Issam Abdul Hadi

Issam Abdul Hadi was born in Nablus in 1928, studied at the A’ishiyya School there and completed her secondary education at the Friends Girls School in Ramallah. Her activist career began in 1949, when she was elected secretary of the Arab Women’s Union in Nablus, which through the 1950s opened branches in the towns and villages around the city; she marched against the Baghdad Pact in 1955 and against the Tripartite Aggression on Egypt in 1956. In late May 1964 she was selected as a member of the First Palestine National Congress, from which issued the Palestine Liberation Organization, and in July 1965 she participated in the Jerusalem conference that established the General Union of Palestinian Women and was elected its president.

After Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967 she organized strikes and marches and aid to the families of the dead and detained. In January 1969 she headed the three-day strike inside the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, and on 13 March 1969 she was arrested with her daughter Fayha’; both were tortured, charged with supplying the resistance with material aid and hiding wanted fighters, and deported to Jordan at the end of April. From Amman she carried on: in 1974 she became the first woman member of the PLO’s Central Council, and at the union’s second congress at Suq al-Gharb in Lebanon in August 1974 she was again elected president of the General Union of Palestinian Women — a post she held until May 2009. She headed the PLO delegation to the first UN International Women’s Conference in Mexico City in 1975, which condemned Zionism as a form of racism, served as vice-president of the Women’s International Democratic Federation from 1981 to 1992, and took part in the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993. After the signing of the Oslo accord she returned to Palestine.

She received the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in recognition of a career spanning eight decades of struggle, was among eight Palestinian women nominated in the Swiss “1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize” initiative in 2005, and was awarded the PLO’s Jerusalem Medal in 2009; the director Arab Lutfi made a film about her whose title catches the person — A Militant Even When Preparing Morning Tea. She died in Amman on 8 August 2013 and was buried there; Mahmoud Abbas announced her death, calling her “the militant Issam Abd al-Hadi.” Those who worked with her recorded a pioneer of women’s and union organizing who worked in harmony with colleagues of every opinion and carried the cause of Palestinian women into Arab and international forums for sixty years.

Sources

• Issam Abd al-Hadi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question