the Gulf area, especially Saudi Arabia, when their enormous wealth amassed from higher oil prices in the mid-to-late ‘70s, enabled them to exert influence throughout the Arab world.

And, of course, there was the dramatic overthrow of the Shah of Iran by the Islamic forces in  1979. The Islamist movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was visible in the dramatic growth of the number of mosques built since the 1970s and, also, in the proliferation of Islamic educational, children’s nurseries, youth clubs, health clinics, and vocational centers. This social service infrastructure, its heart the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Center in Gaza, took on a more overt political face only after the 1987 Intifada, and is mainly represented by Hamas. Islamic Jihad, founded in 1980, has a fairly friendly relationship with the Fateh organization (though less so since the increase in Islamist violent attacks on Israeli targets during 1994 that challenged the PLO’s dealing with Israel). In any case, Islamic Jihad is a rather small group. Hamas, on the other hand, represents the Palestinian resistance arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and was founded in 1987 as an active, militant alternative to the nationalist leader-ship. Hamas was poised to challenge the secular leadership of the PLO and especially Arafat’s peace initiative and the two-state solution. To Hamas, Palestine is an Islamic waqf (trust), and no solution short of the full liberation of Palestine and a government of Islamic law, including a traditionalist social agenda, is aceptable.

From a young girl’s point of view, through to the mature observations of an adult woman, the lifetime of Palestine, with all its peaks and valleys of human experience

Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations—massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered kuffiyehs and suicide bombers, a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction. This novel does not shy away from such painful images, but it is first and foremost a powerful human story, following the life of a young girl from her days in the village of al-Tantoura in Palestine up to the dawn of the new century. We participate in events as they unfold, seeing them through the uneducated but sharply intelligent mind of Ruqayya, as she tries to make sense of all that has happened to her and her family. With her, we live her love of her land and of her people; we feel the repeated pain of loss, of diaspora, and of cross-generational misunderstanding; and above all, we come to know her indomitable human spirit. As we read we discover that we have become part of Ruqayya’s family, and her voice will remain with us long after we have closed the book.

About the author:

Radwa Ashour, a highly acclaimed Egyptian writer and scholar, is the author of more than fifteen books of fiction, memoir, and criticism, including Granada (AUC Press, 2008) and Specters (AUC Press, 2010). She is a recipient of the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature and the prestigious Owais Prize for Fiction. Kay Heikkinen has taught medieval history and literature as well as Islamic civilization, and currently teaches Arabic at the University of Chicago. She is the translator of Naguib Mahfouz’s In the Time of Love (AUC Press, 2010).