Foreword

I ENTERED THE MAIN GATE of the big house and observed lemon trees in the inner courtyard.

To my right, there was the guest reception room. On top of it was the study of the grand man, master of the house, Sheikh Hafez al Batta, the town’s distinguished Islamic scholar, father of Madeeha. He was reading his books on the balcony, as usual. And as usual, reviewing what was going on in his household and beyond. As a 12-year-old boy, I was allowed to cross the next door to the much wider courtyard, where the women and children lived, slept, cooked, sewed, gossiped, and frolicked in peace. My admittance was on account of my friendship with Nadid, Madeeha’s brother, who was my age. We did not stay there long, but went out to play and do things. Nevertheless, my easy access was crucial in my knowing more about Madeeha and being able to have a part to play in her life with her future husband, my brother Ibrahim.

The rest is in the book.

Madeeha (“the praised one”) is a special example of Palestinian women in the south of Palestine. She lived most of her life in Khan Younis, the most southern town (or large village) in Palestine, and was well-educated by the standards of the time, where the majority of rural women had little education. Women were busy with the business of life, making a living in the fields and raising families. Her education allowed her to be a teacher and a headmistress at a young age. She wrote literary articles that were published in the prestigious literary magazines in Cairo, like Al Risalah and Al Thaqafa, equivalent to today’s Times Literary Supplement.

This is not surprising. Her mother came from the respected family Al Idrisi and her father was a learned Islamic scholar. But her own character allowed her to assume extra duties, raising her brother and two sisters after her mother passed away and also her new brothers and sisters in the company of her kind stepmother.

Married to my brother Ibrahim in November 1949, they had a blissful marriage till the last day of their lives.

During the historic crime of the Nakba, which took place in 1948, the tiny stretch of land from Gaza City to Rafah, through Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, the home of 80,000 people, was flooded with 200,000 people, the inhabitants of 247 villages depopulated due to the Zionist invasion of southern Palestine.

Madeeha’s husband Ibrahim became a refugee as his neighbouring ancestral land, Al Ma’in (Abu Sitta), was attacked on May 14, 1948. Al Ma’in is 8 kilometres away from Khan Younis, separated by a fictitious line, the Armistice line of 1949.

The separation between the two is not geographical or national. It is the difference between a homeland attacked and occupied by armed European settlers, and a homeland under imminent threat, not yet occupied, but under siege and bombardment.

As if that were not enough, disaster struck on November 3, 1956.

The Al Batta household was shaken by loud bangs on their door. The old man opened the door to find Israeli soldiers pointing their guns at frightened women and children, shouting: “out, all men.” The old man said there were only women and children. “Get them out. Out. Out.” They came from under the staircase.

Then they saw Nadid. “Come here.” His mother screamed, “He is a school boy. Here is his school card.” They dragged him on the floor. He cried from the bottom of his heart, “Yamma, I am thirsty.” His mother pleaded with the soldier pointing his gun at him to allow him a drink of water. He agreed. She rushed to get a glass of water and approached her son’s lips when the soldier kicked the glass by his boots and emptied his machine gun in his head. Nadid’s blood and the water were spilled on the floor. With an expression of victory, the soldier left.

With God’s mercy, Madeeha was not there. She was with Ibrahim in Cairo. But the pain was multiplied by the distance. And the tragedy was not over. Later the same morning, her brother Hassan, newly married with two children, was dragged from his home and shot summarily along with hundreds of other young men in the town. Over five hundred bodies were strewn in the streets. Nobody was allowed to reach them for a day or two. Khan Younis, now empty of men, became the funeral town.

Women had to cope. The task of coping was destined to be the fate of Palestinian women all their lives. The burden has been loaded on their shoulders for over a century, since the treacherous Balfour Declaration of 1917. Britain was entrusted to bring freedom and independence to Palestine. Instead, it betrayed that trust by handing Palestine to wealthy European Zionists keen to create a colony for themselves. Curiously the anti-Semite Balfour refused to let Russian Jews into England and preferred to create a satellite colony for them in Palestine.

Fifteen years later, the flood of Jewish European settlers in Palestine reached the alarming level of 30 percent of the population. The Arab Revolt (1936–1939) erupted.

Once again, Britain betrayed its duties to protect Palestinian people. The British Army quelled the revolt most brutally. For the first time ever, the villages were bombarded by air. Collective punishment was applied. Villagers were held in cages for two days in the sun without food or drink. Leaders were imprisoned or deported.

A minimum estimate of Palestinian casualties from 1936 to 1939 is 5,000 people killed, 15,000 wounded, and a similar number jailed. More than 100 men were executed, including leaders such as 80-year-old Sheikh Farhan Al-Saadi, who was hanged while fasting during Ramadan on November 22, 1937. About 50 percent of all adult males in the mountainous region of Palestine, corresponding roughly to the West Bank today, where the revolt was particularly active, were wounded or jailed by the British.

While men were rounded up, women cared for their families, salvaged the home supplies destroyed deliberately by the British, and attended to the fields and cattle. They did more than that. They fought battles. Fatma Ghazzal was killed in Azzoun in 1936 in an ambush by an Essex Regiment and was found dead among her men comrades.

Peasant women’s mass involvement was physical and direct…Village women…were arrested for being members of the Black Hand band, for writing threatening letters to the police, for hiding wounded rebel fighters, and they kept secrets…urban women collected money, took part in demonstrations, sent protests to the government, and formed women’s committees…Schoolgirls held strikes.1

And, “police shot a girl during a stoning of forces in 1938.”2 In the battle, “widows of dead fighters also took up arms…encouraged their ‘menfolk’ to assist the fighters…[and] ‘stirred up’ the local population”3 During Faz’a, they “were seen running behind their husbands ululating,” urging them into action.4

When the Nakba struck in 1948, Palestinian women were the first victims and the first to cope with its effects. The Nakba is the largest, longest, continuous ethnic cleansing operation in the history of Palestine. Five hundred and sixty towns and villages have been depopulated by the Zionist European invasion of Palestine. Nowhere was this tragic scene observed more than in the Gaza Strip, when the population of 247 villages in the southern half of Palestine was herded onto the Gaza Strip, which is only 1.3 percent of the area of Palestine.

The mass exodus did not take place smoothly. It was dotted with massacres. Villages were attacked at dawn when people were asleep. At the explosion of bombs, the wave of machine gun bullets, the women rushed to pick up their children for safety in the dark, frequently carrying a pillow instead of a child, shouting for youngsters to follow, carrying some milk or a little food, and hurrying toward the only gate the Israelis had left open for them to escape, having blocked the other sides.

At a distance from their village, they paused to see who had followed and who was lost, looking back at the village, seeing the smoldering remains of their houses, fire billowing from the burnt harvest, their animals wondering aimlessly, and dogs barking in agony looking for their owners.

Above all, women were looking for their menfolk—who had remained to defend as heroically as they could—to see who had been killed, who managed to be safe. Their hearts went out to older men and women and the sick, who could not get away in time and remained. Did they have food and drink? Have they been found by the Israelis and killed?

At that moment of destiny, women had to decide their next course of action: where to go. The most likely route was to go to the nearest village, not attacked yet, where they had friends and relatives. There, they were received warmly. But not for long. Both the hosts and their guests were attacked and expelled. They both sought refuge in a third village.

So, the exodus route grew in length and size, winding its way among pits of danger till the sea of humanity found its temporary repose among trees, or in mosques or schools, in a temporary safe enclave, now dubbed with the new name “Gaza Strip.” It became the biggest concentration camp on earth.

The women’s odyssey did not finish. They had to return after a lull. They had to brave planted mines and soldiers with machine guns waiting for the returnees (ironically called “infiltrators” by Polish ghetto dwellers, now soldiers, who had come to Palestine’s shores in a smugglers’ ship in the dead of night). Return they must, to fetch an ailing mother, recover some supplies, or even to give a drink to animals. Many did not return. They were some of the five thousand Palestinians killed by Israelis upon their return from 1949 to 1956.

Some died fighting. Here is the case of a young woman, Halima, of Beit Daras. She joined the defenders of the village, bringing them food, drink, and ammunition, crossing to the fighting lines. She never came back. Her name remains.

Struggling for life in the refugee camps is another burden taken up by women heroically. At first, they had to keep the tents dry of rain or not blown by wind. They had to find wood for meagre cooking. Soon after, they prepared their children for school under makeshift tents. Then they had to cope with the constant Israeli attack on the refugees in their camps, like when the war criminal Sharon, commander of the notorious Unit 101, attacked al Bureij camp in 1953 and killed forty refugees in their beds.

Seventy years on, women’s fight for freedom has never stopped. They are now looking after their families when their fathers, husbands, and even brothers and sisters are killed or taken prisoner by Israel.

Israel has waged several wars upon the Palestinians, a situation never found at any colonial project.

Israel waged a military war to seize Palestinian land. Israel waged a terror campaign, in an endless series of war crimes, to expel and then deny the return of the refugees. Israel waged a falsification war to claim that the refugees left on their accord, not by its actions. Israel waged a false historical and religious war, to claim that Russians, Polish Jews, Ashkenazis, Khazars, and other assortments are descendants from Palestine and that this entitles them after 2,000 years to take it away from its people. Israel waged a defamation, even criminalizing, campaign against anyone advocating justice for Palestinians, like Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) or Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), making themselves an enemy of international law. Primarily, Israel waged a political war against Palestinians through the alliance of the US and Israel to veto any UN resolution opposing Israeli crimes.

Women bear the brunt of all these wars. They fight back at all fronts at all times. Just look at what they do in the relative peace of their evenings.

They register their heritage at the tapestry of embroidery. Every Palestinian village had a distinctive motif representing a history and tradition of its own. This artistic museum of Palestinian society can never be stolen or destroyed. It is carried in the hearts and on the bodies of women. Not only does it signify the geography of the village, but its history as well. Motifs depict the 1936 Revolt, the Nakba, the village that has gone, the Intifada, and the spirit of resistance.

Palestinian women are an invincible, yet unarmed, army. It can never be defeated. It raised a nation of 1.5 million people in 1948. Their army has now grown to 13 million people. Behind each one, a woman made it possible.

Congratulations to Ghada Ageel and Barbara Bill for their tremendously important series of books on Palestinian women, the invincible army. Recording their history is a moral obligation, an intellectual mission, and above all, a service to the cause of justice.

DR. SALMAN ABU SITTA, 2020

Founder and President

Palestine Land Society, UK