SUMUD

Principle adopted by the Palestinian national movement of clinging to the soil of the homeland.

The Sumud (Steadfastness) Fund was established at the Baghdad Arab Summit in 1978 to discourage Palestinian emigration from the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. The annual budget of $150 million was to be administered by the Joint Committee, composed of members from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the government of Jordan. Funds were distributed to Palestinian leaders, trade unions, universities, newspapers, and cooperatives. Sumud paid unemployment benefits and pensions for retirees and granted interest-free housing loans. In the early 1980s, about $87 million per year was transferred to the occupied territories. Funds dried up in the mid-1980s as oil-rich Arab countries defaulted on their contributions.

In the late 1980s, the principle of sumud was revived in an altered form by Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and West Bank who resented their passive role as welfare recipients. Under the leadership of Dr. Hisham Awartani, an economist at al-Najah University in Nablus, sumud was transformed into a call for Palestinian residents to think and act for themselves.

see also baghdad summit (1978); palestine liberation organization (plo).

Bibliography

Benvenisti, Meron. The West Bank Handbook: A Political Lexicon. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post, 1986.

Cobban, Helena. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Schiff, Zeʾev, and Yaʾari, Ehud. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising—Israel's Third Front, translated by Ina Friedman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Shehadeh, Raja. Samed: Journal of a West Bank Palestinian. New York: Adama Books, 1984.

elizabeth thompson