A White Lie Read online

  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

  Acknowledgements

  THIS BOOK and series would not have been possible without the support and love of several people who were extremely generous with their time, comments, directions and encouragement. For all of them, we are sincerely grateful and are eternally indebted.

  We will begin by expressing our appreciation to the amazing seven narrators of this series, Madeeha, Sahbaa, Hekmat, Khadija, Um Bassim, Um Jaber, and Um Said, and their families, for so generously sharing their stories and making us welcome in their homes.

  We are grateful to our friend Shadia Al Sarraj for her friendship, remarkable support and encouragement.

  We would like also to thank Peter Midgley and Mathew Buntin, the amazing editors at University of Alberta Press, who helped us throughout the process of writing by answering queries and providing support. A special thank you to Cathie Crooks for all her incredible support and to all the talented team at University of Alberta Press.

  Sincere thanks to John Pilger, Wayne Sampey and the late Inga Clendinnen for their assistance, support and encouragement.

  Several people have generously expended time and effort to read sections of our work and offered valuable advice. Professor Rosemary Sayigh deserves special thanks for her generosity in providing us with useful comments. Sincere thanks go to Rela Mazali for her comments on the work and editing skills. We are also grateful to Terry Rempel and Eóin Murray for reading and commenting on parts of the Introduction. Special thanks and unending gratitude to Andrew Karney for all his support, encouragement and friendship. We also would like to thank Wejdan Hamdan for helping in transcribing the stories. She has dedicated many hours in support of this project that she calls a labour of love and resistance.

  Finally, thanks to our late parents, who never gave up hope that these narratives would be published.

  Introduction

  IN PERFORMING their assigned gender roles as life-givers, keepers of family tradition, and culture bearers, Palestinian women have created, practiced, and continue today to practice forms of resistance to generations of oppression that are largely underreported and unacknowledged. This is the case in virtually every part of historic Palestine, but it is particularly true of the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip, often referred to simply as “Gaza,” is a small, hot button territory on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, 40 kilometres long, with a width that varies from 6 kilometres in the north to some 12 kilometres in the south. Despite its significance as the heartland of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and rights, the history of the place and its people is often deformed by simplified discourses or reduced to a humanitarian problem and a contemporary war story. The recurring pain and loss its people face are offset by life and vibrancy, by playful and earnest children, by ambitions and dreams.

  Around 1.4 million refugees1 live inside the Gaza Strip (forming some 18 percent of a worldwide total of 7.9 million Palestinian refugees2). For Palestinians and Palestinian refugees in general, but especially for those living in Gaza, the central event in the narrative of their lives is the Nakba (the 1948 catastrophe), which led to the dispossession of the Palestinian people, displacing them, appropriating their homes, and assigning them the status of “refugee.” In the history of
Palestine and Gaza, the catastrophe of collective dispossession is a shared focal point around which they can congregate, remember, organize, and “struggle to reverse this nightmare.”3 Rather than allowing the memory of the Nakba to dissipate, time has deepened and extended the communal consciousness of sharing “the great pain of being uprooted, the loss of identity.”4

  In his anguished plea for the departure of “those who pass between fleeting words,” the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish calls for the departed to leave behind “the memories of memory.”5 Darwish’s poem is a cry for the value of memory, for the deployment of words, stories, and narratives in the battle for justice. Words and memories, Darwish said, matter. But he also recognized that dispossession is a function of the Palestinian national story. Among the list of items stolen are the blueness of the sea and the sand of memory. These phrases could be references to numerous sites in historic Palestine, but Gaza would have to be among them. There, the blueness of the sea is still available to Palestinians, but the sands of its beaches offer little comfort to those who remain uprooted from the soil of their ancestral homes. (Among them, one of the editors of this work who grew up a short distance from one of Gaza’s most famous beaches, al Mawasi, looking at it from among the dense, grey crowd of houses that make up the Khan Younis refugee camp.)

  The Gaza Strip.

  In Palestinian legal, political, social, and historical discourses, the Nakba constitutes the key turning point. The rights to which Palestinians are entitled under international law are the shifting benchmarks these discourses and narratives seek to restore. The memories that they struggle to keep alive are sites of resistance against the obliteration of history and the erasure of a vibrant culture.

  Gaza’s History

  In putting together this series, we seek to bring attention to just a few strands of the myriad individual narratives comprising the Gazan tapestry. As we explain below, each story has been woven into the series in nuanced awareness of how it relates to the larger context unfolding at the time.

  This larger story is multi-faceted. However, its discrete and varying facets share a common sense of abandonment. Virtually all Palestinians have been abandoned and, in fact, suppressed. That this suppression has taken place through the actions of a group of people who themselves were abandoned and oppressed is one of the most painful ironies of this conflict. When Palestinians cry from the pain of their Nakba, this cry comes directly as a mirror of the pain of the Jewish Holocaust—the pain of the Jewish people escaping concentration camps and genocide in Europe. There were cases of people who wanted shelter, security, and freedom. And there were cases of those driven by the Zionist ideology, which, since the days of Herzel and the Basel Congress of 1897, placed a premium on securing a homeland for the Jewish people above all other considerations, including the dignity and protection of Palestinians.

  Palestinians have been abandoned by the world, whether by colonial protectorates, like Britain, who signed over “their” land to the Jewish people through the 1917 Balfour Declaration—violating the well-established legal maxim that nobody can give what he does not possess—or by some of today’s Arab regimes, mainly the Gulf countries led by Saudi Arabia, who view their common enmity for Iran as justification for steadily siphoning off the rights of Palestinians. The latter creates a sense that the Palestinian cause has lost its status as cause célèbre of the region and that the Palestinian people are becoming mere footnotes in regional politics. Perhaps most tragically of all, they have been abandoned by both recent and current Palestinian leadership, who have signed peace deals without addressing the core issues of their struggle: the right of return and the 1948 Nakba.

  Palestine, 1947: districts and district centres during the British Mandate period.

  It is no wonder, then, that a second strand of the Palestinian narrative is that of alienation from, and lack of faith in, the political structures that should supposedly achieve legitimacy for the rights that Palestinians yearn for so passionately.

  Gaza, from a birds-eye view, has always been subject to abandonment and suppression. Its location is of strategic significance: a crossroads between Palestine and the lands to the south (Egypt), Israel (today) to the north, and Europe to the west. The future capital of the unborn Palestinian state, occupied East Jerusalem, is just a short hour-and-a-half drive to the east. Under the British Mandate (1922 to 1948), Gaza was one of the six districts of Palestine. When the United Nations voted to partition the country in 1947, Gaza was to be one of the main ports for the future Palestinian state. Successive Israeli governments have consistently deemed the place and its people a problem and perpetual security threat. In idiomatic Hebrew, the expression “go to Gaza” means “go to hell.”6 Even within the Palestinian narrative, Gaza’s history has been pushed into the margins.

  The UN library contains a vast body of documentation of the processes and consequences of Palestinian dispossession and occupation, whether economic, social, or legal. Alongside the catalogue of resolutions concerning peace, statehood, and rights (UN Resolutions 181, 194, and 242), the UN has also described the Palestinian refugee situation as “by far the most protracted and largest of all refugee problems in the world today.”7

  In 2012, a UN report predicted that Gaza could be rendered completely uninhabitable by 2020.8 This bizarre prediction is consistent with the notorious Zionist image of Palestine as “a land without a people”9 This image has now morphed into one in which a piece of that land has become unfit for human habitation, when its inhabitants number far more than they have at any other point in its history. Perhaps this uncomfortable contradiction epitomizes the core of what should be said about the recent history of Gaza in explaining the current Kafkaesque predicament of its civilian population. Undoubtedly, Mahmoud Darwish would have relished its poignant irony.

  The loss of Palestinian land from 1947 to present.

  Gazan life in the early half of the twentieth century was largely agrarian and market based for its eighty thousand inhabitants living in four small towns: Gaza, Deir Al Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah.10 Even the most urbane of the Strip’s original inhabitants professed a deep connection to the homeland, and the most harried and overextended of Gaza’s lawyers and doctors made time to nurture fig trees or raise chickens. However, the situation changed dramatically with the 1948 Nakba when over two hundred thousand refugees arrived on the tiny strip of land,11 after simply traveling down the road without crossing even a single international border, looking for safe haven. Many of them imagined a sojourn in the Strip, probably for a “few days or weeks.”12 Establishment, in 1949, of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) to provide vital services such as education, health care, and social assistance seemed to consolidate the status of these displaced persons, despite their abiding hope for “return.” Those who attempted to materialize that hope were forcibly prevented from returning and sometimes killed by Israeli forces. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, in the period between 1949 and 1956, Israel killed between 2,700 and 5,000 people trying to cross the imaginary line back to their homes.13 Over time, the tent camps turned into concrete cities, where the politics of resistance incubated that would later flourish.

  Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip until 1967. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Israel occupied the Strip temporarily and committed massacres in Khan Younis and Rafah before Israel’s military was forced to withdraw. In Khan Younis alone, Ihsan Al-Agha, a local university teacher, documented the names of hundreds of people killed.14 This period was signified by the rise of the Fedayeen movement—a national movement of Palestinian resistance fighters who attempted to mount attacks against the state of Israel, which had occupied and destroyed their homeland. In order to deter Palestinians, Israel constantly attacked and bombarded Gaza. In August 1953, the Israeli commando force known as Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, attacked the Bureij refugee camp, east of Gaza City, killing over forty people. Two years later, in 1955, the
Khan Younis police station was blown up, leaving seventy-four policemen dead.15 This period also witnessed tensions between the Egyptians and Palestinians against the backdrop of the Johnson peace proposal in 1955. Endorsed by the UN and the Egyptian government, the proposal sought to re-settle Gazan refugees in the northwest of the Sinai Peninsula. Popular demonstrations protesting the plan were directed against both the UNRWA and the Egyptian administration in Gaza.16 This wave of focused activism was the context in which the seeds of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were sown.

  The war of 1967, known colloquially as the Six-Day War, left the Gaza Strip and the West Bank occupied by Israel, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Soon after the war, Israel enacted the annexation of East Jerusalem. These developments generated a new set of legal and political structures that extend to the present day. In East Jerusalem, Israeli law applies to all citizens (whether Palestinian or Jewish). However, the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are required to hold special ID documents and they are not entitled to Israeli citizenship (unlike the Palestinian Arab citizens of other areas inside Israel, such as Nazareth). In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the “occupied territories,” Israeli military law was applied. When Jewish settlements were introduced (that is, colonial townships for Jewish people planted on occupied Palestinian land), a new legal strand emerged and standard Israeli law was selectively and exclusively applied to the Jewish residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Such were the emerging features of a regime that has gained increasingly unfavourable comparisons to apartheid rule in South Africa. In Israel and the territories under its control, legal restrictions on people are conditional upon identities and the respective status of these identities within heavily stratified and discriminatory laws. The regime, in other words, implements a “legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination.”17