LAGOS, Nigeria – In 1967, Fatima Bernawi planted a bomb in Jerusalem’s Zion Cinema to protest an Israeli film celebrating the Six-Day War. The attack was foiled, and days later Israeli soldiers arrested her. Sentenced to life in prison, Bernawi became the first Palestinian woman to be imprisoned by Israel. But rebellion ran in her blood. Born in the city in 1939 to a Palestinian mother and a Nigerian father, she was still a child when the Nakba uprooted her in 1948, sending her and her mother to a refugee camp in Jordan before they found their way home. Her father, Mohammed, stayed behind; years earlier, he had taken up arms in the Arab Revolt, the Palestinian uprising against British rule and Zionism. Like him, Bernawi believed the struggle was nothing if not an armed one. In the late 1950s she joined Fatah in its earliest days, when the young nationalist movement still relied on guerrilla tactics, long before it became the largest faction within the PLO.
Bernawi spent 10 years behind bars before a prisoner exchange set her free – only to be exiled once again, this time in Lebanon. When the first Oslo Accords cracked the door open in 1993, she came home to the Gaza Strip and back to Fatah, eventually rising to lead the women's division of the Palestinian Police Civil Police Force as its first chief. She died in Cairo in 2022 and was buried in Gaza days later.
You might think a life that rich would have made Bernawi a household name in Nigeria, her father’s home country. It hasn’t. But the strange thing isn’t that Nigeria has forgotten her; it’s where Nigeria has landed on her fight.
