Her name was Rifqa Al-Kurd. She was older than Israel itself.
Born in Haifa in 1917, she lived through four empires—Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli. She saw two world wars, the Nakba, and the Naksa. She lived long enough to watch the so-called “Deal of the Century” unfold on the same land she had spent her entire life defending. In 1948, when Zionist militias invaded Haifa, Rifqa fled with her family. She left her home clean, thinking she would return in a few days. She never did. Like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, she became a refugee overnight. Years later, in 1956, she was among the families who settled in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, in homes built for displaced Palestinians by the Jordanian government and UNRWA. They were told that after three years, they would officially become owners. They kept their end of the promise. History did not. After 1967 the land that had sheltered her was occupied. Decades of legal maneuvers followed. Settler groups began laying claim to parcels of Sheikh Jarrah, using a 1970 Israeli law that lets Jewish claimants reclaim property allegedly owned before 1948 — a law that does not offer the same to Palestinians. Israeli courts had ruled for settlers, and eviction orders and seizures followed. In 2009, a group of settlers, backed by armed guards, moved into part of Rifqa’s home. They covered windows with cardboard and plexiglass so the family could not see what was happening inside their own house. They installed cameras. They prayed, danced, cursed. They beat her 50-year-old daughter, knowing she had a weak heart. They claimed divine ownership of her walls. And still, Rifqa refused to leave. She built a tent in her yard—a place where journalists, activists, and solidarity groups gathered. Sheikh Jarrah became a symbol because she made it one. When tourists and well-meaning visitors came, she met them as a political subject. “Are you American?” she would ask. “We don’t want your sympathy. We want your action.” That line — simple, sharp — told you everything you needed to know about the woman inside that house. She wasn’t a humanitarian case. She was a fighter. A woman who stood her ground not with weapons, but with truth that cut sharper than any blade. Even in her nineties, she joined protests, treated the tear-gassed with yogurt and onions, and shouted at soldiers half her age. She lived under occupation for most of her life, but never under submission. “I will only agree to leave Sheikh Jarrah to go back to my Haifa house that I was forced to flee in 1948,” she said once, and meant every word. When she passed away in 2020 at the age of 103, Palestinians called her the "Jasmine tree" of Jerusalem. Because even in her final years—frail, sometimes forgetting names—she remembered the details of the Nakba. The faces. The fields. The theft. She never got to see justice. But she never stopped demanding it. Her name was Rifqa Al-Kurd. And she stood a hundred years tall.
