Stories of Palestinian Women’s Underground Resistance

Palestinian women have been an active part of their societies, though not always visible. We find Palestinian women taking part – and sometimes in leadership roles in times of rebellion, self-defense, strategy-making, national cohesion and armed resistance. Palestine has experienced and is still experiencing serious memoricide: the active deletion of archives, the criminalizing of narratives, and the intentional erasure of memories. What do we know about Palestinian women’s resistance in the 1930s and specifically in 1948? This event focuses on the 1930s and 1940s and on women in military leadership roles who managed underground groups. We meet Fatma Khaskiyya who was the strategist and military leader of a hundred men already in 1936 and later in 1948. And we get to know the founder of an underground resistance group of fourteen women in Jaffa in 1947-48. Who were these women, why don’t we know more about Palestinian women’s resistance during their defense of their towns? And what do these stories and histories tell us about Palestinian culture?