Samiha Khalil

Of the women’s demonstrations she led against the Baghdad Pact in the 1950s, Samiha Khalil said simply: “We killed the Baghdad Pact. We kept demonstrating until it expired.” She was born on 20 April 1923 in Anabta, daughter of Yusuf al-Qabaj and Halima Tuqan, and schooled in Nablus, Tulkarm and the Friends boarding school in Ramallah — she recalled giving her first nationalist speech at a mosque protest at the age of twelve. During the Great Rebellion her father, then mayor of Anabta, protested as British soldiers slit open with bayonets the bales of rice and flour he had collected for the poor; the British killed five of her cousins in those years. Married in 1940 to the schoolteacher Salama Khalil, she was stranded by the war of 1948 away from their home in al-Majdal, reached Gaza by a roundabout route with three children and a fourth expected, and eventually settled in Ramallah, where in 1952 she founded the Arab Women’s Union in al-Bireh with a kindergarten, a literacy centre and a sewing workshop.

In 1965 she and other women established Jam’iyyat In’ash al-Usra, the Family Revival Society, and she remained its president until her death. The same year she took part in the founding conference of the General Union of Palestinian Women in Jerusalem and became a member of the Palestine National Council. She completed three years of secondary curriculum in nine months to sit the tawjihi alongside her own son, and enrolled at Beirut Arab University past the age of forty — until the occupation of 1967 cut her off from her final exams. After the June war she rushed to the aid of the newly displaced, above all the people of the Latrun villages Israel destroyed, opening twenty-three first-aid centres and organizing monthly support for nursery children and the families of the dead. When the military administration banned the society from raising funds, she turned it into an economy: buying cheese, olives and juice from village women to sell on their behalf, teaching sewing, embroidery and hairdressing, housing the children of martyrs, publishing studies of village heritage through the research committee she founded in 1972, and building a popular museum in Ramallah.

The occupation answered her with six arrests, the last in 1976 on charges of belonging to the Palestine National Front; placed in a cell with four Israeli women charged with violent crimes, she was beaten with broomsticks so badly that the prison administration transferred her for fear she would be killed. There followed two and a half years of house arrest and years of travel bans. In 1979 she was elected the only woman on the National Guidance Committee, the highest Palestinian body inside the occupied territories. She represented Palestinian women in more than twenty congresses worldwide, and in 1996 — a believer, as she was, in total equality between men and women — she ran for president of the Palestinian Authority against Yasser Arafat, the only person ever to do so, and won 12 percent of the vote. She died in Ramallah on 26 February 1999. Her tombstone reads: “Samiha Khalil: She fought for the freedom and independence of the Palestinian people.”

Sources

• Samiha Khalil — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question