1. John Brenkman recently wrote: "Citizens can freely enter the field of political persuasion and decision only insofar as they draw on the contingent vocabularies of their own identities. Democracy needs participants who are conversant with the images, symbols, stories, and vocabularies that have evolved across the whole of the history. . . . By the same token, democracy also requires citizens who are fluent enough in one another's vocabularies and histories to share the forums of political deliberation and decision on an equal footing" (Brenkman 1993, 89).

2. Interview by the author with Sahar Khalifa in Nablus, 29 May 1991. Rosemary Sayigh indicates that the "special difficulty of the Palestinian struggle, its imbalance of forces, means that women's part in institution building, artistic and literary production, professional work, or sumood (steadfastness) takes on a national importance. To limit our focus to 'organized' women is to miss another kind of struggle. . . . The slogan of 'organic unity' between the women's and the national movement was fundamental in legitimating women's political activism in the '60s and '70s" but then she adds, "it also repressed consciousness of their situation and history as women" (Sayigh 1987, 10).

3. Even Jean Genet, not noted for his interest in women, praised Palestinian women's political effectiveness in his posthumously published Prisoner of Love (Genet 1992, 3-4).

4. Sayigh discusses the lack of systematic documentation of women's activities and particularly of lack of attention to any such records as might exist (Sayigh 1987, 10).

5. Terry Atwan puts the number of women jailed during the Intifada at 1,500 ("Life Is Struggle Inside and Outside the Green Line," in Palestinian Women: Identity and Experience , ed. Ebba Augustin [London: Zed Press, 1993], 57). Ahmad Dahbur wrote a poem entitled "You" in 1977 where he also refers to the Intifada: "For out people in the occupied territories . . . and for their great intifada/I remember the stone which my mother threw during the latest demonstration."

6. Among the names of women mentioned to me during a visit to the West Bank in the summer of 1991 are Hanan Awwad (poetry), Halima Jauhar (short stories), Basima Hallawa (short story), Nahida Nazzal (memoirs from prison), Samia al-Khalili (poetry), Khaula 'Uwayda al-Labadi (short story), Dima Samman (novel), Samira al-Sharabati (poetry; Hadi Daniel criticized for her not being political enough and for copying Nizar Qabbani). In Israel, Siham Dawud and Muna Abu 'Id (poetry).

7. Discussing a conference on the Intifada and women's issues in Jerusalem in December 1990, Basem Tawfeeq anticipates Rita Giacaman's fears. He writes that though the Intifada's first six months "witnessed a breaking of class, gender, religion and age barriers . . . the second phase returned women to their previous traditional roles. . . . Females became 'marginalized, then the Intifada set the stage' for a regression in women's rights . . . the nationalist leadership (a woman in the audience volunteered) use us as a media front" (Tawfeeq 1990, 8).

8. "Interview of the Month" between Farah and the poet Mahmud Darwish in Al-Jadid , April-May 1962.

9. Women writers like Samira 'Azzam, who left in 1948, wrote politically throughout. In "On the Road to Solomon's Pools," 'Azzam writes of the emasculation of Palestinian society. During an attack, he takes his family away from the village. He alone holds the baby until it is killed in his arms. He deliberately loses his wife in the crowd of refugees so as to be able to bury the son himself and alone, giving the mother no part in the family tragedy even when her child dies (story included in Cooke and Rustomji-Kerns 1994, 18-22).

10. Other Palestinian women writers' works also were introduced by men: e.g., Samih al-Qasim introduced Fadwa Tuqan's A Mountainous Journey; Samih Semah introduced Siham Dawud's anthology And So, I Sing (1979). A committee of three men--Muhammad Sulaiman, Mundhir Amir, and Samih Sammara--chose Dawud's poems from 1973 volumes of Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad and she learned of the anthology after it was published.

11. See negative examples in "The Jailhouse" and "The Eldest Son" (Farah 1954, 71-81; 110-21). In "The Café Wise Man," another story from the collection, the waiter Hasan is fired after a rich client he accuses of not paying his bill accuses him of theft. The café wise man gives Hasan the half guinea the rich man claims to have paid with instructions to tell the owner that he had just found it under the table. The owner warns Hasan that ''in future he should keep his eyes open to see the coins that were paid him." Hasan bites his tongue: "Can people only believe us if we are rich and wear elegant suits?'' When Hasan tries to repay the wise man, the latter refuses despite his own need. Even when the rich man is exposed for gambling with his workers' wages, Hasan can do nothing. The story concludes wistfully: whenever an elegant suit enters the café, Hasan avoids serving its owner (50-58).

12. In "Regret," yet another story from the 1954 collection, Farah mocks the affectation of the use of French names and the interjection of foreign words like manicure and tennis into Arabic speech (40, 41). This kind of criticism was not new. Men like Iskandir Khuri al-Baytjalli had been saying the same things since the 1920s (see Peled 1988, 184).

13. We can read of the very same debauchery in the pre-1948 "Be Kind to the Children" (Farah 1954, 50-51).

14. For example, Hana Ibrahim's "The Tenth Anniversary Celebration" (1958) and "Infiltrators" (late 1950s); and Ghassan Kanafani's "Return to Haifa (1969).

15. Somekh divides the Palestinian depiction of Jews into three types: "The first (and the least frequent) kind is a description of Jews, in isolation, with no connection to the fate of the Arab population. . . . The second theme . . . is that in which contemporary Jewish society appears as opposed to Arab society, in confrontation or by comparison. Arab society is described as still backward, lagging behind the modern world, whereas Jewish society is shown as dynamic. . . . The third kind, and the most important: stories describing the bitter fate of the Arab population in Israel, while at the same time reflecting the partial or complete identification of Jewish individuals, simple people or intellectuals, with the sufferings of the Arabs. It should be noted that such stories . . . were generally written by Communist authors" (Somekh 1989, 116-17).

A striking example of a Palestinian writing about an Israeli is the poet Mahmud Darwish, who composed verses to Rita, his childhood friend and later lover whom the 1967 war tore from him for military service. 'Ab-dallah al-Shahham wonders why Darwish should write such poetry and surmises that Darwish may have wanted to prove that "he was more of a humanitarian than all of them because he enjoyed broader horizons, he was prepared for a dialogue with his enemy." He quotes the poet as having said: "I do not hate the Jews [but rather Zionism, which] is based on violence and militarism. . . . The more Rita is in love, the more she relinquishes Zionism" (al-Shahham 1988, 28-35).

16. Ibn Khaldun writes that some readers interpreted this story to advocate passivity and a dangerous acceptance of injustice and pain (editorial in Al-Jadid , April 1957, 22).

17. For sumud , says Jean Makdisi, "there is no single English sound-and-sense equivalent that I know of; rather it would have to be rendered by tapping the thesaurus' rich repository--tenacity, steadfastness, resolution, endurance, indomitability--all these words together, with their overlapping shades of meaning, give a sense of that noble word, assoumoud " (Makdisi 1990, 175).

18. The 1955 January issue of Al-Jadid published an editorial that demanded rights for women "so that they may fight side by side with men to destroy the chains of oppression" (6).

In a report presented at the symposium on the status of Israeli Arab women in Haifa on 7 March 1982, Miriam Mari distinguishes three stages in women's growing feminist consciousness (though she does not so identify it): (1) 1948-56, "when compulsory education laws brought many Arab girls into the schools"; (2) 1956-67, "when more Arab women began to work outside the villages, and, in some cases, came under the progressive influence of Mapam and the kibbutzim"; (3) post-1967 economic and academic opportunities (quoted in Tessler 1982, 6).

19. Hana Ibrahim's story "Rebel" ( Al-Jadid , February 1956) tells the story of a blind girl who uses her miraculously regained sight to escape from everyone she knew, who persecuted her because of her sex and handicap.

20. While I was in the West Bank during the summer of 1991, I was given copies of stories by women that the Israeli censors had banned. They include Hanin 'Adnan Hindiya's "Al-janna al-da'i'a" and Khaula 'Uwayda al-Labadi's "Al-nabadat al-khalida."

21. In 1991 Najwa Qa'war Farah, who is now based in Amman, published a collection of short stories entitled Intifadat al-'asafir that openly indicts the Israeli occupation. Most of her protagonists are men who are trying to get back to the homeland to see family or to fight in the resistance. Farah is uncompromising about the evil of collaborators, as in "Memoir of an Ex-convict."

22. Khalifa tells of the difficulties she encountered trying to publish Al-subar (translated into English as Wild Thorns ). First she tried two publishers in Beirut, one Lebanese and the other Palestinian. Both ultimately felt it was too dangerous to publish. Then she took the manuscript to Cairo but found the publisher who was interested in it too insistent on changing the language, particularly the Palestinian colloquialisms. Upon her return to the West Bank, she was offered a contract by a joint Israeli-French publishing house. In 1976 the book came out simultaneously in Arabic, Hebrew, and French (Khalifa 1989).

23. Abu Hiyad in Muhammad Ayyub's Al-kaff tunatihu al-makhraz (Amman, 1987) says, "Where does the sumud money go? Who is the beneficiary? Do the poor get anything? The rich are steadfastly holding on to their wealth. They are the ones whose pockets are big enough to contain the sumud money."

24. Khalifa wrote Sunflower after having conducted one-to five-hour-long interviews with over fifty educated men (Khalifa 1989).

25. Khalifa repeats this plea almost verbatim in her next novel, Memoirs , 96.

26. For single women, according to Suha Sabbagh, "Since 1967, female employment has increased from 8.4% to 24.8% in 1980 . . . women who suddenly found themselves single heads of households were chastised by other women for departing from traditional modes of behavior by virtue of their new-found responsibility" (Sabbagh 1989, 75). A couple of Palestinian women whom Shaaban interviewed on women's independence said, "Arab societies under Israeli occupation preserve both the bad and the good for fear of losing their identity . . . sexually liberated women could in an instant turn into prostitutes in men's eyes; their sexuality remains a potential source of shame and social disgrace and it is still the most accessible means men have of subjugating them" (Shaaban 1988, 140, 162).

27. "Collaborators with the occupation were encircled and gradually rendered ineffective, as the entire mass of people under occupation came together in a block that opposed occupation" (Said 1989, 37).

28. Khalifa wrote Memoirs within six months, immediately upon completing Sunflower in 1979 but published the novel only six years later, on the eve of the Intifada (interview, Nablus, 29 May 1991).

29. Snitow writes: "The urgent contradiction women constantly experience between the pressure to be a woman and the pressure not to be one will change only through a historical process; it cannot be dissolved through thought alone. . . . The category woman is a fiction; then, post-structuralism suggests ways in which human beings live by fictions; then, in its turn, activism requires of feminists that we elaborate the fiction woman as if she were not a provisional invention at all but a person we know well, one in need of obvious rights and powers. Activism and theory weave together here, working on what remains the same basic cloth, the stuff of feminism" (Snitow 1989, 46-47).

30. When 'Afaf is accused of being from the oppressors' class, she retorts: "The oppressors' class has oppressed me" (Khalifa 1986, 51).

31. For a discussion of the constructive role of abortion in war, see the editors' introductory essay in Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier 1989, 9-24.

32. "My silence under such circumstances would drive him crazy and make him wish to destroy" (Khalifa 1986, 78-79). After Fadwa Tuqan tells her mother about her imagined adventures, she is warned that she may be going crazy. Thereafter, Fadwa keeps her world to herself and continues to escape there for the rest of her life (Tuqan 1990 [1984], 58-59, 116). In Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra , the protagonist's behavior and others' reactions to her are identical. Zahra also seeks refuge in the bathroom when others press in too closely.

33. In his review of the book in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Safir , 26 February 1991, Nadim Tawfiq Jarjura claimed that Bab al-Saha is a search for the answer to the question, who is allowed to kill? He sees the novel as Khalifa's attempt to "pierce the barrier between literature and reality. . . . As though literature has become necessary self-criticism." It was also a challenge to the author to see if "fiction could render the truth of what was happening in Palestinian society?" He quotes Khalifa as having said that the Intifada, unlike most experiences that need time for their articulation, had to be recorded at once. She had decided to focus on one aspect: the collaborators and their executions.

34. When 'Afaf's father discovers her in a cave with some young men preparing explosives, he is torn between shock at the flounting of social imperatives and pride in his daughter's nationalism: "But the family's honor! So he went from area to area and from café to café, saying, 'My daughter is honorable. My daughter is clean. My daughter is doing what men do.' The story got around until the governor heard about it and they arrested the revolutionaries and they beat one of them who could not stand it and he confessed from the first blow, another from the second blow" (Khalifa 1986, 137; cf. 6, 56).

35. Khalifa told me that Husam represents the Palestinian leadership and that she had "wounded him, crippled him so that all the lessons would pass in front of him consciously and unconsciously. Although he had at first advised Nuzha to go to the United States, by the time he has been with her for an extended period he advises her to stay. His previous rejection has turned into acceptance as he synthesized all these lessons and became wiser" (interview, Nablus, 29 May 1991).

36. Khalifa called Ahmad "a victim of the nationalist movement that cannot reeducate its cadre" (interview, Nablus, 29 May 1991).

37. Parallels from Djebar's revisionist Algerian text: "Abdelkader [narrator's and martyr's elder brother] and the partisans began to upbraid me: 'Your brother Ahmed died a martyr! We shall be happy to enjoy a similar end" (Djebar 1993, 130).

Abu Samra writes self-evidently of these ululations that women emit at a martyr's funeral. One woman refused to cry at her son's funeral, saying "Instead of weeping today everyone should ululate because today is Taysir's wedding" (Abu Samra 1989, 29). This transformation of a martyr's funeral into a wedding is repeated by other mothers. One said that she felt that "This wedding-funeral is better than the wedding of his marriage" (30). One martyr before dying had said to his mother: ''We must sacrifice ourselves because Palestine is a bride with a very expensive dowry. How can we get her without paying the price?" (33).

38. In Al-mutarada (the pursued), Raja' Abu Ghazzala creates women who are frustrated by the men in their lives. Particularly striking is the short story "The Mad Woman's Tree." Two women meet after fifteen years' separation and review what they have accomplished during the intervening years. One of them remembers that she had wanted to "become a psychiatrist so as to be able to treat the boys of the alley for their superiority complex, their machismo and their aggression against the girls." Her companion reproaches her for not executing her plan, because all the men she knew needed help; they were "sick with love of power and tyranny. . . . We don't need one woman psychiatrist, we need an army" (Abu Ghazzala 1988, 33, 41). She denounces Anisa for allowing herself to become a pawn between her father and her husband. Anisa knows that this is true, but all she can do is paint violent paintings that no one understands. What is the use of art if it is directed at a society that is not ready to understand its message?

39. In her August 1991 letter, Khalifa writes, "the act of burning the flag of occupation is not an act of killing or violence, is it? It is a symbol of opposing oppression, an act of resistance, no? At least, this is how I think about it as a Palestinian citizen, even though I am a woman and a feminist."

40. According to Giacaman, "Women's traditional roles as homemakers are now imbued with new significance, as Palestinian society moves towards self-reliance through small-scale food production in order to cut dependency on imports" (Giacaman 1988b, 1).

41. "It is only in writing and by writing that the writer can be said to exist at all. The 'writer' is what exists in the interior of the activity of 'writing' . . . actions and their effects are conceived to be simultaneous; past and present are integrated rather than disrupted, and the subject and object of the action are in some way conflated" (White 1992, 179-87).