Selective memory, gender and nationalism: Palestinian women leaders of the mandate period

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 141-158

  Fleischmann, Ellen L ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 12944293862     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1999.47.141     Document Type: Review

References (75)

1. Amin Maalouf, The Rock of Tanios, translated by Dorothy S. Blair, New York: George Braziller, 1994, p. 261.
2. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: the Dynamics of Collective Memory, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1994, p. 145.
3. Carolyn Bynum, 'Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective', Critical Inquiry 22, Autumn 1995, p. 28.
4. Camilla Sivers, 'Reflections on the Role of Personal Narrative in Social Science', Signs 18: 2, 1993, p. 411.
5. Sivers, p. 420.
6. Personal Narratives Group, 'Truths', Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, edited by Personal Narratives Group, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989, p. 264. (Emphasis added.)
7. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: the 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. xxviii, xxvi.
8. Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, 'Collective Memory - What Is It?', History and Memory 8.1, Spring/summer 1996, p. 33. The full quote is revealing (the authors are discussing an article by Pierre Nora): 'For Nora does not simply refer to the obvious gap between memory and history, that is, the well-known fact that memory is an unreliable source of valid history.' I find this statement problematic, although I must sidestep it here. One questions what constitutes 'valid history' - a term the authors use unself-consciously and without definition.
9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, New York: Noonday Press, 1992 [1957], pp. 109, 142, 110, 119.
10. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 143.
11. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 54, 55.
12. Sharif Kanaana, 'The Role of Women in Intifada Legends', Discourse and Palestine: Power, Text, and Context, ed. Annelies Moors, Toine van Teeffelen, Sharif Kanaana, and Ilham Abu Ghazaleh, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1995, p. 153.
13. Gedi and Elam, 'Collective Memory - What Is It?', p. 33;
14. Collective Remembering, ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, London: Sage Publications, 1990, p. 3.
15. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, pp. 54, 47-49.
16. Numerous social scientists who write about collective memory and historical remembering emphasize the social context of memory, but do not seem to focus on the political uses to which constructed collective memory is put. See, for example, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames;
17. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989;
18. and Middleton and Edwards, Collective Remembering.
19. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, p. 49.
20. Rosemary Sayigh describes this kind of remembering in her ethnographic study of Palestinian refugees, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, London: Zed Press, 1979. Palestinian collective memory is deeply territorialized - to paraphrase Malkki. It constructs a kind of history which claims moral attachment to a specific motherland or homeland, and 'posits time-honored links between people, polity, and territory'.
21. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 1.
22. Popular Memory Group, 'Popular Memory: theory, politics, method', Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics, ed. Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz, and David Sutton, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, p. 211.
23. A number of women's conferences were convened in this period, in Beirut (1930), Baghdad, Damascus, and Tehran (1932), and Cairo (1938 and 1944). Most were called 'Oriental' (or Eastern) women's conferences, and included women from Iran and Afghanistan, whereas the 1944 one in Cairo was called the Arab Women's Conference.
24. Asma Tubi, 'Abīr wa majd, Beirut: Matba'at Qalalat, 1966, p. 152,
25. Khadija Abu 'Ali, Introduction to Woman's Reality and her Experience in the Palestinian Revolution (Arabic), Beirut: General Union of Palestinian Women, 1975, p. 44;
26. Randa Sharaf, 'ZIikha Shihabi in History's Conscience: Pioneer of the Women's Movement in Palestine, founder of the Arab Women's Union' (Arabic), Al-mar'a 13, June 1992, p. 8;
27. The Sun Will Not Set: Zlikha Shihabi Between the Lines' (Arabic, n.a.), al-Ittihad, 18 March 1992;
28. and Wadi'a Khartabil, Memoirs of Wadi'a Qaddura Khartabil, Seeking Hope and the Nation: Sixty Years From a Woman's Struggle on behalf of Palestine (Arabic), Beirut: Bisan al-nashr, 1995, p. 60; Amy Aramki, interview with the author, 26 Nov. 1992, Bir Zeit; Hind Husayni, interview with the author, 15 Feb. 1993, Jerusalem.
29. A delegation of eight women was sent by the Arab Women's Executive in Jerusalem. Filastīn (Palestine, one of the major Palestinian newspapers, 1911-1967), 10 April 1930.
30. The Arab Women's Executive may well have been modelled after the Arab Executive, mentioned above. Like the AE, which dissolved in 1934, the Arab Women's Executive seems to have also eventually disappeared some time after the 1930s.
31. Filastīn 10 April 1930; British Colonial Office Official Palestine Correspondence (hereafter CO) 733 239/5, Pt. I and II, 23 Oct. 1933.
32. This was The Arab Woman and the Palestine Problem, London: Herbert Joseph, 1937.
33. Interviews with 'Abd al-Rahman al-Kayyali, 8 March 1993, Amman, and Sa'ida Jarallah, 19 April 1994, Jerusalem.
34. Mughannam is often identified as the 'secretary' of the Arab Women's Committee; other reports describe her as leading the women in demonstrations, and call her an 'ardent nationalist', who 'plays an active part in the Women's Nationalist movement': Despatch from MacMichael (High Commissioner for Palestine) to MacDonald (Secretary of State for the Colonies), 5 April 1938, Central Zionist Archives (CZA) RG 25S, Political Affairs, file 22793; Cunliffe-Listcr (Secretary of State of the Colonies) to Wauchope (High Commissioner), 23 Oct. 1933, CO 733 239/5 Part I; Arab Who's Who, CO 733 284/22.
35. When I interviewed the current (as of 1993) president of the AWU, Amina al-Kadhimi, and its accountant Hassan Istambuli, both of whom knew Shihabi personally, they argued over these particulars. Furthermore, neither seemed to know what had happened to her personal papers, or the archival data of the AWU itself. Interview with Amina al-Kadhimi and Hassan Istambuli, Jerusalem, 22 April 1993. A newspaper article stated that she was born to a 'patriotic Jerusalem family', but provided no other details: 'The Sun Will Never Set' (see note 20).
36. A sort of curriculum vitae, written in the first person some years before her death, provides most of these details (except for the year of her death, of course). This two-page type-written CV under the letterhead of the Arab Women's Union was given to me by Amina al-Kadhimi. There is no date but Shihabi states her age as 82 and her birth date as 1903, so presumably it was written in 1985.
37. CO 733 284/22 17693, Arab Who's Who, 1933; interview with Matiel Mughannam, conducted by Julie Peteet and Rosemary Sayigh, 10 August 1985, Washington, DC; telephone interview with Theodore Mughannam (Matiel's son) by the author, 28 Sept. 1995, Arlington, Virginia. (I would like to thank Rosemary Sayigh and Julie Peteet for their generosity in providing me with the transcript of their interview.)
38. Falastinn-English, 2 Nov. 1929.
39. At one point, she said in an interview in the press, 'All English women think Arab women are uncultured. They believe they speak only Arabic, that they all wear veils and rush away at the sight of a man. How I wish I could take English women around to sec my cultured Arab friends. How surprised they would be - European clothes, silk stockings, highheeled shoes, permanently waved hair, manicured hands.' Palestine Post, 7 Dec. 1936.
40. Filastīn, 18 and 27 August 1931.
41. Felastin-English, 17 Oct. 1931.
42. Ellen Mansur, interview with author, 6 Sept. 1992, Ramallah, West Bank.
43. There is some discrepancy about when Mughannam returned; in her 1985 interview with Peteet and Sayigh, she said she came back to the US 'three years ago'. Her son stated that she returned in the 1950s. Interestingly, she and Shihabi died in the same month and year, August, 1992.
44. Interview, Sa'ida Jarallah; Samah Nusseibeh (then president of the Arab Women's Society), Jerusalem, 23 Nov. 1992.
45. Interview, Salma Husayni, Jerusalem, 19 April 1993.
46. Interview, Sa'ida Jarallah. Use of the appellation 'union' is also important. Until 1938, I never came across use of the word 'union' to designate the Jerusalem women's group, despite numerous claims that the Palestinian Women's Union was founded in 1921. The appearance of the word, beginning in 1938, was clearly part of an effort to distinguish two groups, one of which had not previously existed. Yet confusion over names was the major result. (As I note below, use of the name did not, in fact, indicate political alignment with either faction.) The issue is further complicated by the sloppiness of the newspapers and other written sources, who continually referred to the various women's groups by different names, resulting in confusion over groups' identities. (For example, the groups were referred to, variously, as the Arab Ladies Society, the Arab Women's Committee, the Arab Women's Union, the Arab Ladies Committee, etc.) The Arab Ladies Society now translates its name as the Arab Women's Society (not a literal translation of the Arabic, which retains the word 'ladies') in English. In 1944, the Arab Women's Union changed its name to the Palestinian Arab Women's Union.
47. For more details of the split, see Ellen L. Fleischmann, 'The Nation and Its "New" Women: Feminism, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Palestinian Women's Movement, 1920-1948', Ph D diss., Georgetown University, 1996, pp. 256-267.
48. In Malkki's work with the Hutus, she, too, deals with a refugee population, which shares similarities with the Palestinian situation. See Purity and Exile.
49. Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, p. 90.
50. Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, p. xviii;
51. Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 31. Indeed, the fact that the Palestinian Resistance Movement considered and called itself a movement and not merely the PLO is significant.
52. Laurie Brand, Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 197-199.
53. The comment about the AWU's independence was made in an interview with May Sayegh by Soraya Antonius, in 'Fighting on Two Fronts: Conversations With Palestinian Women', Journal of Palestine Studies 8: 3, Spring 1979, p. 29, n. 8. The GUPW, along with other Palestinian organizations, was considered illegal by the Israeli military government which occupied east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza after 1967.
54. 'The Sun Will Not Set', al-Ittihad, 18 May 1992.
55. Antonius, 'Fighting', p. 28.
56. Peteet, Gender in Crisis, p. 6.
57. Abu, 'Ali, Introduction,
58. and Ghazi al-Khalili, The Palestinian Woman and the Revolution (Arabic), Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1977.
59. Salwa al-'Amid, Observations on the reality of women in the Palestinian Revolution' (Arabic), Shu'un Filastiniyya 113, April 1981, pp. 9-19;
60. Ghassan 'Abd al-Qadir, 'Woman in the Palestinian National Struggle' (Arabic), Malaf al-tali'a 26, 1979;
61. Nuha Abu-Daleb, 'Palestinian Women and Their Role in the Revolution', Peuples Méditerranéens 5, Oct-Dcc. 1978, pp. 35-47;
62. Muna Ahmad Ghandur, Female Guerrillas, Um Ahmad and Her Three Daughters in the Resistance (Arabic), Beirut: Matba'at al-Wafa, 1969;
63. Ghada Karmi, 'Liberation Through Revolution for Palestinian Women', The Guardian 14 May 1976;
64. Ijlal Khalifa, Woman and the Palestinian Cause (Arabic), Cairo: Modern Arab Press, 1974.
65. Although I focus on the ones about Shihabi's role in the Mandate period, others also appeared. Some of these consisted of simplistic adages such .as: before the establishment of the PLO women were 'backward' and oppressed by 'tradition'. Abu 'Ali, Introduction, 43;
66. al-Khalili, The Palestinian Woman, 80.
67. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 60, 76.
68. Frames, p. 118.
69. Interview with Matiel Mughannam conducted by Julie Peteet and Rosemary Sayigh, 15 August 1985.
70. Much of what follows I owe to Memories of Revolt. I obviously follow in the footsteps of Swedenburg, who has laid the groundwork for examining the issue of Palestinian collective memory and its politics.
71. Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, pp. 7, xxvi.
72. Indrani Chatterjee found perhaps an even more complex dynamic at work in studying the differences between colonial and indigenous sources in her work on eighteenth-century India. Not only did she have to pay attention to the historicity of sources, as well as their facticity; she also discovered complications in the 'interplay of hidden indigenous meanings with the structures and forms of [the] colonial state'. The opposition between indigenous history and colonial history was not always clearcut; rather, the interaction between them produced historical myths (if I may use the word once again) of their own in both types of sources. See Indrani Chatterjee, 'Testing the Local Against the Colonial Archive', History Workshop Journal 44, 1997, pp. 215-224.
73. Filastin, 13 Dec. 1944.
74. Al-Khalili, The Palestinian Woman, p. 80. (The Arabic word for aware is used to mean 'politically sophisticated' - aware of the situation - in the context of the Palestinian nationalist struggle.)
75. Mughannam herself participated in this repression. In her interview with Rosemary Sayigh and Julie Peteet, Sayigh asked her if there were 'conflicts, competition, [or] problems between members' and she denied it.