Intissar al-Wazir (Umm Jihad)
انتصار الوزير (أم جهاد)
First woman member of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority's first minister of social affairs
The Gaza City militant who became Fatah's first woman member in 1959, built the PLO's institutions for the families of martyrs and prisoners, survived her husband Khalil al-Wazir's assassination beside her in Tunis, and returned from thirty years of exile as minister of social affairs.
Intissar al-Wazir was born in Gaza City in 1941, and in 1959 became the first woman member of Fatah — the movement in which she met Khalil al-Wazir, whom she married two years later. From 1963 to 1965 the couple lived in Algiers, where Khalil al-Wazir ran Fatah’s first bureau abroad. An ardent militant for the place of women in the Palestinian resistance, she was one of the founders of the General Union of Palestinian Women, participating in the first conference for Palestinian women in 1965, and serving as the union’s secretary-general from 1980 to 1985. In the 1960s she helped found the PLO’s social service institutions — the Social Affairs Committee, the Martyrs’ Families Organization, and the Committee for Prisoners and the Injured — the apparatus that sustained the families of the movement’s dead and imprisoned, which she would direct for decades.
She became a member of the Palestine National Council in 1974, took a history degree from the University of Damascus in 1978, and joined Fatah’s Revolutionary Council in 1981, serving as its deputy secretary-general from 1983. In April 1988, after six years in Tunis, an Israeli commando assassinated her husband — by then the PLO’s second figure and the architect of support for the First Intifada — in front of her at their home. That same year she was elected to the PLO Executive Committee, and in August 1989, at Fatah’s fifth congress in Tunis, she joined the movement’s Central Committee.
In 1995 she returned to the Gaza Strip after thirty years of exile and was appointed the Palestinian Authority’s minister of social affairs; in January 1996 she was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council as a deputy for Gaza City. She kept the social affairs portfolio through successive cabinets, including the government formed in April 2003, in which Yasser Arafat insisted on her inclusion. Her nom de guerre, Umm Jihad — mother of the struggle — is the name by which Palestinians know her: one of the last women of the founding generation, unyielding in her insistence that the occupation, not the occupied, bore responsibility for the condition of her people.
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Further reading
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