A White Lie
Page 4
Over the past two decades, numerous laypeople, non-governmental organizations, and solidarity workers have joined the intellectual mission of rescuing a history that aims, according Said, to advance human freedom, rights, and knowledge.56 That mission has gathered momentum and gained significance in historic Palestine in a context of neglect on the part of the Palestinian national leadership, which has failed to organize and ensure continuous records or documentation of popular Palestinian experience and of the ongoing dangers posed by the Israeli occupation.57 The specifics of this violence as a current historical process were highlighted in a book by Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha titled An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (2018). The book includes a detailed discussion of the potential of oral history for historicizing marginal experience. It also notes that Palestinian history has not been adequately recorded as the experience of both a community and of individuals and emphasizes the vital role that oral history plays in assembling the Palestinian narrative.
The role of Palestine during World War II features prominently in standard historiographies, but little has been written about its Indigenous population, the conditions of their existence prior to 1948, or their collective life and history before exile. Summing up this gaping void, Said wrote: “Unlike other people who suffered from a colonial experience, the Palestinians…have been excluded; denied the right to have a history of their own…When you continually hear people say: ‘Well, who are you anyway?’ you have to keep asserting the fact that you do have a history, however uninteresting it may appear to the very sophisticated world.”58
Scholarly Work on Palestine’s History
Many historians and researchers have drawn on both oral and visual history to counter the multi-form suppression and abandonment—ranging from disinterest to fundamental denial—of Palestinian history recounted from Palestinian standpoints. A variety of strategies have been adopted in carrying out such work, and famous among these efforts is Walid Khalidi’s Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876–1948 (1984). Others have presented individualized narratives, for example, in Salman Abu Sitta’s Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2016), Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2009), and Leila El-Haddad’s Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between (2010). Scholars such as Ramzy Baroud, in Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion 2002 (2003), have used oral testimonies in more comprehensive works to gain a fuller understanding of specific events (in this case, Israel’s siege on Jenin in 2002), while linking the event in question to collective Palestinian history. Others have recounted the singular history of specific political factions, for instance, Khaled Hroub in Hamas: Political Thought and Practice (2000) and Bassam Abu Sharif in Arafat and the Dream of Palestine: An Insider’s Account (2009). Several online projects and websites, such as Palestine Remembered, have also initiated and continue to maintain an ongoing collection and dissemination of Palestinian oral histories.59
Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007), edited by Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, is one of the more prominent attempts to incorporate oral history as an essential means of delivering history, justice, and legitimacy for the Palestinian cause, while also linking current events to the recent past. Departing from the Nakba as a central event that defines and unites Palestinians, their volume undertakes the injection of collective memory into the overall framework of Palestinian history. Making memory public, Sa’di and Abu-Lughod write, “affirms identity, tames traumas and asserts Palestinian political and moral claims to justice, redress and the right of return.”60 It also challenges the Zionist myth that Palestinians have no roots in the land.
Some authors have taken up Said’s idea of the intellectual’s mission being to advance human freedom and knowledge.61 This idea is based on Said’s definition of the intellectual as being both detached and involved—outside of society and its institutions, and simultaneously a member of society who is constantly agitating against the status quo. Ramzy Baroud’s book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (2010), the Indigenous section in Ghada Ageel’s edited volume Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences (2016), which includes chapters by Reem Skeik, Samar El Bekai, and Ramzy Baroud, and Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2012) are all manifestations of a concept in which the outsider is also the insider, the researcher, and the narrator. The authors of these narratives either spent a large part of their lives under Israel’s occupation or returned from exile and experienced the suffering of both the individual and the group. These experiences generated their common aspiration to become intellectuals who would repeatedly disturb and problematize the status quo. In documenting their personal stories and describing everyday life in the West Bank and Gaza, these insider-outsider-researcher-narrators have attempted to link present and past.
Within the broader context of abandoned and suppressed narratives, accounts of women’s experiences, elided almost completely from hegemonic histories, open sorely neglected but significant avenues into an understanding of how the past and the present are constituted, reconstituted, and conceived. Women’s accounts are particularly vital for comprehending the past and present in Palestine, as they are framed and determined by the ethnic cleansing of 1948. While women’s stories are largely marginalized, their experiences form a cornerstone of the structure of human impacts generated by successive military campaigns against Palestinians and by generations of Palestinian resistance, both military and non-violent. Foregrounding women’s narratives counteracts a history in which selectiveness reinforces and supports systems of oppression and displacement through the erasure of authentic voices and the prioritization of male dominant narratives.
The tragedy of 1948 and its aftermath in Palestine have been endured by the whole of society and particularly by women, who have borne the remnants with which to reconstruct lost homes both on their backs and in their hearts. As they have put up and organized tents to house their families, they have cared for and raised children, and queued for hours to receive United Nations rations and handouts of clothes, blankets, and kitchen utensils. They have struggled to keep smiles on their own faces and those of their families in the face of humiliation and bitter pain, in the day to day practice of what Palestinians call Sumud. Uncovering the details of their life journeys under such exceptional circumstances reveals a version of Palestinian history that is not only far more complete, but that also acknowledges the central role that women have played in making this history. Sayigh has argued that
women have been a basic element in the Palestinian capacity to survive poverty, oppression, exile. They have been models of courage, tenacity, resourcefulness and humour. Though all were victims of expulsion and of gender subalternity, I would never think of them primarily in these terms, but rather as people who knew/know how to live against poverty and oppression. Palestinian women have the inner resources to make a good life for their children. They pack, and move, and set up again in a new place, among new people.62
Research on the role of gender in preserving the memory of the Nakba has been carried out by several scholars who have attempted to detail and highlight this crucial agency. In their contribution to Nakba, edited by Sa’di and Abu Lughod, Isabelle Humphries and Laleh Khalili used oral history to “examine both how the Nakba is remembered by women, and what women remember about it.”63 It was also crucial to them to investigate how women’s memories “were imbricated by both the nationalist discourse and the same patriarchal values and practices that also shape men’s lives and their memories.”64 Their chapter confronts the manifold predominant narrative and the resulting lack of confidence that has suppressed women’s voices and constrained their role as a conduit of memory.65 Palestinian women’s lack of self-confidence vis-a-vis, and exacerbated by, the male-dominant narrative is clearly reflected, for instance, in Sayigh’s quotation from one narrator: “I can’t say I know all this
history; others know it better.” While this narrator is an “eloquent history teller” who is familiar with the events she witnessed, she still designates the task for telling history to those “who would know better.”66
Fatma Kassem’s book, Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gender Memory (2011), focuses on Palestinian women living in Israel. Kassem collected the oral testimonies of twenty urban Palestinian women, a group whose life stories of displacement are rarely noted, even though they form essential parts of the larger Palestinian national narrative. Kassem, who was born in today’s Israel years after the Nakba, positions herself as both an insider—a narrator of her own story—and an outsider—a researcher—in the volume that aims to reveal “the complex intersections of gender, history, memory, nationalism and citizenship in a situation of ongoing colonization and violent conflict between Palestinians and the Zionist State of Israel.”67 Like Baroud, Ageel, and Barghouti, this positionality allowed her a great deal of freedom in crossing boundaries as an unconstrained outsider while interacting intensively as a trusted insider with the other narrators, whose stories, she said, “shaped” her life “as much as [they] did theirs.”68
The work of Sayigh exhibits a similar type of direct interaction with the narratives of Palestinian women. She has authored several books examining the oral history of the Palestinians, notably, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries.69 In her work, Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement, an online book, Sayigh narrates the stories of seventy Palestinian women from various locations in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem.70 The interviewees spoke about their lives following the displacement of Palestinians after the Nakba. Like most of her influential work, Sayigh’s interviews—conducted between 1998 and 2000, just prior to the initiation of this project—investigate displacement and its effects on Palestinian women, and the impact of the Nakba on the identity of women and their sense of self. Also considered in her book is the linkage between collective displacement and the critical role played by women in the Palestinian narrative. Sayigh’s body of work has not only advanced the destabilization of dominant narratives, making space for a more egalitarian narration of history, it also accurately situates Palestinian women at the centre of Palestinian history, offering a fuller, more representative understanding of Palestinian history altogether.
The Women’s Voices from Gaza series is a continuation of the oral history work carried out by many intellectuals and individuals who aimed to assign Indigenous Palestinians a greater role in explaining the dynamics of their own history and to re-orient the story of Palestine by restoring it to its original narrator: the Palestinians. It is a complement to a corpus of work that preceded this series and that asserts the centrality of the narrative of Palestinians, especially women, in reclaiming and contextualizing their history.
A White Lie
The first narrative in our series turns the clock back ninety years and invites readers on a journey of reimagining a once-upon-a-time in Palestine. The story recounts a life of happiness, uncertainty, loss, and also, ultimately, of pride, resistance, and hope. Weaving together many narrative threads, A White Lie unearths a version of history long excluded from mainstream discourse, illuminating a vibrant culture, rich community relations, old traditions, and grand resistance. It is the story of Madeeha Hafez Albatta, a woman with the warmth and depth of the homeland. Madeeha was born and raised in Khan Younis, a town in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and her life took her, along with her family, across mandatory Palestine to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Tunis, the United States, Germany, Greece, Austria, and Canada. In 1938, with Palestine under the British Mandate, Madeeha had to resort to tricking her family into allowing her to attend college. That trick changed her life forever. She became a teacher while still in her teens and then the headmistress of a school while in her early twenties, the youngest headmistress in Gazan history and most likely in the entire region.
As a teacher and headmistress, a campaigner for rights, an activist and community organizer, a mother, and a champion of dignity, Madeeha witnessed some of the most turbulent periods of Palestine’s recent history. Widely viewed as a symbol of love and freedom, she advocated an honourable life in all these roles. Her life story presents a model of bravery and strength, demonstrating the collective Palestinian will to stand fast and resist the odds. She was among the pioneers to rally her community to guarantee the right to education for thousands of children arriving in Gaza after the destruction of their homes and homeland in 1948. Upon witnessing the influx of hapless refugees, Madeeha immediately began mobilizing community efforts and energies to secure schooling before the arrival of any outside assistance, including that of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). She was the driving force and key organizer behind the refugee schools, which were set up without aid from any international organizations. Madeeha saw education as a crucial means of survival and a way to preserve Palestinian traditions, culture, history, and identity. Building on this vision and mission and on the nucleus she had set up, the UNRWA then took responsibility for the education of refugee children.
In 1956, Madeeha lost both of her brothers, Hassan and Nadid, who were slaughtered by Israeli soldiers together with hundreds of civilian men and youth in Khan Younis. She was forced into the uncertainty of exile, away from her children and unable to return to her home for almost six months, due to the military campaign waged by the UK, France, and Israel against Egypt, as well as the occupation of the Gaza Strip. Her shock and dismay at this tragedy and her sense of powerlessness and despair, magnified by distance and the inability to support and share with others, approximate the feelings of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in exile at the time who witnessed repeated attacks on beloved family members, friends, neighbours, and an entire nation. Madeeha lived on to witness Egypt’s defeat in 1967, followed by Israel’s military occupation of the remnants of Palestine, including the Gaza Strip, while her husband, Ibrahim Abu Sitta, was deported to Sinai along with other community leaders, forcing Madeeha to live through worry and enforced separation. In 1970, during a short visit to Amman, Madeeha experienced the purge of Palestinian leaders by Jordan’s regime, known by Palestinians as “Black September,” surviving yet another period of horror away from her family and home. The eruption of the first Intifada in 1987 revived Palestinians’ hope and spirit of resistance and culminated with the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995. The period of hope, which Madeeha shared, was short lived, however, ending in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Intifada that manifested the despair experienced by Palestinians. A White Lie reveals how these events shaped Madeeha’s life and the lives of her family members. It traces the unimaginable decisions and actions they were forced to take in order to safeguard the remains of Palestine, through educating and attempting to protect the family’s children, while also caring for extended family and leading the community.
But Madeeha’s story provides far more than the account of an individual life under continued and complex political upheaval and war. Her narrative preserves minute details of distinctly Palestinian individual and collective life through different eras and regimes. It depicts a vibrant culture, old traditions, customs, and other critical features of Palestinian society that readers rarely encounter. The narrative spans her childhood and early adulthood, including her train trips across Palestine and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine), providing a picture of ordinary Palestinian family life in the early twentieth century. This period of the British Mandate in Palestine is largely neglected in other works, while those accounts that do exist invariably focus on the political clashes of the time, between Palestinians and the British and later Palestinians and the Zionists. Little mention is made of the rich tapestry of day-to-day life in Palestine.
Madeeha’s narrative also uncovers untold parts of the Palestinian story, as it captures the disruption and change in Palestine caused by the 1947 partition plan
and the 1948 Nakba. Her uncovering of such changes has also been very clear in her literary writings, published in Al Risala and Al Thaqafa, two prestigious Cairo magazines, which according to Abu Sitta were the closest equivalent to today’s New York Times Review of Books.71 The experiences that surface in her tale highlight the role played by civil society in mitigating the national tragedy. Sounding her amazingly resilient voice, the narrative depicts Madeeha reaching out to Gazan civil society to seek help and reflects the immensely impressive response. Records of strong community relations, a healthy civil society, and women’s central roles in it are aspects that are largely absent from scholarship on Palestinians. The narrative further reveals the depth of the solidarity of Palestinians from Gaza with their brothers and sisters: the displaced peasants and city dwellers who found refuge in Gaza. Like the other narratives we share in this series, Madeeha’s story conveys the displacement and dispossession with great clarity. It speaks of a land and a people with a culture and history that existed before these events for generations, completely contradicting the infamous Zionist myth of Palestine as a land without a people unproblematically awaiting a people without a land.
Moreover, Madeeha’s lived experiences of childhood, adulthood, education, employment, activism, love, marriage, and aspirations draw an image that belies widespread western, orientalized stereotypes of Arab Muslim women. Her story portrays the capacities, strengths, and abilities of Palestinian women and reflects their aspirations and feelings, as well as their engagement with patriarchal social constraints in struggles for change that are analogous to those of women in many other areas throughout the world. It also reveals the racism embedded in common attempts to frame, and in fact misrepresent, the struggle of Palestinian women within their cultural tradition and religion. On top of their inaccuracies, such explanatory frameworks fail to capture the unending forms of violence that militarized occupation has practiced on women in Palestine.