palestinian women movements

Selective Memory, Gender and Nationalism: Palestinian Women Leaders of the Mandate PeriodAuthor(s): Ellen L. FleischmannReviewed work(s):Source: History Workshop Journal, No. 47 (Spring, 1999), pp. 141-158Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289606 .Accessed: 20/03/2012 16:10

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FEATURE: NARRATIVES, MEMORIES

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Delegation of Arab Women to see the British High Commissioner for Palestine, Jerusalem, 1929. Matiel Mughannam is second on the left.

Selective IMemory, Gender and Nationalism: Palestinian Women Leaders of the M4andate Period

by Ellen L. Fleischmann

INTRODUCTION

During the British Mandate period in Palestine (1920-1948), organizations established by Palestinian Arab women evolved into a dynamic movement which, while working within the framework of the (male-led) nationalist movement, developed its own distinct character, leadership and identity. A group of educated, urban, elite women, only vaguely remembered today, acquired leadership skills through their political work, and became renowned in the press as well as among the British government officials with whom they did battle in the struggle for Palestine.

This essays deals with the nexus of memory, gender and history in the construction of national narratives. At the crux of this issue are questions about how the leadership of the Palestinian women's movement during the British Mandate -period is remembered and forgotten in the nationalist lexicon. When it is convenient to remember women, why are some

expunged from the historical narrative while others are elevated to cele- brated prominence? How does a dominant nationalist interpretation

History Workshop Journal Issue 47 C) History Workshop Journal 1999

142 History Workshop Journal

intrude upon individual and collective remembrances of women's historical role, inventing and re-inscribing an imagined history? Specifically, I examine why certain leaders have been relegated to historical oblivion in collective memory while one in particular, Zlikha Shihabi, is continually evoked in nationalist narratives - or myths, even - which contradict other historical sources. But although selective memory occasionally propels an isolated figure to the forefront, ultimately, the women's movement, Shihabi included, has been relegated to the margins of the national narrative. Its history is only invoked when convenient for contemporary politics. The dis- juncture between historical remembering and forgetting highlights the politicization of memory, gender and history.

MYTHS, LEGENDS, AND THE MEANING OF 'COLLECTIVE MEMORY'

Nothing but a legend, you say? You want nothing but facts? Facts are per- ishable, believe me, only legends remain, like the soul after the body, or perfume in the wake of a woman.1

Amin Maalouf

The questions raised in this paper originated, as such issues often do, as a puzzle which emanated from research. While looking for empirical data in a research project which aims to answer specific, historically framed questions, the historian often becomes derailed by the questioning process, which itself provokes previously unimagined inquiries. Thus, while plumbing the sources for the history of the Palestinian women's movement, I continually con- fronted odd disjunctures and discrepancies among the data. A kind of refrain kept recurring, particularly in contemporary sources, that was not only absent from coeval ones, but even contradicted them. (By contemporary, I mean 'current, modern' of our own period; by coeval, I mean 'of the same age' - within the historical period under study.) I kept hearing or reading what I came to regard as nationalist myths or legends. I myself had unreflectively repeated these myths in my own writing, and it was only when I delved into extensive research in primary sources that I began to examine their origins and assumptions. Diverting the inquiry was analogous to opening Pandora's box; soon other questions tumbled out one after the other, pushing methodological issues to the forefront of my research agenda.

One could be forgiven for assuming that my use of the words 'myth' and 'legend' (particularly in quotes) indicates that what is at issue here is the seemingly passe question of how historians authenticate the veracity of sources, and attempt to sort through the conflicting data collected in order to arrive at some sort of objective, empirical, verifiable 'truth'. Truth has become a slippery, contested concept recently - to the extent that, as one scholar observed, 'it is not altogether fashionable' to speak of it any longer.2 Relativism, positionality of researcher and researched, recognition of

Palestinian Women Leaders 143

competing narratives and claims to representations of truth, and accusations of essentialism3 have caused historians (among others) to reject nineteenth- century positivism's once ruling belief that the simple task of the historian is to reveal the past 'as it really was', in Ranke's famous axiom. Indeed, one can say that 'there is no such thing as Truth, in the sense of knowledge that transcends the definitions, values, and rules of any or all specific knowledge communities. The vision of a Truth that transcends historical circumstances and societal context is ultimately a dream of power over others'.4

And yet, a cautionary note needs to be interjected. Despite new questioning of old assumptions that an 'objective', empirically provable truth is retrievable, such interrogations do not absolve scholars from responsibility about the use of sources, as if we were entitled to conclude whatever we like from our investigations.5 We must, rather, be self-conscious about our own role as interpreters of the past, and attempt to engage in a 'cautious juxta- position of alternative truths'.6 The point is, that until fairly recently, historical truth was not, in fact, perceived in the plural but instead singularly defined by rigid rules and conventions which conveniently silenced uncon- ventional, alternative, subversive or 'unauthorized' sources and voices. Although these rules are currently being contested and transformed, a certain amount of resistance and confusion nonetheless reigns. How does a historian evaluate sources? This question raises fundamental questions about history's very essence.

In this essay, I am not interested in necessarily verifying 'supposedly neutral historical facts', while invalidating myths and legends; nor do I propose to release alternative truth genies out of some bottle where they have lain captive, repressed and silenced. Rather, I explore the politics of conflicting historical interpretations and representations.7 In examining the processes by which historical narratives are constructed, I ask how historical representations are used ideologically. These processes, and the political and epistemological assumptions which undergird them, tell their own kind of 'truth' about the use of history.

What do I mean here by 'myths' and 'legends', and what is their relation to so-called 'valid' history?8 In using the terms myth and legend, I do not intend to disparage their veracity and pass judgment on it, although I admit that by using this language I do call it into question; establishing a 'truth' scale, however, is not the point. Myths and legends constitute their own form of historical truth. But, as with any source, we need to consider ideological or social functions as well as actual messages and content.

Myths and legends have been commonly considered fictitious - even fan- tastic - symbolic and allegorical explanatory devices, often deployed by cul- tures to explain the unknown, or to construct folkloric representations of cultural characters, stereotypes, or histories. Roland Barthes emphasizes myth in its form as a 'system of communication', a 'message' and 'type of speech' which 'has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justifi- cation.' Myth is infinitely flexible in its composition, since 'any material can


arbitrarily be endowed with meaning'. Myth's 'unity and coherence are ... due to its function'.9 Barthes claims that 'myth is depoliticized speech', a statement which seems to contradict his (and others') linking of myth and historical representation.10 The nationalist 'myths' which kept cropping up in my research, for example, were clearly endowed with political meaning and served ideological and politico-nationalist functions. Indeed, the very subject of these mythical narratives was expressly political, covering such matters as the historical origins of political movements and leaders. This is not to say, however, that myth's function and content are always explicitly (or implicitly) political; myth can incorporate many ideological functions - cultural, social and even spiritual - which may overlap with, or be distinct from, political ones.

A useful idea that helps clarify the political potential and meaning of myth is Liisa Malkki's concept 'mythico-history', defined as a kind of collective narrative which subversively recasts and reinterprets history in 'fundamentally moral terms'. For our purposes, mythico-history is cast in nationalist, political terms that have an underlying moral message. What makes a narrative mythical, according to Malkki, is not its 'truth or falsity' but rather, its concern with 'ordering and reordering ... social and political categories.... It seize[s] historical events, processes, and relationships and reinterpret[s] them within a deeply moral scheme of good and evil'.1"

A legend, according to Palestinian ethnologist Sharif Kanaana, is a device which 'in some way helps people to come to terms with the powers which cause ... collective stress'. Legends, myths, and mythico-history enable people to define and mould representations of collective stress, effec- tively opening an outlet for their participation in the construction - whether oral or written - of their own history.12

A crucial aspect to myth, legends and mythico-history is their origination from the repository of collective memory: in order to enter mythological lore, the narrative must be recounted and retained in memory by many people. The boundaries between myth, legend, mythico-history, and collective memory are therefore quite tenuous. Indeed, the relationship between history and memory is a thorny one for scholars: some highlight the "'fundamental opposition" between the two, claiming memory is "an unreliable source" of history, while others, more accurately, identify their 'inter- dependent yet contestive relationship" '.13

Collective memory has been defined as 'a socially articulated and socially maintained "reality of the past"', inherent in a 'community of memory' which is created and defined by its remembrance of a traumatic event.14 The act of remembering is not necessarily an isolated, individualistic activity but one which takes place in a social and political context, resulting in the construction of memory.15 Ultimately, the community is defined by 'the meaning given to the event, rather than the event itself16 so that members of the community do not necessarily need to have experienced the traumatic event, but do need to share in the interpretations of its meaning. A clear


example of this kind of collective memory is how the children of Palestin- ian refugees 'remember' their parents' villages through establishing their own identities from a sense of belonging to place - even places they have never seen; thus, the child of a villager from Asdud (Ashdod) calls himself an 'Asdudi' regardless of not having set foot on Palestinian soil.17

Collective memory is not only interpretative but can itself be a complex, eclectic, politicized construction, with sources ranging from myths, legends, oral and personal narratives to written documents. I should note that, for the purposes of this essay, I sometimes use the terms collective memory and collective history interchangeably; collective memory is in most respects a constituent part of collective history.

It is perhaps axiomatic to note that the producers of 'facts' such as those inscribed in documentary records are human beings who interpret the truth as subjectively as an individual who transmits information orally or infor- mally through personal narrative. In examining the meanings and processes inherent in the construction of mythico-history, however, we arrive at another kind of truth, for such an exploration reveals how mythico-history informs history-writing. It also reveals much about the ideologies and power dynamics embedded in this kind of history.

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING: SELECTIVE NATIONALIST HISTORY

... memory is, by definition, a term which directs our attention not to the past but to the past-present relation. It is because 'the past' has this living existence in the present that it matters so much politically.18

Popular Memory Group (1982)

In this section I examine some specific myths and legends which informed the historical narrative of the Palestinian women's movement. How are women remembered and (significantly) forgotten?

When I started my research, I conceived the task rather simply: the straightforward goal (I thought) was to deepen understanding of the emer- gence and development of the women's movement through reconstructing its chronology and uncovering rich details about its key figures and events. The bare outline of the story is as follows: in the early 1920s, educated, upper-middle-class Palestinian women began to organize politically and socially in women's organizations around the national issue. They, like the rest of the Arab population in British Mandate Palestine, were galvanized by the violent disturbances between Arabs and Jews in 1929, known as the Wailing Wall incident. The mainstream, male-led Palestinian national movement, which had begun to organize in the 1920s with the convening of seven Palestine National Congresses led by the Arab Executive Committee (AE), became increasingly radicalized in the 1930s. The AE dissolved in 1934, debilitated by increasing political differences between the voices of


'moderation' (compromise with the British government and the Zionists) and 'radicalism' (complete rejection of Zionism). With the onset of a six- month General Strike in 1936, the struggle evolved from one of diplomatic wrangling with the British government into a three-year, full-scale, armed revolt which ended only when the British put it down with great military force in 1939. The movement never entirely recovered from the Revolt, weakened as it was by internal divisions and the imprisonment and exile of its leadership. In the 1940s it was unable to mount an effective, united front against the far better-organized and extremely well-trained and armed Zionist movement.

The women's major entry into the national arena occurred in 1929 with the convening of the Palestine Arab Women's Conference in Jerusalem, attended by hundreds of women from all over the country. The conference was immediately followed by a motorcade demonstration against British government policies, and the dispatch of a delegation to present grievances to the British High Commissioner of Palestine. The conference and demonstration, widely considered the key events which launched the women's movement, constituted the primary impetus for the establishment of numerous women's organizations throughout the country that formed the nucleus of the newly emergent movement. From the 1930s on, these groups were actively involved in: demonstrations; fundraising for prisoners and their families; smuggling and providing arms for the 1936-39 Revolt; garnering regional and international support through propaganda and the press for the Palestinian national cause; offering services such as medical care and education within a nationalist framework; and participating in regional, pan-Arab, 'Oriental', and international women's conferences.19 The movement remained active and viable until the events of 1948 dispersed, dis- rupted and fractured Palestinian society and its attendant social and political institutions.

The major, recurring 'myth' about the movement on which I focus con- cerned the role of individual women leaders in the seminal early years of the movement's establishment. I continually stumbled across discrepancies in contemporary sources centred upon the revered figure, Miss Zlikha Shihabi, who, from 1937 until her death in 1992, was president of the most prominent women's organization, the Arab Women's Union of Jerusalem (henceforth AWU). The recurring line, or refrain, about her ran like this: she was the 'founder', and 'the first pioneer' of the women's movement; 'the highest model for all Palestinian women'; the creator of the 'first Palestin- ian women's organization'; the 'first president' of the AWU, 'since its inception'; and 'the head of all the women's societies'.20 A common version of the founding story was that Shihabi, who was born in 1903, co-founded the Palestinian Women's Union in 1921 with Melia Sakakini, sister of a renowned educator and nationalist, Khalil Sakakini.

At first glance, there was nothing so remarkable about these claims and the phrases used to describe them. I took them at face value. (I did question


the version mentioned above in which Shihabi, an eighteen-year-old, single woman, 'founded' the women's movement.) What soon became puzzling and frustrating, however, was that, when I attempted to sharpen the focus on Shihabi and fill in the details of these stories, concrete information was almost completely absent. The elusiveness of her presence in the primary sources defied expectations and created frustration. Instead, the data which did emerge contradicted the dominant narrative about Shihabi's role to the extent that it piqued my curiosity and raised new questions.

In primary sources, Shihabi appeared simply as a name on lists of leaders during the early period of the movement. She was not noted as the leader or 'pioneer' of the movement, and indeed, did not engage in the activities which distinguished other women leaders, such as speaking before crowds, leading demonstrations or participating in regional and international women's conferences held in the early 1930s. She did not, for example, attend what was probably the first regional conference among Arab women, the Eastern Arab Women's Assembly held in Beirut in April, 1930.21 She was merely a member, not an officer, of the first major leadership apparatus of the movement, the Arab Women's Executive Committee (AWE), which was elected during the 1929 Palestine Arab Women's Conference and subsequently directed the movement. In the aftermath of the Conference, members of this executive committee formed the influential Jerusalem Arab Women's Association (AWA), to which Shihabi belonged. The president of the Arab Women's Executive was Wahida al-Khalidi; the first president of the AWA was Shahinda Duzdar.22

But the major contradiction in these sources which particularly caught my attention was that another leader who was prominently featured in the press and the government documents during the 1920s and 1930s, Matiel Mughannam, was barely mentioned in contemporary written sources, and was particularly absent in oral-history interviews I conducted. Only four people mentioned Mughannam, while at least fifteen mentioned Shihabi. Yet accounts of Mughannam's activism practically leapt from the pages of sources written in the 1920s and 1930s. Mughannam, unlike Shihabi, was an officer of the Arab Women's Executive Committee, was the spokesperson at numerous meetings with the High Commissioner, participated in an Arab Women's conference in Beirut in 1930, and agitated a crowd by delivering a fiery speech from a balcony during notorious disturbances in Jaffa in 1933 which resulted in numerous deaths and an official inquiry by the British government into the police treatment of the women involved.23 She was frequently interviewed, quoted and described in the press as well as con- tributing articles to it herself. She remains one of the major sources of information of the women's movement during this period, having written the only book on the subject, which was published in 1937.24

The contradictions in these accounts of the two women's activity naturally led to closer examination of sources. A pattern emerged from interviews, contemporary newspaper articles, and books: Shihabi was depicted


as a woman who almost singlehandedly, heroically, established and con- tinuously led the women's movement from its inception. One man from her generation, 'Abd al-Rahman Kayyali, when asked what he recalled about the women's movement during the 1930s, highlighted Shihabi's leadership, describing her as 'outgoing and brave, with a strong personality. She had the freedom to go wherever she wanted and all the women's movement was led by her'. Another contemporary commented that she was 'more political' than other women, and was 'always the first one to go to demonstrations and demand different things'.25 The few people in interviews who did mention Mughannam usually did so only in response to explicit questions (many did not remember her at all), whereas quite a number not only drew attention to Shihabi, but described her, despite not knowing her personally. Kayyali, for example, narrated in rather explicit detail how Shihabi organized and led demonstrations, yet when asked if he ever witnessed any, replied that he had not.

On the other hand, in British government records, and in Arabic and English newspapers from the Mandate period itself, it was Mughannam who was frequently portrayed as the most active leader of the women's movement, although other women (including Shihabi) also featured as part of a group of leaders.26 Mughannam's words, from press interviews, demonstrations and meetings with British government officials, are extensively quoted, and her signature appears on dozens of protest telegrams and mem- oranda. She wrote a number of direct appeals to international public opinion that were published in both the English-language and Arabic press.

Who were these two women, and what do we know about them? Details about Shihabi's personal background and character are surprisingly vague and elusive. Interviews with surviving officials of the Arab Women's Union which she headed for more than fifty years produced conflicting information on her family background and such basics as what her father did for a living, and how many and what sex her siblings were. Her father was probably an official of the Ottoman government, and she may have been the youngest of three brothers and two sisters.27 We know she was born in Jerusalem in 1903, and died there in 1992. A Muslim, she attended the Sisters of Zion School, run by Catholic nuns, but it is not clear how many years she remained there. She never married. Interestingly, in a sort of curriculum vitae Shihabi herself wrote, she does not claim that she 'founded' the Arab Women's Union (AWU); rather, she states that she became its president in 1937.28 This date is significant in itself, a point to which I shall return.

We know much more about Matiel Mughannam, who left more of a historical paper trail. Significantly, she was married to Mughannam Mughan- nam, a prominent member of the opposition Nashashibi faction, and the general secretary of its political organ, the National Defence Party. Matiel, a Christian who was born in Lebanon, was raised in Brooklyn, where she attended high school (but did not graduate), and met her future husband; he was a Protestant, a native of the Palestinian town of Ramallah, who was


attending law school in the United States. The couple went to Jerusalem for their honeymoon in 1921, and decided to settle there, since there was a need for English-speaking lawyers.29

Matiel's English skills were also in demand. She translated from Arabic to English for the delegation that met with the High Commissioner during the Arab Women's Conference in 1929 (see photo).30 Her fluent English and American upbringing undoubtedly facilitated her comfort in English- speaking company and culture. Although extremely active in the women's movement in the 1930s, Matiel Mughannam was culturally very pro- Western and Anglophile,31 despite her fiery nationalist speeches, writings and activism. She evidently managed to separate her socializing from her politics: she hosted a tea party for the wife of the High Commissioner nine days after the Arab Women's Association sent him a telegram - of which she was the chief signatory - protesting against the British police's 'abuse', disgraceful behaviour and 'oppression' in attacking a crowd of demonstra- tors in Nablus.32 Mughannam tried to use her Western connections to benefit the Palestinian cause, for instance when in 1931 she took out a full- page advertisement in the English-language version of the Palestinian newspaper, Filastin (Palestine in Arabic), entitled, 'An Appeal: To my Friends and Countrymen in the United States of America'.33

In 1939 the Mughannams moved to Ramallah, where Matiel helped establish the Ramallah Arab Women's Union. Mughannam does not seem to have been particularly liked by other women. One peer described her as 'stuck up', and commented that she did not really like women but preferred the company of men, which is ironic, considering that she was one of the few women in the movement who drew attention to feminist issues, albeit cautiously and circumspectly.34 In an interesting parallel with Shihabi, Mughannam remained president of the Ramallah organization for forty years, after which she moved to the United States, where she died in 1992.35 (The longevity of these tenures raises important questions about how demo- cratic these primarily upper-class women's organizations were.)

In 1937-38, the Arab Women's Association (AWA) which was founded in 1929 split into two organizations. Tension arose within the original group over the issue of politics, reflecting the factionalism within the Palestinian national movement. Up until around 1936, the Palestinian nationalist movement had been relatively united in its struggle, the dissolution of the Arab Executive notwithstanding. In the course of the 1936-39 strike and Revolt, however, the divisions within the movement hardened into two distinct fac- tions roughly allied with two major notable families whose political bases were in the Jerusalem area, the Husaynis and Nashashibis. This internecine conflict has been cast in the nationalist narrative as pitting the ultra- nationalist faction allied with the Husaynis and its leader, Hajj Amin al- Husayni, against a collaborationist ('moderate' according to the British) opposition, the Nashashibi faction.

The subject of the split in the women's movement remains controversial


and little discussed (or even known) to this day. I began to question por- trayals of the unity of the women's movement after I read through almost twenty-eight years' worth of newspaper articles in the Arabic press, and noticed the development around 1939 of two women's groups which each, separately, contained some of the members of the original Arab Women's Association and its Arab Women's Executive. I then asked women about the split and managed to elicit information about it, although they were clearly reluctant to talk about it even more than fifty-five years after the fact.

The reason for the split in the predominant women's organization, according to one reluctant informant, was the competition between Zlikha Shihabi, a known Husayni supporter, and Zahiya Nashashibi, another leader in the movement, over the office of president. The women, like the men, began to have 'political differences. And they divided'.36 Another woman commented in an interview that Hajj Amin al-Husayni, 'wanted Palestinian women to mix with other [national] women's unions'.37 This remark probably refers to the prominent role played by national women's organizations of Egypt, Lebanon and Syria in a big women's conference held in 1938 in Cairo that focused on bolstering pan-Arab support for the Palestinian cause. The conference was directed by the renowned Egyptian feminist Huda Sha'rawi, president of the Egyptian Feminist Union.

The result of the split in the Palestinian movement was the existence from 1938 of two separate women's groups in Jerusalem: the Arab Women's (or Ladies) Association, established by Nashashibi 'along with the Nashashibi family', and the Arab Women's Union,38 loosely associated with the dominant Husayni faction.39 Ultimately, the Jerusalem-based AWU became the leading umbrella organization for the national women's movement. It is an interesting, confusing twist that Mughannam's group in Ramallah used the word 'union' in its name, although not aligned with the AWU.

It was precisely at the moment when the women's movement itself began to fracture internally - around 1938-39 - that Shihabi rose to prominence and Mughannam faded into the background. Starting in the 1940s, the Arab Women's Union and its president, Shihabi, began to dominate press and other accounts of the women's movement, and other leaders increasingly played a more secondary role. The Arab Women's Association, on the other hand, dropped out of the political arena and focused almost exclusively on social-welfare work.

It is important to note that, after 1948, regional fragmentation of Pales- tinian society resulted in commensurate fragmented collective memory. Palestinians still living in Jerusalem and the West Bank remember differ- ently from those in exile in Lebanon, for example. Their divergent histories and experiences after 1948 shape their memories of pre-1948 life. When we speak of Palestinian collective memory, we cannot speak of a monolithic, united act of remembering. Here, however, is the point at which collective memory and collective history part ways; the former becomes embedded


within the latter. The multiple collective memories of Palestinians living in places as disparate as, for example, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf states and the West Bank together form the elements which constitute collective history. In the complex process by which Palestinian collective history is constructed, legends and myths begin to take on particular significance, since other types of historical sources - physical, concrete ones such as documents and personal papers - have been lost, confiscated or destroyed. Thus the term 'mythico-history' works well for this kind of collective history, which is an attempt to knit together these disparate memories in order to form a coherent, unitary narrative.40 Mythico-history is, above all, an ordering process, and Palestinian collective history represents an attempt to create some kind of ordered, linear, explicative narrative in order to stave off historical chaos and oblivion.

It is significant that the characterizations of Shihabi as the 'pioneer' and 'founder' of the movement began to gain currency in the 1970s. What caused a 'retrospective reinscription of memory'41 between the Mandate period and the 1970s? How and why did the '70s and beyond figure in newly constructed historical representations of women's political involvement, reinserting women into the historical narrative?

In order to answer these questions, it is necessary briefly to examine both the global and Palestinian political and historical context of the late 1960s-early 1970s. This period witnessed the birth of the Palestine Liber- ation Organization (PLO) in 1964, the onset of armed struggle, the 1967 war, Black September 1970 (when the Palestinian Resistance Movement in Jordan was crushed by the regime and subsequently relocated to Lebanon), and the Civil War in Lebanon, which began in 1975. The Palestinian Resist- ance Movement came of age during a period of global political and social upheaval, when revolutionary and liberation movements waged anti- imperialist resistance in the Third World, and civil-rights, student, anti- Vietnam war and feminist movements emerged in the United States and elsewhere. Beirut, which was the centre of the Palestinian Resistance movement, 'was a vortex of progressive and pro-Palestinian activity'. Many Pales- tinians were affected by a 'new culture of resistance'.42

At the beginning of this era, in 1965, Zlikha Shihabi, along with a committee of other Palestinian women, formed the General Union of Palestin- ian Women (GUPW). Although nominally independent, the GUPW was, for all intents and purposes, an arm of the PLO. Originally based in Jerusalem, it was soon forced to relocate several times due to the 1967 War and other tumultuous events; eventually, it was reorganized in Beirut in 1974. For a short time after its founding, Shihabi was its president. The Arab Women's Union in Jerusalem, which Shihabi continued to head without interruption, was independent of the PLO and the GUPW.43 Shortly after the 1967 war brought East Jerusalem (under Jordanian administration since 1948) under Israeli control, Shihabi was briefly deported by the Israeli authorities.44


During this period, according to Soraya Antonius, 'a new idea began to slowly percolate: that women constitute half the available manpower resource, one that a small, embattled nation cannot afford to waste'.45 'War and the national movement' acted as 'catalysts, undermining ... asym- metrical gender relations and exposing them to scrutiny'.46 This new atmos- phere resulted in publication in the 1970s of books on Palestinian women's role in the 'revolution' by both the GUPW and the PLO Research Centre.47 These, together with articles which began to appear during the 1970s, marked a new interest in Palestinian circles in the question of women's political role, initiating debate on gender and nationalism.48

But in addressing their contemporary situation, Palestinians found them- selves confronting the past. Clearly, some of the older women leaders did not appear out of a historical void. Shihabi, after all, had founded the GUPW. It was necessary to recognize some sort of pre-history out of which she emerged, and to trace the historical trajectory of her prominence. It was at this point of recognition that Palestinian women had a historical role in the national movement, that myths and legends about this role began to be reiterated.49

I call the stories about Shihabi myths because they serve a mythical, didactic purpose. In collective history, as with any history, personalities and certain events became imbued with symbolic, mnemonic importance. These memories - such as that of Shihabi as the 'strong', 'educated' 'pioneer' of the movement - were important in the here and now to serve current purposes as exemplars and symbols. Zlikha Shihabi had to embody Palestinian 'progress' and 'modernity' to both outsiders and Palestinian society, in order to prove that Palestinian society was not primitive, atavistic and therefore 'undeserving' of nationhood. Of course, this historical imagining was politically calibrated to counter Zionist versions of Palestinian history. Col- lective or mythico-history often has a defensive cast to it. 'One almost inevitably needs the presence of the Other', a role served 'very well' by the oppressor. 'The caring for the past is always coupled ... with having someone challenge your vision of it.'50

But also, a crucial ideological purpose in recasting Shihabi's and Mughannam's respective roles in history was to ensure the construction of a coherent, unitary historical narrative which could inspire current and future generations to carry on the national struggle. A key aspect to this process is the corollary to collective memory: collective forgetting. 'When we speak of forgetting, we are speaking of displacement (or replacement) of one version of the past by another.'51 Mughannam's memory was dis- credited and even, to an extent, expunged, from the nationalist narrative because she was associated with the Nashashibi faction, whose members have been widely viewed in Palestinian historiography as collaborators with the British, if not outright traitors to the nationalist cause. As such, they have been blamed for the betrayal and disunity which are perceived as major factors in the loss of the country. A woman tainted by association with


this group could hardly symbolize or epitomize the heroic, nationalist woman.

No matter that Mughannam herself was a staunch nationalist, and that women married to nationalist men did not always politically toe the line with their husbands.52 Matiel Mughannam was in many ways less than ideal as a historical exemplar. She was an outsider - practically a foreigner - and she enthusiastically adopted much of the culture of the colonizer, despite her 'ardent' nationalism. Her lack of deep, local, clan roots in Palestinian society, her Christianity, and her embrace of Western culture probably further contributed to her historical marginalization. It was more convenient to forget her and de-emphasize her historical role, in order to enable the dominant narrative's shape to hold, and to distance it from the taint of inauthenticity, collaboration and unpatriotic acts which her connections implied.

Shihabi, on the other hand, was the better candidate to be the symbolic 'founder' and 'pioneer' of the movement. She was a Jerusalemite by birth, and was thus allied with, and had networks among, the powerful Jerusalem elite who dominated the political scene. The sheer longevity of Shihabi's involvement; her brief association with the PLO, paradigm of Palestinian nationalism; and the fact that she remained in Jerusalem for the entire period of her life, further embedded her in people's collective memory. The assumption naturally followed that since she had 'always' been active, she must have always, in fact, led.

CONCLUSION: DISCORDANT MEMORIES

The basic questions I first addressed were: why is Shihabi remembered and why is Mughannam forgotten in collective memory, and what are the myths and processes which informed the construction of Palestinian nationalist mythico-history? But in fact, the real underlying premise of the nationalist narrative - its mythico-history - is the marginalization of Palestinian women's political role during this period. The process by which it is achieved is subtle and complex.

Mythico-history is portrayed as a defensive cultural and historical device, utilized to preserve a community's cohesion - particularly one under attack from external forces; it is conceived of as subversive in the sense that it acts to counter hegemonic, externally-opposed historical interpretations. But mythico-history is not static and one-dimensional; it can also be manipu- lated by groups to construct hegemonic historical interpretations in order to subordinate and silence alternative historical visions from within the community of memory. Thus its historical interpretation - constructed from both silences and forgettings, myths and legends - can become dominant.

How this interpretation changes over time illustrates power relationships within subaltern communities of memory.53 Initially, Palestinians' collective memories and sense of history were responses to the dominant Zionist and


Western versions of history - indeed, to the denial in these versions of the very existence of Palestinian history. Thus a male-dominated, nationalist narrative developed which itself, while an expression of defiance to imperialism, also constituted, paradoxically, a repression of alternative historical narratives. 'The exigencies of a struggle that demands national unity tend to circumscribe [a] potentially oppositional space' in collective history. People's 'sense of history was overdetermined by the current situation'.54 But, in the case I examine, the 'current situation' is itself historicized and transformed by moving back and forth through time and space. Besides responding to dominant, externally-imposed historical interpretations, the sources also spoke to changing internal perceptions of gender and the political role of women during different periods of Palestinian history, and even in different places (Lebanon, and the West Bank/Jerusalem).55

The fact is, both Shihabi and Mughannam remain obscure and anony- mous to the majority of Palestinians. The endless repetition of the myths - as well as the forgetting process - indicate historical neglect and marginalization of women. History-writers simply could not be bothered with researching women's role or checking their sources; they were content to repeat the myths and legends unreflectively and unquestioningly in order to propagandize whatever line was current political ideology, and to move on to the main narrative: the male-led national movement. Indeed, in the few historical narratives which briefly mention women's political activity during the Mandate period, women are only named on lists (as president of such- and-such group); or mentioned because they were 'martyred' or, unusually, involved in military struggle, like the famous and constantly-evoked female fighter, Fatma Ghazzal, killed in the 1936 Revolt. Rarely are a woman's individual actions, characteristics, or words described or cited, despite their abundance in the historical record.

Nationalist narrative is content to keep Palestinian women in their (historical) place, which is playing a 'heroic' role 'alongside their men'. In this respect, (vague) collective remembrances that construct bland, generically 'heroic' characterizations of Zlikha Shihabi fit in well with the nationalist agenda. The fact that most depictions of Shihabi result in her ultimate char- acterlessness has helped to marginalize women as nonentities. Shihabi herself conformed - whether consciously or not we may never know - to nationalist imperatives in order to demonstrate national unity. Shihabi never challenged gendered norms of the patriarchal status quo - such a challenge would have been considered divisive and secondary to the primacy of the national problem. During a 1944 Arab Women's Conference in Cairo which focused on the status of women in Arab countries, for example, Shihabi stated in a press interview that women in Palestine would not 'demand more rights than what is allowed by Islamic law and the holy Quran' since 'demanding women's rights was before its time'.56

On the other hand, Mughannam, who is barely remembered at all, much less as a national heroine, nonetheless emerges as a real human being albeit


with a contradictory character and politics, at least from the Palestinian nationalist point of view. The contradictions in her personality only highlight her individuality and reality as a historical character. One feels as if one knows her from the accounts of her in the primary sources, and even from the negative comments of those few who remembered her.

But even beyond the Shihabi-Mughannam dichotomy, the earlier, for- mative history of the women's movement - its inception and development - just seems of little interest in contemporary Palestinian collective memory. In the few writings that mention this history, writers tend to refer dismissively to the women leaders as 'bourgeois' and politically 'unaware' in other words, not 'revolutionary'.57 These narratives quickly skip forward to the post-1967 period.

Both 'official' Palestinian nationalist and collective history elide all evi- dence of the nuances, contradictions, and complexities of the women's movement: its independence, factionalism, individual power struggles, and originality. It is telling that, to this day, the split in the women's movement which occurred almost sixty years ago has been successfully repressed, and those who do remember it are reluctant to discuss it.58 The representations of the women's movement had to correspond to and fit within the major nationalist narrative - in some ways to rectify the weaknesses within the male-led movement - in order to be more seamless, more united, and more positivistically linear in its progress and triumphs. The result is the construction of a mythico-history in which women's importance in the nationalist narrative is based largely on obscuring the rich ambivalences and contradictions of their role in order to maintain unifying nationalist myths and legends.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

I would like to thank Ted Swedenburg for his helpful input and criticism of an earlier draft of this article, Julie Peteet for her advice and suggestions during the writing process, and the editors of History Workshop Journal - Anne Summers, in particular - for their constructive editorial comments. A version of this article was presented at the 1996 annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Providence, Rhode Island.

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; Collective Remembering, ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, London: Sage Publications, 1990, p. 3.

14 Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, pp. 54, 47-49. 15 Numerous social scientists who write about collective memory and historical remem-

bering 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; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; and Middleton and Edwards, Collective Remembering.

16 Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, p. 49. 17 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'. Malkki, Purity and Exile, p. 1.

18 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.

19 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 Afghanis- tan, whereas the 1944 one in Cairo was called the Arab Women's Conference.

20 Asma Tubi, 'AbYr wa majd, Beirut: Matba'at Qalalat, 1966, p. 152, 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; Randa Sharaf, 'Zlikha 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; 'The Sun Will Not Set: Zlikha Shihabi Between the Lines' (Arabic, n.a.), al-Ittihad, 18 March 1992; 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.

21 A delegation of eight women was sent by the Arab Women's Executive in Jerusalem. Filastmn (Palestine, one of the major Palestinian newspapers, 1911-1967), 10 April 1930.

22 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.

23 Filastmn 10 April 1930; British Colonial Office Official Palestine Correspondence (hereafter CO) 733 239/5, Pt. I and II, 23 Oct. 1933.

24 This was The Arab Woman and the Palestine Problem, London: Herbert Joseph, 1937. 25 Interviews with 'Abd al-Rahman al-Kayyali, 8 March 1993, Amman, and Sa'ida Jarallah,

19 April 1994, Jerusalem. 26 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-Lister (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.

27 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).

28 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.

29 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.)

30 Falastin-English, 2 Nov. 1929. 31 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 see 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.

32 Filastmn, 18 and 27 August 1931. 33 Falastin-English, 17 Oct. 1931. 34 Ellen Mansur, interview with author, 6 Sept. 1992, Ramallah, West Bank. 35 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.

36 Interview, Sa'ida Jarallah; Samah Nusseibeh (then president of the Arab Women's Society), Jerusalem, 23 Nov. 1992.

37 Interview, Salma Husayni, Jerusalem, 19 April 1993. 38 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.

39 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.

40 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.

41 Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, p. 90. 42 Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, p. xviii; 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.

43 Laurie Brand, Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for


State, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 197-199. 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.

44 'The Sun Will Not Set', al-Ittihad, 18 May 1992. 45 Antonius, 'Fighting', p. 28. 46 Peteet, Gender in Crisis, p. 6. 47 Abu, 'Ali, Introduction, and Ghazi al-Khalili, The Palestinian Woman and the Revol-

ution (Arabic), Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1977. 48 Salwa al-'Amid, 'Observations on the reality of women in the Palestinian Revolution'

(Arabic), Shu'un Filastiniyya 113, April 1981, pp. 9-19; Ghassan 'Abd al-Qadir, 'Woman in the Palestinian National Struggle' (Arabic), Malaf al-tali'a 26, 1979; Nuha Abu-Daleb, 'Palestin- ian Women and Their Role in the Revolution', Peuples Mediterraneens 5, Oct-Dec. 1978, pp. 35-47; Muna Ahmad Ghandur, Female Guerrillas, Um Ahmad and Her Three Daughters in the Resistance (Arabic), Beirut: Matba'at al-Wafa, 1969; Ghada Karmi, 'Liberation Through Revolution for Palestinian Women', The Guardian 14 May 1976; Ijlal Khalifa, Woman and the Palestinian Cause (Arabic), Cairo: Modern Arab Press, 1974.

49 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; al- Khalili, The Palestinian Woman, 80.

50 Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 60, 76. 51 Frames, p. 118. 52 Interview with Matiel Mughannam conducted by Julie Peteet and Rosemary Sayigh, 15

August 1985. 53 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.

54 Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, pp. 7, xxvi. 55 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.

56 Filastin, 13 Dec. 1944. 57 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.)

58 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.

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