Fatima Bernawi was a Palestinian revolutionary, fighter, and political prisoner, remembered as one of the first women of the modern Palestinian armed resistance and as a leading figure of Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinian community. She was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a Nigerian father and a Palestinian mother. Her family belonged to the small Afro-Palestinian community of the Old City, made up of descendants of African pilgrims and workers who had settled near the Al-Aqsa compound generations before. As a child she lived through the Nakba of 1948, when Zionist forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, and her family became refugees.

After Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in 1967, Bernawi joined Fatah and the armed struggle against the occupation. That October she was arrested and accused of planting an explosive device in a Jerusalem cinema that was discovered before it went off. She was sentenced to life in prison, becoming one of the first Palestinian women imprisoned for armed resistance against the occupation. She endured a decade in Israeli prisons and was freed in 1977 in a prisoner exchange, after which she was forced into exile. She continued her work within the Palestine Liberation Organization and the movement abroad.

After the PLO’s return to Gaza in 1994, Bernawi helped found and lead the Palestinian women’s police force, opening new roles for women in the national movement. She died in Cairo in 2022. Her life joins the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle with that of the African diaspora, and it reminds us of the women who stood on the front lines of resistance from the very beginning. Her legacy endures in the Palestinian women who continue to resist occupation and in the Afro-Palestinian community whose story is woven into the fabric of Jerusalem.