The Women of the Movement

The Palestinian national movement is usually narrated through its men, and the archive that results is not so much hostile to women as structurally incapable of seeing them: it indexes armed formations, party congresses and negotiating delegations, and the work women did was mostly done in unions, welfare societies, classrooms, clinics and prisons. This exhibition follows that second organisational history, which is older than the parties and outlasted several of them.

Its institutional centre is the General Union of Palestinian Women. Issam Abd al-Hadi of Nablus — elected secretary-general of the Arab Women’s Union there in 1949, and a member of the First Palestine National Congress of 1964 out of which the PLO issued — took part in the conference held in Jerusalem in July 1965 that established the GUPW, and was elected its president. In March 1969 she was arrested with her daughter Fayha’ and tortured, charged with materially aiding the resistance and hiding wanted fighters, and in late April both were deported to Jordan. She rebuilt the union in exile, was re-elected president at its second congress at Suq al-Gharb in Lebanon in August 1974, became the first woman on the PLO’s Central Council that same year, and remained the union’s president until May 2009. That is a working life of forty-four years in one office, most of it conducted outside the country it was for.

The lives around her run through the same institutions from different directions. Intissar al-Wazir joined Fatah in 1959 as its first woman member and spent decades building the PLO’s provision for the families of prisoners and the dead. Samiha Khalil founded In’ash al-Usra — the Family Revival Society — and turned it into a source of income and training for thousands of families under occupation, which is why she was arrested six times and why she was credible enough, in 1996, to be the only person who ever stood against Yasser Arafat in an election. Leila Khaled took the other route, and is now the one photograph most people can name; the walk includes her because a movement’s history is not improved by tidying its armed wing out of it.

Imprisonment is the thread that ties the twentieth century in this exhibition to the twenty-first. In his history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, Ra’fat Hamdouna records that Israel has arrested “thousands of women, including mothers, minors and elderly, who participated in the resistance, or raised their voices demanding the restitution of their rights and their stolen land.” Khalida Jarrar’s five imprisonments — through her father’s death, and through her daughter’s funeral, which she was not permitted to attend — are the same sentence in the present tense. Ahed Tamimi’s memoir is the next generation writing it down at sixteen.

The walk ends with two women killed at work. Shireen Abu Akleh had reported for Al Jazeera for a quarter of a century when she was shot covering a raid in Jenin in May 2022; Razan al-Najjar was a twenty-one-year-old volunteer paramedic from Khan Younis, killed while treating the wounded at the Gaza fence in 2018. Neither was carrying a weapon and both were doing the specific job the movement in this exhibition invented for itself: stay, document, treat, testify. That is what the record shows the women of this movement were mostly doing, and it is why the record is worth walking.

Sources

• Issam Abd al-Hadi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Institute for Palestine Studies)
• The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: History and Experiences — Palestinian Prisoners’ Solidarity Network