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Zulaykha al-Shihabi

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 8/10/2026

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On Feb. 26, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video on Truth Social, the platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group. The 34-second video, accompanied by AI-generated dance music, opens on a generated video of a child and an adult man kneeling in rubble. A masked soldier with a gun stands over them. More generated video of men and women picking through debris between bombed-out buildings follows. Text over them reads, “Gaza 2025,” then “What’s next?”

What’s next is computer-generated young children running barefoot through videos of sleek sports cars driving down restored streets and a luxurious beach resort where trillionaire Elon Musk enjoys a bread dish. A lone child stands in the street holding a golden balloon of the president’s head. Donald Trump dances with a scantily clad performer in a night club and barefoot children hop and leap on a beach to catch dollar bills dropping from the sky. Another lone child, this time with a red balloon, is among the crowds walking toward a golden marquee illuminated with the words “Trump Gaza.” A towering golden statue of the president stands in the middle of a street before we see a generated video of, presumably, a gift shop where visitors can buy a replica of a seated golden Trump.

In generated flesh-and-blood Donald Trump then sits with the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu on beach chairs by a resort’s blurry beach-becoming-swimming pool. The men, shirtless and in bathing suits, enjoy beers by another sign reading “Trump Gaza.”

In the final image, a child carrying a heart-shaped balloon, walks alone toward a crowd in formal wear gathering by archway lit in gold. In huge letters the electric sign on the arch reads, “TRUMP,” and in smaller letters beneath it, “GAZA.”

In the opening pages of One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, author Omar El Akkad describes a half dozen men carrying a wounded child, “a girl of nine or ten,” on a stretcher out of the wreckage of “something cavernous, something that used to be a home. ... The men who carry the stretcher move with urgency, as if the doing of care, of gentleness, can undo what has happened to this girl, to this place, to the bodies yet to be dug from beneath the rubble.”

Omar, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist, reckons with the utility of language in the following paragraphs, how English translations of Arabic phrases rarely capture the depth understood by those who grew up with them. “The girl on the stretcher believes she has ended. A man says to her: Inti zay el amar. You are like the moon. Again, translation fails. There is no English equivalent to the lineage of this phrase, a lineage that runs through generations of old movies and love songs and family gatherings. Listen to the sly setting joy and pleading, raw pleading that carries the words as this man tells the girl who lived when so many others died that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of the world.”

Omar highlights why there’s a fixation on children in mass casualty events such as these. “[W]hen we name the dead, when we name these dead in particular, it is customary to note the number of children obliterated, because the men are assumed to be terrorists and the women might be terrorists or at least go on to create them.”

Yet, for as high the death toll among children, the adults killed number higher, leaving children without caretakers, without homes, without food. “The medics,” Omar notes, “are forced to create a new acronym for them. WCNSF—Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.”

Even the AI, with its algorithmic and human-prompted crassness generating a video of President Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East,” couldn’t ignore one gutting reality of Gaza as it has been allowed to become today: Children alone, with no one left to care for them. The fantasy of the images comes in the running on healthy legs and grasping with healthy arms. In December of 2025, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency reported that Gaza now “hosts the largest group of child amputees in modern history.”

Zulaykha al-Shahabi, whose first name is sometimes spelled Zulaija or Zlikha, was born in Jerusalem in 1903 to mother Zaynab al-Muhtadi and father Ishaq ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Shihabi. The youngest of the couple’s six children, Zulaykha had two older brothers—Subhi and Jamil—and two older sisters—Rasmiyya and Rifqa.

Father Ishaq, unlike many men of his era, believed his daughters should be as well-educated as his sons. In this pursuit, the Muslim Zulaykha attended the Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic institution. “Because it was well known for its academic excellence, it drew students from all over Palestine and from neighbouring Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, and from the ranks of Mandate British officials,” wrote Mona Hajjar Halaby for the Institute of Palestine Studies.

Unlike Samira Azzam who grew up in Mandatory Palestine, Zulaykha was 20 years old when Britain formalized their rule in 1923 and the work began to make the area a Jewish homeland. Her family had deep roots in Jerusalem and she knew its history well, which made her deeply invested in Palestinian self-determination. She would share with her classmates the stories she heard from her parents.

In the years prior to the British Mandate, Jewish immigrants frequently relocated to Palestine to live, often settling in Jerusalem. An estimated 4 percent of the Palestinian population was Jewish in the days of Ottoman rule (1516-1917). “At the start of World War I, Palestine was home to 60,000 Jews, of which 39,000 had Ottoman citizenship, compared to more than 700,000 Ottomans who were Muslim or Christian,” according to the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, using demographic studies conducted by Ottoman Empire historian and demographer Justin A. McCarthy. Those numbers shifted dramatically during the years of Mandatory Palestine with an influx of an additional 250,000 Jewish immigrants between 1929 and 1939. Of these, 230,000 would settle permanently.

Such a sudden and intense change in a nation’s population will inevitably create tensions over housing, jobs, and resources. This tension was made worse by the explicit stated goal of replacing the Arab and Muslim inhabitants with Jewish ones.

To call this “colonizing” now is controversial, but in Zulaykha’s time that was the common understanding of the project, locally and globally. Before Palestine was chosen, other areas were considered for settlement, including Argentina in South America and Angola in South Africa. Newspapers in 1912 printed headlines like “Zionists to Colonize Angola.” In 1935, the Buffalo Jewish Review reported “some highlights of the World Zionist Congress at Lucerne” and listed a series of budgeting items. “…the congress adopted a budget for the Zionist Organization in 1936. The budget aggregates $1,940,000 and includes among its main items the following: $150,00[0] for the settlement of German Jews in Palestine, $372,000 for general colonizing work, $275,000 for the immigration department of the World Zionist Organization, and $50,000 for the development of training farms for prospective young immigrant workers in the various countries of Europe.”

In 1896, Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern Zionism, wrote in The Jewish State, “Here two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentine. In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.” Notably, the support of Britain and later the United States lent the project that needed “sovereignty.”

Zulaykha spoke publicly, nationally and internationally, in support of Palestine throughout her life.

The man who became a prominent Zionist leader after Theodor Herzl’s death, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, beneath a header reading, “Colonisation of Palestine,” made his case to “moderate Zionists” in 1925, cautioning them that it was unlikely that Arabs could be persuaded, paid, or bribed to sell their homeland.

“We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies. ... It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously... Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.”

The primary criticism in Zulaykha’s time was the same as it is today: That the project is a colonizing one, not that the colonizers are Jewish.

As Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in an essay titled, “Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish,” Palestinians have, by and large, been adept and careful about not leaning into antisemitic hatred. Mohammed recounted how, from a young age, he learned about antisemitic stereotypes and policed his language to avoid them. “The Palestinian People have consistently made it crystal clear that our enemy is the colonialist and racist ideology of Zionism, not Jews. Our capacity to produce such distinction is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism.”

Like Samira and Hind Taher al-Husseini, her family’s status and social class protected Zulaykha from much of the unrest. Despite this distance, she participated in protests from the very first days of the British Mandate. Some accounts attest that she was forming women’s groups and voicing her objections as young as 18 years old.

Tensions erupted in violence in August of 1929. As with many events in this region, historians disagree on the catalyst. Some say it was the result of an Arab religious leader stoking fears of a Jewish takeover. Others say it was sparked by a Zionist demonstration at the Western Wall, also called the Wailing Wall or Buraq Wall, a location of religious significance to both Jews and Muslims. The event itself, likewise, goes by many names: 1929 Palestine Riots, al-Buraq Uprising or Disturbances, or the Western Wall Riots.

“Erupting in Jerusalem, they quickly spread to Hebron and Safad. In less than a week—from 23 to 29 August—the official casualty counts listed 133 Jews killed and 339 wounded, mainly by Arab rioters, and 116 Arabs killed and 232 wounded, mainly by British security forces,” reported historian Alex Winder in The ‘Western Wall’ Riots of 1929: Religious Boundaries and Communal Violence. “The unprecedented violence spawned three commissions of inquiry, forced the British Mandate authorities to reevaluate and temporarily suspend their policies, and revealed as never before the explosive depths of the emerging conflict.”

The women’s delegation at the home of the British High Commissioner in 1929. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division, Washington, D.C.

After the violence ceased, Zulaykha and the newly formed Arab Women’s Executive Committee coordinated the attendance of a supportive audience for the subsequent trials and visited prisons to offer solidarity to the detained Palestinians.

Zulaykha was one of the organizers of the first Palestine Arab Women’s Congress, an event held on Oct. 26, 1929, and attended by as many as 300 Palestinian women. Directly following the meeting, the attendees and others formed “a silent convoy of cars, which passed through the city of Jerusalem, and ended with a speech in front of the High Commissioner's headquarters,” according to the Palestinian Museum in an essay titled “A purse, a song, and a gun.” They came to the High Commissioner, a British politician, with a list of demands, all centered upon expanded rights for women and independence for Palestine.

These two aims—an independent nation and women’s rights—were frustratingly at odds, as the Palestinian Museum noted. “This feminist movement did not emerge by happenstance. The clash with the British colonists led to the emergence of the Palestinian national movement, in which the question of identity was of primary importance. This also put the feminist movement in conflict with its national and social identity, and pushed it to search for its own political orientation and national discourse.” Recall that Zulaykha’s father was unusual in wanting to educate his daughters. As a nation struggled to define itself and organize, many found themselves disagreeing on what should be preserved and what should be rebuilt from the rubble of the British Mandate.

Ellen L. Fleischmann wrote in “The Emergence of the Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1929-39” of the sophistication of the Arab feminists’ strategies as they often used sexism—benevolent or otherwise—in their favor.

“Women's frequent participation in demonstrations signified their willingness to engage in ‘unladylike’ and even violent behavior, thereby defying cultural norms that prescribed limited public visibility of women. In mixed demonstrations, the women marched surrounded by men, confounding the British practice of separating the sexes during demonstrations so as to deal with the men by force while avoiding physical harm to the women. The police were well aware of the demonstrators' tactical intentions, and following the 1933 demonstrations police depositions complained that ‘the women are brought into the plan of campaign solely for the purpose of embarrassing the Police.’ And indeed, during those demonstrations the government's worst fears were realized: the British were perceived as attacking defenseless women, provoking male outrage and upsetting ‘tradition.’”

When the Egyptian Feminist Union held the Eastern Women’s Conference for the Defense of Palestine in October 1938, Zulaykha was one of 27 Palestinian women who traveled to Cairo to speak as representatives of the Arab Women’s Society of Jerusalem. “The fact that the largest organized gathering of Arab women in Egypt occurred on the occasion of the defense of Palestine from the British mandate and the Zionist incursion exemplifies the inherent connection between the development of Arab feminism, as a movement, and anti-colonial struggle,” wrote Mariam Karim for Nasawiyyah: Arab Media History in 2025. “Non-Palestinian Arab women considered the struggles within their own countries as ‘indivisible’ from the struggle for Palestine’s liberation, an absolute and guiding principle on which Arab feminism, as a project and movement, is crystalized.”

This conference, where Zulaykha spent days conversing with like-minded and equally passionate women, invigorated her. From the Arab Women’s Society she formed the Palestinian Arab Women’s Union in Jerusalem, a name which spoke of a belief there would be a widespread Arab feminist movement with branches all across the Middle East. Now a deputy of the Palestinian delegation, she led another visit to the British high commissioner at the Government House, threatening widespread demonstrations if they went unheard and unheeded.

Here again they found their passion for the cause at odds with the culture of their countrymen.

“The High Commissioner's official papers stated that he met with a delegation of Arab women during the conference, but rejected the delegation's request to organize a demonstration,” recounted the Palestinian Museum. The Commissioner “threatened some ‘Muslim leaders’ that if they did not interfere to prevent the demonstration, their women might get beaten up by the authorities. These ‘Muslim leaders’ cooperated and changed the arrangements for the demonstration, which took the side roads to reach the al-Aqsa Mosque. This explains the reason why such a march began in silence and not through main streets ... Some men obeyed the threats of the High Commissioner and put pressure on women to change the course of the demonstration.”

Whether because of this social pressure for silence, increasing threats of arrest, or because the practical needs on the ground became so profound, much Arab feminist work after this time retreated to the home. As we saw with Hind’screation of an orphanage, Palestinian women actively responded to the desperation and starvation caused by the violence. Zulaykha also started an orphanage—the number of parentless and injured children required many of them.

Despite this shift to what could be interpreted as more “womanly work,” scholars like Ellen pointed out that politics exist in the home, too. “The gender consciousness of the movement's founders was muted, often inconsistent, and subtly subversive rather than explicitly ‘feminist’ in the contemporary sense of the term,” she wrote. “But it is important to stress that despite the charitable and socially oriented character of much of their work, the women explicitly conceived their movement in political terms... By referring consistently to themselves as the women's movement, they self consciously staked out a political position.”

The Jerusalem Story website shared the labor that Zulaykha and other Arab feminists performed in this “quiet” period. “She worked to provide shelter for orphans, for whom the [Arab Women’s] union covered the educational expenses at Dar al-Aytam al-Islamiyya. In Jericho, she founded a rehabilitation facility and a home for destitute women,” the website stated, and she “looked for ways to financially sustain the AWU and the beneficiaries beyond donations. She believed in self-sustainability. Early on, the union bought several plots of land and planted grape vines or fruit trees, and these plots were presented to families of those slain in combat so they could live off the land.” Zulaykha also “initiated programs to provide women and girls with work opportunities so that they could obtain financial independence. To that end, the union provided a variety of courses to women and girls to help them develop their skills including weaving, embroidery, and artificial flower-making.”

As the 1940s dawned, the Arab Women’s Union invited speakers, writers, and thought-leaders to “give lectures on scientific, national, and cultural issues.” Zulaykha often hosted these events in her own home.

In December of 1947, the period the Palestinians call “an-Nakbah,” “catastrophe,” began. By May of 1948, half of Palestine’s Arab population—an estimated 750,000 people—had been pushed from their homes and from the country itself as the homes and land were gifted to Jewish settlers. The State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, and quickly recognized by President Truman of the United States.

This was during the days of the United Nations Partition Plan, the structural system placed after the expiration of the British Mandate. The country of Palestine was divided up and divvied out to create distinct Arab states and Jewish states. Zulaykha’s home city of Jerusalem was designated “a corpus separatum,” administered by the United Nations and not explicitly Arab or Jewish. This meant, for the time being, Zulaykha and her family were not displaced like so many others. She continued her care work in Jerusalem, while also frequently traveling across the Jordan River to Amman, Jordan.

The Arab Women’s Union often met at Zulaykha’s home, as pictured here from an event in 1944. Zulaykha is seated on the floor on the right, wearing black and white. Photo courtesy British Mandates Jerusalemites Photo Library, Facebook page

In 1958, 55-year-old Zulaykha founded the Union of Charitable Societies of Jerusalem, “the first independent Palestinian nonprofit union for civil, charitable, and development societies,” according to The Jerusalem Story. Along with work in social welfare, poverty reduction, education, health, children and women empowerment, “[i]t seeks to help build an effective Palestinian civil society through advancing Palestinian civil work in an institutionalized and democratic manner and according to the principles of good governance and accountability.” The UCS organization continues to this day.

While her siblings married and had children, Zulaykha remained single. A niece said she “married the cause.” This was the case for many Arab feminists, whether motivated by passion or strategy: Their society was, in general, more tolerant of social and political activity from single women than from women already designated wives and mothers.

Still fueled by that widespread Arab feminist movement, Zulaykha traveled nationally and internationally to speak for Palestine, participated in numerous events and organizations to promote Palestinian liberation, and created women’s unions to include mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives in advocating for their futures. She even spoke before the United Nations.

The Egyptian Women’s Union prepared a stamp for the

The 1938 Eastern Women’s Congress for the Defense of Palestine. Photo courtesy Karim, Mariam “The 1938 Eastern Women’s Congress for the Defense of Palestine: anti-colonial genealogies of Arab feminism” Nasawiyyah: Arab Media History. May, 2025.

During the Six-Day War, also called the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, forces from Israel seized the West Bank and territory inland to Jerusalem. Zulaykha, now in her mid-60s, was promptly deported to Jordan “for her organizing demonstrations, especially those in 1968, such as the May 15 Nakba Memorial Day demonstration, and the mid-August protest demanding the release of Palestinian women political prisoners,” reported the Jerusalem Story. “One more premise for her deportation was that she had cosigned petitions sent to the United Nations and various consulates calling for the end of the Israeli rule.”

Petitions, organized by the mayor of Nablus and Arab poet Fadwa Tuqan, demanded that the deportation order be revoked. By some accounts, the pressure was international, and even came from the United Nations itself. The petitions worked. Zulaykha was returned to Jerusalem where she continued her social work and advocacy until her death on May 13, 1992. She was 89 years old.

In One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, Omar observed, “While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.”

We see this frequently in the stories of the indigenous Americans, such as Buffalo Calf Road Woman, Osh-Tisch, and the Woman Warriors of Little Bighorn. We see it even in the women who fought against the Nazis in World War II, like Eta Chajit Wrobel and the Women of the 1944 Sonderkommando Revolt at Auschwitz. All were called terrorists, radicals, and extremists by those they fought against.

Where there is resistance, women are always part of it.

Sources:

Guardian News: Donald Trump shares bizarre AI-generated video of 'Trump Gaza'

One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

UNRWA Commissioner-General On Gaza: Gaza Now Hosts the Largest Group of Child Amputees in Modern History

The Palestinian Museum: A purse, a song, and a gun: The struggle of Palestinian women in the 1920s and 1930s

Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question: Zulaykha al-Shihabi, al-Buraq/Western Wall: Palestinians Rise up in Protest Against Zionist Provocations;

Jerusalem Story: Zulaykha al-Shihabi, The Union of Charitable Societies—Jerusalem, al-Buraq Uprising

Institute for Palestine Studies: al-Buraq Disturbances, 15-29 August 1929, School Days in Mandate Jerusalem at Dames de Sion by Mona Hajjar Halaby

The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate by Justin A. McCarthy

The ‘Western Wall’ Riots of 1929: Religious Boundaries and Communal Violence by

Boston Evening Transcript: June 28, 1912