A Palestinian Woman: Between the Youth and the Factions

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

A Palestinian woman lost her husband in the 1987 intifada, and was left with three sons and two daughters. Her children were young, unable to work, and she had no choice but relentless labor in various fields, including domestic service in people’s homes, to secure their daily bread and expenses. Her brothers helped her somewhat, and so did some charitable organizations.

The sons and daughters grew up, and the financial burden increased. The eldest chose to leave school to work for a merchant for a meager wage — otherwise who would sustain the family and the siblings who needed money for their schooling? The Aqsa Intifada broke out in 2001, and this eldest son took part in the national struggle, and fell as a martyr, leaving the family to fend for itself. Two years later, the occupation forces seized the second son and sentenced him to life imprisonment. As for the third son, he fell prey to some criminals dealing in Israeli-supplied weapons, and began causing trouble for his mother and his two sisters.

The woman threw herself into work in order to keep going, able to meet the material needs of what remained of her family, and she was very keen on protecting her two daughters and having them educated, believing that learning was an effective weapon both on the national level and on the level of personal livelihood. She worked in a sweets factory, then selling on the sidewalk, then as a housekeeper in a charitable institution. But her income remained tight, and there was no ease in her life.

She fell behind on the rent for the small apartment she lived in, and the landlord began pressing insistently to collect what was owed him. She put him off for three years and could find no way out of the crisis, even though she had bought a small apartment in a building still under construction. What was to be done?

The young men of Nablus heard of the matter and rushed to help. As soon as the contractor put the roof on the purchased apartment, the plasterer moved in and began his volunteer work, joined by the electrician and the pipe-fitter. The quarry owner supplied the sand needed for plastering, and the cement merchant supplied half the quantity required. When it was time for the tiling, the tile-factory owner had already prepared the required quantity at half price, and the tiler laid the apartment’s floor at his own expense. As soon as he finished, the paintbrush was already at work on the walls. One shop donated the plumbing fixtures, another the faucets. Two carpenters split the task between them and fitted the apartment with the doors and cabinets it needed.

The neighbors witnessed the event and welcomed it with great joy and admiration for these young men who worked silently and insistently to lift the woman out of her crisis and grief. The young men then turned their attention to her son, whom the temptation of carrying weapons and bullying people had led astray; they reprimanded him, warned him, and kept a close watch over him. They resolved to bring him back to school, and back into his mother’s embrace, so that he might become a young man useful to himself, his family, and his homeland.

At the very time these young men were carrying out their national and religious duty, other young men were falling dead in the streets of Gaza in bloody fighting between Palestinian factions. Money that came as support for the Palestinian people was being spent on buying rifles from Israeli intelligence and on spilling Palestinian blood, while the sweat of these young men poured out to finish the cement mix that would build a home to shelter a Palestinian woman and her two promising daughters.

The woman found herself a single member of a Palestinian family that stretched across the whole of the homeland. After spending hours weeping at the grave of her husband, who had paid his life as the price of the homeland, she began to realize that the whole homeland was hers, and that all the young men of the homeland were her sons, who withheld nothing. This woman came to understand, as did everyone who witnessed such sacrifice and self-giving, that Palestine is full of strong, generous, and faithful men and women who are true to their pledge and their promise.

This is the true face of the Palestinian people and Palestinian youth. It is a people of solidarity and mutual aid, of sharing bread, of sharing in joys and sorrows, a people of pride, sacrifice, and commitment. It is the face that sees its own dignity as greater than reaching out a hand to others, and above the tyranny of tyrants. For ninety years, the Palestinian people have lived under enormous economic, political, social, security, and psychological pressure, and have managed to carry themselves — the young caring for the old, the young respecting their elders, the wealthy looking after the poor, and the poor never falling short in chivalry or generosity. This people has lived as a cooperative, loving family, which has enabled it to stand firm over time in the face of every ordeal that befell it and every worry that afflicted its sons.

The Palestinian people are now passing through an ordeal, but history refuses to let it be long. Under an unstable Palestinian situation that witnesses various foreign interventions, and suffering from the calamities and tragedies of occupation, internal shocks remain to be expected. There is no doubt that there are internal elements working toward sabotage, exactly as some armed criminals do, but history remains stronger than all the margins, and the Palestinian people will return faithful to their history, heritage, civilization, and nation. If the blood of the martyrs has become cheap in the eyes of some, the majority remain present, and must soon shake off the dust to return true to their pledge and promise, committed to building and liberation.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “امرأة فلسطينية: بين الشباب والفصائل” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.