A WHITE LIE.

A WHITE LIE

EDITED BY BARBARA BILL AND

GHADA AGEEL

University of Alberta Press

REVIEW BY NUZHAT ABBAS

A White Lie is the first volume in Barbara Bill and Ghada Ageel's seven-part oral history series, Women's Voices from Gaza, created to document women's lives, before, during and after the 1948 Naqba or "catastrophe"--which Salman Abu Sitta, in his moving foreword, describes as "the largest, longest, continuous ethnic cleansing operation in the history of Palestine " Citing Darwish's call for the "memories of memory," Bill and Ageel's comprehensive introduction to Palestine's history builds upon Rosemary Sayigh and Nahla Abdo's critical work in oral history to "re-orient the story of Palestine by restoring it to its original narrator: the Palestinian people."

Animated by Madeeha Hafez Albatta's energetic voice, A White Lie explores her eventful life with insight, wit, grief and restraint Born into a respected, scholarly family in Khan Yunis, Albatta lost her mother at an early age. "From that day, I stopped being a child and became responsible for the family. " Despite this loss, she tells incredibly funny stories about her stubborn mischievousness as a child, culminating in the clever "white lie" of the title, which allowed her to achieve her dream of education within the conservative context of 1930's Gaza "The night before I was to leave was the most beautiful night of my life...even more beautiful than my wedding night. "

Returning to Khan Yunis to become one of its youngest teachers, Albatta became Gaza's youngest headmistress in 1946. During the Naqba, as Indigenous Palestinians fled to Gaza to escape Israeli massacres and the mass destruction of their villages, she organized refugee shelters and schools for girls that became the basis for an education program now run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Personal memories of domestic joy intersect with her witnessing and acute analysis of brutal political events. Though she left teaching to marry Ibrahim Abu Sitta, and raised nine children with him, she continued, throughout her life, to work with women and refugees in Gaza. In one of the book's most painful passages, an event that haunts her life, she describes how she begged her husband for a trip to Egypt in 1955, only to hear, from afar, news of Israel's massacre of young men in Khan Yunis, including the murders of her beloved brothers, witnessed by her young son "I was four months pregnant with twins," she recalls, "and suddenly the floor was full of blood. I had miscarried."

After Israel's bombings in the Gaza Strip in May 2021, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that 9 in 10 children in Gaza, many of them orphaned, suffer from PTSD, and that women pregnant during the time of attack can expect to suffer complications To read Albatta's life story, in this moment, is to understand not only the long arc of Israeli apartheid and settler-colonial violence, but also to celebrate, through their own voices, the qualities of Sumud (steadfastness), intelligence, wit and vitality that continue to animate Palestinian women's resistance