Samiha Khalil

Samiha Khalil was born in the town of Anabta. Her father was Yusuf al-Qabaj and her mother was Halima Tuqan. She had two sisters. Her husband was Salama Khalil. She had four sons, Khalil, Saji, Samir, and Samih, and one daughter, Sa’ida.

When Samiha was three years old, her mother sent her to the city of Nablus to live with her maternal aunt, because Anabta did not have a primary school for girls.

She spent six years in Nablus, where she attended a private elementary school. After returning to Anabta, her mother tried to convince her father to move to Tulkarm so that her daughter could continue her education.

She completed primary school through the seventh grade at a school in Tulkarm. There, the schoolchildren would demonstrate to protest against Jewish immigration and demand an end to the British Mandate. They would gather at the mosque to deliver nationalist speeches. Khalil recalls giving one such speech when she was twelve years old.

Her parents then sent her to the Friends boarding school in Ramallah where she studied for three years. During those years, Samiha and her classmates followed political events and shared lyrics of songs about the Palestinian cause with each other. At times, they would voice their protest against some of the school’s American teachers who opposed the Palestinian struggle.

During the General Strike and the Great Rebellion her father was mayor of Anabta. He encouraged the wealthy inhabitants to donate foodstuff for distribution to the poor. With her own eyes she witnessed how British soldiers broke into her house and used their bayonets to slit the bales of rice and flour. When her father loudly protested that these bales were meant for the poor, he was violently pushed aside and he fell to the floor. The young girl never forgot that scene and also never forgot that the British killed five of her cousins during the Great Rebellion.

In order to complete her education, Samiha was required to enroll in a mixed-gender class at school, something that her religiously observant father was resolutely opposed to. She was therefore compelled to return home to Anabta, where she began studying at home, taking private lessons in order to obtain her high school diploma. However, it was not long before her parents decided she must be married off and chose a husband for her.

In 1940, Samiha married Salama Khalil from the town of Taybeh. He worked in the field of education as a schoolteacher, and then as principal of a middle school in Qalqilya. In 1944, he was appointed principal of a junior high school in al-Majdal.

In late 1947, when war broke out between Arabs and Jews, she and her husband were on vacation in Tulkarm and Taybeh. At the time they had three children and were expecting a fourth. When they tried to return to Majdal, they were stranded. As a result, after spending a few days in Jerusalem, they were forced to take a long roundabout route to go to Gaza City, where a relative of theirs resided.

Her husband found work in the Ministry of Education in Gaza, which was then under Egyptian administration, so she stayed with him and their children there until 1952. When they decided to return to Tulkarm, they were unable to travel to Cairo, from where they could fly to Amman and then go on to Tulkarm, due to their limited financial resources. Instead, they were forced to travel by sea along with their five children in tow. On a small boat and under difficult conditions, the family sailed to Beirut, from where they were able, via Damascus and then Amman, to reach Tulkarm.

Samiha Khalil then settled with her family in Ramallah, where her husband found work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). She lived an austere life, as her husband's salary was the family’s only source of income. However, she managed her household’s economy efficiently; she took care of all the household chores on her own, assisted only by her children. She also began to think about how to help people, so she founded the Arab Women’s Union in al-Bireh, which included a kindergarten, a literacy center, and a sewing workshop.

Samiha Khalil participated in leading demonstrations against the Baghdad Pact in 1956, standing at the head of the largest women's demonstration from Ramallah which included students of the Female Teachers Training College and the women of al-Bireh. In Jerusalem, women and female students participated in the demonstration. The following day she led another demonstration, which brought together women from twenty-seven villages of the West Bank. She was reported to have stated at that time: “We killed the Baghdad Pact. We kept demonstrating until it expired.”

In 1965 she and other women established Jam‘iyyat in‘ash al-usra (the Family Revival Society), a social assistance and women empowerment organization, and remained its president until she died. In the same year, she participated in Jerusalem in the founding conference of the General Union of Palestinian Women, and established a branch of the union in Al-Bireh. She also became a member of the Palestine National Council.

Thanks to her husband's support, Samiha Khalil was able to complete her education once her children had grown up. She finished the curriculum of the last three years of secondary school in nine months and sat for the general secondary exam (the tawjihi) with her son Saji; she was more than forty years old when she enrolled in Beirut Arab University to study Arabic literature. The Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 prevented her from travelling to sit for her final third-year exams, and so she was forced to abandon her university studies.

The June 1967 war marked a decisive turning point in her life. She rushed to the aid of the newly displaced, especially the residents of the Latrun villages that Israel destroyed immediately after occupying the West Bank. She brought together a number of young women who wished to do aid work, and together with her colleagues, they opened 23 first aid centers, each equipped with a doctor, a bed, a telephone line and medicine. They also went to great lengths to persuade families to remain in Palestine and not flee to Amman. They also formed a committee to collect donations to support children in nursery school and the families of martyrs, and managed to raise about 1,000 Jordanian dinars every month.

However, two years later, the Israeli military administration sent a notice to the association informing it that it was prohibited from collecting and distributing funds, and that no charitable organization would be permitted to raise more than 2,000 dinars per year. Consequently the association began buying cheese, olives, and juices from village women and selling the products on their behalf in order to support the women financially. The association then established a center to teach girls sewing and the art of traditional embroidery, and it started holding charity bazaars to sell the merchandise made in the center. In 1969, the association founded four vocational training and production centers in various villages of the West Bank. But the occupation authorities again issued an order halting the activities of these centers. In response, the association’s management requested the girls in the village to come to al-Bireh to receive instruction there, where the association owned a small number of sewing machines. The association also opened a school to teach girls hairdressing that sustained itself through its own income.

The mayor of al-Bireh donated a plot of land to the Family Revival Society that she had helped to establish. Five years later, the society opened its own center on that plot thanks to donations received from well-off families. The association then constructed another building specially for housing the children of martyrs and girls in training who lived in remote areas. Samiha Khalil could thus fulfill her four objectives: saving and educating children, putting girls to work, enshrining the principles of volunteer work, and protecting heritage.

The preservation of Palestinian popular culture was among her top priorities. Through her Family Revival Society, she founded the Committee for Social Research and Heritage in 1972 and became a member of the committee whose first published study in 1973 was entitled Qaryat Turmus Ayya: dirasa fi-l turath al-sha‘bi [The Village of Turmus Ayya: A Study of Popular Culture]. The following year the committee issued a journal called al-Turath wa-l mujtama‘ [Heritage and Society].

Samiha Khalil played a leading role in founding a popular Palestinian museum in Ramallah. This included wax figures and a model of the village of Sammu‘ and its battle.

Samiha Khalil was arrested six times by Israeli authorities for participating in demonstrations and engaging in protest activity against the occupation. The last time she was arrested was in 1976, on charges of belonging to the Palestine National Front in the Occupied Territories, which was created in August 1973. That time, Khalil was placed in a cell with four Israeli women detainees all charged with violent crimes. These cellmates beat her with broomsticks so badly that the prison administration feared they might kill her, and decided to transfer her to a different cell with other Palestinian prisoners, who immediately tended to her.

After her release, Samiha Khalil was placed under house arrest for two and a half years, during which she was forbidden from meeting people and having access to newspapers. She was also banned from traveling for several long years. However, she continued her struggle and, in 1979, she was elected a member of the National Guidance Committee, which was the highest authority of the Palestinian people inside Palestine. She was the only woman on that committee.

Samiha Khalil managed to represent Palestine’s women in more than twenty congresses worldwide, and she delivered speeches and explained her country’s cause in international arenas.

She was a firm believer in total equality between men and women. She ran for the presidential elections in 1996 opposite Yasir Arafat. She won 12 percent of the vote, thus enshrining a democratic and enlightened tradition in Palestinian political life.

She was an honorary member of the Union of Arab Lawyers and an honorary member of the Arab Women’s Union.

She was the recipient of several awards and medals, including the Jerusalem Medal for Culture, Arts and Literature in 1991. She thus thoroughly deserved her common sobriquet: The Oak Tree of Palestine.

She died on 26 February 1999. Her tombstone carries this inscription: “Samiha Khalil: She fought for the freedom and independence of the Palestinian people.”

Khalil published as many popular tales as she could collect in Majallat al-turath wa-l mujtama‘. She wrote zajal poetry (which spread among her intimates) and recited it on national occasions. She wrote a book of zajal called Min al-intifada ila al-dawla [From the Intifada to the State]. She also published many political and social articles in local newspapers.

Sources

Abu Eisheh, Anwar. Mémoires palestiniennes: La terre dans la tête. Paris: Éditions Chemins de traverse, 2011.

أبو فخر، صقر. "سميحة خليل سنديانة فلسطين". "السفير- ملحق فلسطين"، أيار/ مايو 2011.  

الخليل، ساجي. "لمحات من الجانب الإنساني في شخصية سميحة الخليل". موقع "جمعية إنعاش الأسرة".

عبد الهادي، فيحاء. "أدوار المرأة الفلسطينية في الثلاثينيات، المساهمة السياسية للمرأة الفلسطينية: روايات النساء، نصوص المقابلات الشفوية". البيرة: مركز المرأة الفلسطينية للأبحاث والتوثيق، 2006.   

لوباني، حسين علي. "معجم أعلام فلسطين في العلوم والفنون والآداب". بيروت: مكتبة لبنان ناشرون، 2012 .

“Samiha Al-Khalil: A Profile from the Archives”, on al-Jadaliyya Website: jadaliyya.com