With great sorrow we were informed of the untimely death of Maisoon Assadi, a Palestinian author, citizen of Israel, born in Deir al-Assad in the Galilee and a resident of Haifa, who over the years was also a supporter of Socialist Struggle. Maisoon died on 29 June after a battle with a serious illness. We extend our condolences to her artist spouse Osama Masri and her two sons, Safir and Maysam.
“Oh, plane in the sky, pass regards to uncle Saleh and tell him that we miss seeing him among us”, is how Maisoon, as a child in Deir al-Assad, greeted airplanes in the sky, as she described in her 2010 story “Delivery of Hope” (شحنة من الأمل), which touched on the Palestinian refugees question. Her father explained to her how her uncle Saleh had visited Lebanon in 1948, when the borders were closed, and he, like the other refugees, was forbidden to return home at the end of the war. Years later, in the Ayn al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, children ran through alleys and called out to airplanes in the sky: “Oh, plane in the sky, pass regards to grandpa Mohammed Taha and the uncles and aunts in Deir al-Assad, and tell them we miss them”.
Historical baggage
Maisoon was born on 7 November 1963 — symbolically, the anniversary of the “October Revolution” — in Deir al-Assad, the village where Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish also grew up, after his family was uprooted from the destroyed village of Al-Birwa. Maisoon was born at the latter part of the period of military rule imposed on the Arab-Palestinian population after the ‘48 War and the Nakba, during which some 500 Arab-Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed and hundreds of thousands became refugees in the shadow of atrocities. In January this year, Maisoon published in Al-Ittihad, the newspaper of the Israeli Communist Party (ICP), where she had written since 1994, a eulogy for her uncle Ahmed Ali Taha Assadi, who was ICP’s first secretary in Deir al-Assad, and included excerpts from interviews she conducted with him. Her uncle recounted how he was 14 years old at the time of the Nakba, when Israeli military forces gathered the residents, randomly executed two residents of Deir al-Assad and two of the nearby al-Bi’na, while many were deported to Lebanon (an event noted also by historian Benny Morris, 2004).
The trauma of the Nakba and the military rule were compounded by further attacks that shaped Maisoon’s childhood. In 1961, the lands of Deir al-Assad and nearby Arab communities were expropriated for the establishment of the city of Karmiel, as part of a racist government policy to “Judaize the Galilee”, that is, to squeeze the Arab-Palestinian population, which at the time constituted about 91% of the area between Nazareth and the Lebanese border. In its demographic war, the Israeli regime settled in the new “Development Town” Jewish working class families — and cynically further nurtured national chauvinism for the purpose of “divide and rule”. When Maisoon was about 12 years old, a huge expropriation of land from Arab municipalities to expand the city of Karmiel was met in March 1976 with a dramatic challenge in the form of stormy demonstrations and the historic Land Day protest strike. Six demonstrators were shot dead by military and police forces.
Maisoon grew into a trend of growing rebellion among the Palestinian population against a reality of oppression, repression and erasure. She turned to studying education and history at the University of Haifa, and while still a student, the Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Palestinian refugee camps under the cover of Israeli invasion bayonets. The massacre sparked a wave of stormy Palestinian demonstrations, which led to the establishment of the High Follow-Up Committee, coinciding with the intensification of mass opposition in Israeli society to the occupation in Lebanon. Especially among Palestinians, a new generation had been radicalized in the face of the brutality of Israeli capitalism and occupation, also against the backdrop of a deepening economic crisis and the unprecedented rise of the Israeli far-right in the form of the Kahanist movement. In December 1987, the First Intifada broke out, a historic mass uprising against the occupation and oppression imposed on millions of Palestinians.
‘Workers’ Unity’ grouping
Maisoon was at the time looking for a path to political struggle against the national oppression perpetuated by Zionist nationalism, against the inequality rooted in capitalist society, and for a fundamental, revolutionary change in the reality of life. She joined forces for several years with an incipient socialist organizing attempt, under the title Workers’ Unity (Po`alim Yahad/Ittihad Al-‘Ummal), which was an early precursor of Socialist Struggle. The early grouping worked to build support for the ideas of the then international Marxist movement Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), whose British section at the time, the Militant, was a prominent force in the workers’ movement, playing a particularly key role in the mass anti-poll tax movement that led to Thatcher’s fall in 1990.
In that nascent local group, Maisoon was an involved member, took part in political activities in the streets and workplaces, and also wrote and translated in Arabic and Hebrew for the organization’s publications, in order to promote ideas of struggle and internationalism on a class basis against capitalism and imperialism, and for a socialist alternative, with an emphasis on the decisive potential power of the working class in the struggle for the transformation of society.
However, in the face of the transient capitalist triumphant campaign of the 1990s, when neoliberal globalization was at its peak and the collapse of the Stalinist Soviet Union was demagogically exploited to promote the idea that “there is no alternative”, the socialist movement globally was in retreat. At the local level, in Israel-Palestine, the Oslo Accords also added to confusion on the left, when these were used to realign the occupation under the auspices of a “peace process”. The nascent project of Workers’ Unity ended, and longer standing organizations on the socialist left, such as ‘Marxist Matzpen’ (USFI), came to meet their end under the pressures of the period.
Ideological sympathy and literature heritage
Maisoon completed training in written journalism and social work studies, and over the years has moved to invest her energy in literary and journalistic writing, alongside her work as a social worker at the AKIM organization for the advancement of people with intellectual disabilities. She also founded, together with Osama, the first theater for actors with intellectual disabilities.
Politically, Maisoon has remained sympathetic over the years, even though she was not a member of Socialist Struggle, which was established in the circumstances of a boom in the class struggle against Netanyahu’s 1st government nearly 25 years ago (within the framework of the CWI). Among other things, Maisoon hosted meetings of the Haifa branch in her home in its early years, donated occasionally, took the newspaper ‘The Struggle’, and occasionally shared the organization’s publications on social networks, including, for example, against the gas tycoons or for defense of LGBTQ+ rights.
While she rebelled against national-based oppression, Maisoon also did not shy away from standing up to prejudice and incitement from patriarchal right-wing elements in the Arab-Palestinian community, who called in 2018, for example, to boycott her children’s book, ‘Do the Children Know?’ (هل الاولاد يعرفون؟), which provides children with an accessible open dialogue about intimate relationships between parents and about pregnancy.
Her book “Tales of Cafés” (حكاوي المقاهي) deals with the life of the working class in Haifa’s Hadar neighborhood. She described the protagonist (Educational TV, 3 April 2014) as “a woman working in the clinic of several doctors who earn a lot while she receives the minimum wage and struggles to survive on a daily basis, to make a living and to raise her children. She works in cleaning houses to supplement her income”. Maisoon was well acquainted with economic and social difficulties from her own life, and in this book she sought to present “our situation as Arabs and Jews living in Haifa, in all respects, positive and negative”, and emphasized aspects of fraternal relations that developed between working people, Arabs and Jews. She advocated struggle across national communities. “If we want to fight for our rights, we as Arabs must work with the Jews in every field, that’s what I believe”.
As a child in Deir al-Assad, she learned the art of storytelling. In her lifetime, she managed to write dozens of children’s books and collections of stories for adults in Arabic, some of which were translated into English and Hebrew, and came to schools to discuss the stories with students. Last December, the stories collection “With an Apology to the Public” (مع الإعتذار للجمهور) was one of three winners in the collections category of the Manaf Prize for Arabic Literature — following other awards recognizing her work.
Maisoon Assadi’s literary legacy became her lifetime project. But we will also remember her daring, her active involvement during her youth, and her sympathy in recent decades for the efforts to build a socialist, internationalist, revolutionary movement — that is necessary to overcome a society based on inequality and oppression, which she challenged also in her works. May her memory be a revolution.
