Palestinian Women

From its very beginnings in 1948, the government of the state of Israel has consistently refused to assume or even acknowledge any responsibility for the forcible expulsion of its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. Typical of its official state policy is the remark by the late ex-Prime Minister, Golda Meir who declared before Parliament: “Who are these Palestinians? It is not that we stole their lands and threw them out! They do not exist!!”

The author of this research study is a young Palestinian student newly graduated from Ben Gurion University who wrote her doctorate in Hebrew in order to make public for the first time, the intimate experiences of elderly illiterate Palestinian women who endured and survived the Nakba or catastrophe in 1948. Ever since then, all of them have been deprived of the most basic human right – the right to live safe and secure in their own home. The ordeals of these women were not confined to 1948 but have persisted unchanged down to the present day.