Terrorist who dreamed of attack for years
FATIMA BERNAWI was just 28 when she planted a bomb at a cinema in Jerusalem – a moment she said she had dreamed about all her life.
Along with another woman, she visited the Zion Cinema and left behind her handbag containing the device.
thankfully, it was discovered by an American tourist - who alerted an usher that the two women had left behind their bag.
they opened it and found the ticking bomb, and managed to clear the cinema before it exploded at the entrance.
But Bernawi said her mission in October 1967 was not a failure – because it spread fear throughout the world.
‘every woman who carries a bag needs to be checked before she enters the supermarket, any place, cinemas and pharmacies... I don’t define that as a failure,’ she said in 2015, when she received the Star of honour – the highest military decoration awarded by the Palestinian Authority.
It was reported that she was honoured for her ‘outstanding sacrifice and courage’ against ‘the enemy’ and for ‘her pioneering role in the struggle, her sacrifice for her homeland and her people, and its revolution, and her willingness to give from the beginning until now’.
Born in Jerusalem of Nigerian descent, her mother and siblings fled their home for a refugee camp in Jordan in 1948.
But she said she smuggled herself back to live with her father when she was just nine. Aged 17, she started work as a nurse for the Arab- American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia during the mid-1950s, when she spoke of the racism she encountered because she was a black Palestinian and was not allowed to give injections.
She eventually returned to the West Bank and became the first female Palestinian guerrilla fighter and the first woman to join the armed struggle against Israel.
She was arrested by Israeli soldiers after the failed bomb plot, which was carried out in protest at a film celebrating the Six-Day War between Israel and Palestine, and sentenced to life imprisonment – becoming the first female Palestinian political prisoner.
But she was released a decade later as part of a prisoner swap, and returned to the Palestinian nationalist political party fatah, becoming its highest ranking woman in its militia.
She died in Amman in 2016 and is remembered at the Yasser Arafat Museum in ramallah, where a plaque reads: ‘fatima Bernawi was the first female Palestinian political prisoner’.
It was reported that Arafat, the former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, held her in such high regard he said if he was to marry anyone, it would be her. he eventually married wife Suha in 1990 when he was 61.