Silenced Palestinian Voices IV: Silenced twice – the women who led the First Intifada

Women’s voices deserve a space of their own. This essay is Part 9 of the “Quiet Abandonment” series on the world’s retreat from the Palestinian cause and Part 4 of “Silenced Palestinian Voices.”

Building on Part III’s exploration of diverse Palestinian voices, this article focuses on the women who embodied sumud during the First Intifada and their subsequent marginalization. Palestinian women regard sumud as a uniquely Palestinian form of steadfast resilience, the resolve to stay and survive, turning perseverance under occupation into a political statement.

With women’s participation in the First Intifada so unique, the fact that it is not part of known lore is a slight to the women who took part. Attempting to shatter the silence, Brazilian director Julia Bacha produced the film “Naila and the Intifada” in 2017.

In spite of attempts to get it cancelled (silenced), I saw the film at a screening in 2019 in Haifa. It was hypnotic. Through animation and interviews, it brought to light the women’s voices of the Intifada that history had nearly erased. My full reflections on the film, including its controversies, are shared in a separate review.

Bacha told Middle East Eye:

The uprising didn't last five years because of young men throwing stones at tanks …. [but] because there was an organising structure of civil disobedience and the creation of parallel institutions of power … without yet the existence of a Palestinian government. The reason why they were able to do that was because women were at the helm.

As I wrote in Part III, girls discovered that, released from domestic constraints, they could leave their homes and stay out late if they participated in what was seen as the legitimate national struggle. Activist Zahira Kamal recalled,

For the first time we weren't waiting for instructions.

Gender roles shifted further when the youth noticed that the IDF treated the girls more gently than the boys, leading to the arrangement whereby girls were positioned in front during confrontations. In this period of collective resistance, social constraints loosened, and women wore jeans and t-shirts rather than the hijab, as their participation was valued rather than questioned.

The Mobilization Takes Hold

Raja Mustafa was 16 when the First Intifada began. Interviewed in 2015, she recalled:

All the girls my age fought in the first Intifada; we were in the streets throwing rocks and blocking roads and screaming at the protests just like the men.

While documentation shows that "50-65% of young women participated in demonstrations," in an article she wrote in 2018, Naila Ayesh said that IDF mentality did not account for female participation and certainly not leadership. Not under suspicion from Israeli authorities, therefore, women were able to move freely during curfew hours and distribute communiqués hidden in bread baskets calling for strikes, demonstrations, and more.

But the role of women was far more significant than even this.

Strategic Innovation and the Cost of Success

With many men in prison, dead, or deported, women provided critical infrastructure during the uprising. They organized committees that provided relief for families of those killed, established secret classes when Israel shut down schools and universities, and set up medical clinics. They organized farming cooperatives and taught women how to grow their own food, so they would not have to rely on Israeli produce.

Ayesh claimed,

Women made executive decisions and one even led the PLO for about 18 months.

However, this moment of expanded possibilities proved temporary, according to Dr. Yara Hawari:

Palestinian women have always played a fundamental role in the struggle... Yet they have faced consistent political marginalization.

The exclusion of women from subsequent political processes revealed the fragility of their gains.

From Madrid to Oslo: The Return of the Exiled Men

As has happened in many countries throughout history, the women who had tasted political engagement and economic power were pushed back into traditional roles when the men returned. Ayesh believed that:

Left without the men for long enough, they may have begun to build roads and other infrastructure as well. In other words, they may have begun to set down the foundations for a viable state.

Although several women were included in the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace conference, with Hanan Ashrawi as their spokesperson, Zahira Kamal saw the women as "tokens," not serious decision-makers. The very qualities of sumud that had sustained communities during the uprising—patience, persistence, and collective organizing—were dismissed as secondary to the dramatic politics of international negotiation.

Unbeknownst to them, a secret channel for negotiations was being opened in Norway, a channel that would ultimately bypass them all. Hanan Ashrawi, who had become a symbol of Palestinian sumud on the international stage, was deliberately left out of the secret Oslo talks that prioritized the PLO’s male elite. She recalled her shock when the agreement was signed, noting that it lacked legitimacy because it "bypassed the collective leadership and the representatives of our people."

Naima al-Sheikh Ali, a grassroots organizer, echoed this bitterness, stating that "women were left out of all preparations for the formation of the Palestinian Authority". This was a complaint among male local leaders as well, as noted by Ayesh:

These secret meetings led to Arafat coming in from the cold, back from Tunisia, to take the leadership away from the people and lord it over them.

In other words, the First Intifada had revealed women's capacity for sumud-driven leadership, and Oslo revealed how little that was valued when the time came to distribute power.

From Mass Movements to NGOs

The 1980s grassroots women’s mobilisation during the First Intifada gave way to the rise in the 1990s of international NGOs, whereby local women’s activism was replaced with donor-driven agendas that often disempowered the very women they were supposed to help.

Birzeit University instructor Islah Jad studied this phenomenon. Instead of mobilizing thousands, women were filing reports for international funders, and the feminist energy of the Intifada had been bureaucratized out of existence. NGO-isation diverted accountability away from the communities who needed help improving their lives to donors who needed success stories for their websites.

Jad quoted an older activist:

When we organise demonstrations, they stop their cars in front of the demonstrations, get their banners out and stand in the first row to be photographed.

The Erasure of Memory

While women's committees were highly organized, record-keeping was hampered by limited resources and the clandestine and decentralized nature of their work. This meant that important details were rarely recorded. Furthermore, within Palestinian historiography, the dominant national narrative emphasized male-centered resistance, sidelining women's roles. The erasure of Palestinian women's sumud reflects a profound loss in collective memory.

Palestinian PHD student Lucy Garbett claims that despite a recent "archiving fever," the infrastructure that enabled women's participation, such as the 60-70 kindergartens, was systematically omitted from documentation and photographs of women demonstrating were preserved, but not the childcare centers that made it possible through acts of collective care and sumud. This created a narrative of participation without agency or organizational capacity.

Garbett argues that:

The Palestinian women’s movement did something quite extraordinary: they showed an attentiveness to the material conditions that lie at the crux of people’s everyday lives and sought to alleviate them as part of a political project, while also understanding that a political project necessarily needs to pay attention to the unequal conditions that people face and what that means for their involvement.

One founder of a women's committee told Garbett, “They were so important, but you are the first person to ever ask me about them.”

More than a mere loss of historical details, then, this erasure of a particular form of Palestinian steadfastness that combined resistance with community building, challenging the occupation while challenging patriarchal norms, was a societal loss of all that women have to offer.

The Pattern Complete: Silenced Twice

The trajectory of these years is unmistakable. Women were central to the First Intifada, then pushed aside when the exiled leadership returned. Women were present at Madrid but sidelined; close to Oslo but locked out; elevated in NGOs, but stripped of grassroots force and decisionmaking power; united in conferences, but ignored by decision-makers.

The same society that valorized women's resistance ultimately constrained their long-term political agency. The men who had been exiled and returned to consolidate their own power dismantled the local, grassroots leadership that had been the heartbeat of the Intifada. These women’s voices deserve to be heard in order to understand the history they shaped.

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I would like to thank journalist Khaled Abu Toameh and Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Israeli scholar of Arab and Islamic culture, whose conversations and insights helped me while researching this topic.

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