The voice comes on the phone: “How about you to accompany me to Sidon tomorrow? I’m going to visit the kids there.” The schedule does not allow the invitation to be accepted, but the offer does not pass through... Samira Khoury has left a trace that will strengthen after the meeting and we will find out that she used to leave him wherever she went.
The topic of defending women has rarely been raised without the proverb “Si Al-Sayed”, and his bad treatment of them. However, the hero of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz is not the only model for men. Few people, for example, come to mention "wrinkle", one of the characters of the "daq alley", and the humiliating way his wife, Hosniah Al-Franah treated him just because she was the one who spends on the house.
Samira Khoury is one of those few. She remembers Si Al-Sayed as she remembers the “fly”, and she remembers leading women in defending the right demands of women, as well as others who practice extreme behavior that does not serve the cause, to conclude after many years of public work to say that most of the problems of repression and violence are related to two things: the economic situation and culture.
It is this critical attitude of the feminist movement that has been active in the 1960s, which has long rejected Khoury to turn down the inclusions in feminist associations and unions that arose then. She says the feminist movement at the time “was a bigoted in a way that’s not what I didn’t accept.” A phrase that was echoed by a woman named Samiha Khalil, who works at the Family Resuscitation Association in the Al-Bireh area in Palestine, remembers: "O aunt, solve them for the equals, by divorced their marriage." In her opinion, the feminist movement was a "wrrogant",


so she was not enthusiastic to participate despite admitting that the woman was really stifest and oppressed.
Khoury did not need to justify her non-membership of those associations, she has already been active in public work since she was 17. But, as the years and tragedies passed as well, and because “the more I drumped one of them, I was tying them, as my mother would tell me,” Khoury bowed ten years ago to Ms. Anissa Al-Najjar’s request and joined the “Lebanese Committee for Peace and Freedom,” which forms the Lebanese branch of the oldest women’s organization in the world founded in 1915 in Geneva, the International Feminist League for Peace and Freedom.
Khoury today headed the Lebanese branch of the organization, which seeks peace "based on justice," as she is keen to say. She is also the vice president of the International Feminist League, and is a founding member of the "Arab Women's Solidarity" association, and was a volunteer in the "House of Children of Res Resilience", "Popular Advers" and others... Yet she reiterates that she is an outsider in the world of women, describing her work in the League as a politician: “I wasconvinced through my experience, and with the succession of tran of
tragedies, that the empty chair has no sound. So from my position I try to get my voice and my case. We must go and raise the voice provided that one of us does not give up his convictions.” Khoury says that even though she has been raising her voice for a long time. One of the stations he mentions dates back to 1974. The Palestinian, who was born in Gaza, was exposed that year at UNESCO in Paris, in her capacity as the representative of the Higher Council for Education and Culture of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel's educational violations in occupied Palestine. At the same time, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat used to say at the United Nations his famous sentence: “Do not drop the olive branch from my hand.” Khoury does not very much welcome talking about her political experience, which also started early, but mentions that she was the only woman in the Palestinian delegation to Paris, and also the only woman in the Supreme Council within the organization.
Khoury’s choice of this task comes naturally, as it forms part of her career that began in the mid- 1960s, but also before. During her class at AUC, she joined the Social Resuscitation Club and was participating in literacy courses for camp women. From that stage, Khoury remembers the Palestinian reading book of its author Khalil Sakakini, then known among Palestinians as Ras Ross, which appears on the front page of the book. Khoury believes that he is the best book: “It can be said that until today no book has been issued at its level, in addition to that we were keen to know the book itself, which was used in Palestine.”
After obtaining a degree in Arabic literature and education, Khoury worked at UNRWA professor training institutes, which provided her with the opportunity to enter the occupied Palestinian territories. «I was the first Arab person to enter Gaza after the 1967 occupation.» She also visited all UNRWA schools in all asylum camps in the Arab world: “It was a rich experience for me even if I was Palestinian and I know the suffering, this experience enriched me a lot from within.”



Khoury continued to move between one country and another, and between one camp and another until an Israeli decision was issued to prevent her from entering Palestine in 1976, three years later, and for reasons that she preferred not to publish it, she resigned from her job and returned to the American University to learn the subject of "civilizational studies". It can only compare the university as a student knew it, and the university today: “In the 1960s, Beirut was the first spark for everything related to the Arab world. Today, unfortunately, I am forced to say that we are far behind that stage in terms of awareness, values and the whole cultural system after the values of the market dominated everything.”
At the beginning of 2000, Khoury was excited to participate in the establishment of an association called the "Arab Women's Solidarity Association" aimed at empowering women and children. This idea coincided with the liberation of the South, which prompted the institutions to choose the "Bent Jbeil Official Mixed Preparatory School" for their modest start, so they worked to feed its library. But the school was destroyed in 2006, so the association focused its activity in Saida where it established an awareness center for children and their mothers “to protect children who are threatened by becoming street children.
Khoury's old experience with children, dates back to her years of work in the Palestine Liberation Organization, where she accompanied the stage of establishing kindergartens and had an experience she described as wonderful with them, some of which she returned and recorded through stories issued in 2001 by the Gardens House. From these publications, "How do we protect our house?", "The red butterfly" and "Merj's Birthday", which did not receive any of its profits, but donated them, as usual, to associations that need it.
Khoury's old experience with children, dates back to her years of work in the Palestine Liberation Organization, where she accompanied the stage of establishing kindergartens and had an experience she described as wonderful with them, some of which she returned and recorded through stories issued in 2001 by the Gardens House. From these publications, "How do we protect our house?", "The red butterfly" and "Merj's Birthday", which did not receive any of its profits, but donated them, as usual, to associations that need it.
Khoury's old experience with children, dates back to her years of work in the Palestine Liberation Organization, where she accompanied the stage of establishing kindergartens and had an experience she described as wonderful with them, some of which she returned and recorded through stories issued in 2001 by the Gardens House. From these publications, "How do we protect our house?", "The red butterfly" and "Merj's Birthday", which did not receive any of its profits, but donated them, as usual, to associations that need it.
Each ritual in his relationship with the cafe. This is what Samira Khoury says, which is remarkable by our recording notes on the "Klinks" restaurant where the dialogue took place. You sadly remember that the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani was, whenever he entered a cafe, he pulled a box of sulphur and painted faces on it, he often gifted it and signed to his councils, and he jokedly says: “This is the face of Kanafani.

This is computer translated from the original Arabic article https://al-akhbar.com/Archive_Research/141323