Legitimacy, Student by Student

I stopped the voting for a full half hour that day, but that wasn’t where the story began. It started the day before, when I went to take over the polling hall from the municipality. I hadn’t made a single decision, yet by evening the whole town was talking: this woman doesn’t want the elders to vote; she’s working against our people. A bank manager wrote this publicly, by name, and stirred people up against me. In reality, assigning halls to different floors wasn’t my call; the building had only two ground-floor rooms, and the rest were allocated by the elections committee. But no one asked for the truth. All they asked was: Who is this woman who thinks she’s somebody?

On the drive home, tears started falling on their own. When I got in, I broke down, not from exhaustion, but from the shock of being accused of something I didn’t do, in front of people who didn’t know me. I felt weak and scared, and I honestly asked myself: Can I keep going with this? From home, I called the elections committee in Ramallah and told them everything, my voice still shaking. They said it plainly: This isn’t about procedure; it’s an attempt to weaken you because you’re a woman. They stood by me. Later, their investigation confirmed that the room assignments were entirely correct and official, and that not a single decision had been mine personally.

I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning, when I walked into the hall, my hands were trembling, but I stood my ground. I wasn’t afraid of the job itself; I’ve handled responsibility and made decisions for years. What weighed on me was something else: I was the first woman in this conservative town to stand in a position where she gives orders to men.

All day long, confrontations didn’t stop. I had to clear the hall twice, and I halted voting for a full half hour when someone tried to bypass the rules. One of them was a police officer; I asked him to remove people with no official status from inside the hall, and he refused, standing in front of me: “You’re a woman! How can you give me orders?” I didn’t argue. I called his direct superior, who came to the school, and the incident ended. But his words stuck with me: even the authority that was supposed to back me legally needed time to accept that a decision could come from a woman.

A few days later, the bank manager who incited people against me tried to apologize, but he didn’t come himself. He sent his mother, a woman my mother’s age, to apologize on his behalf while he stayed at work. I asked her to leave his number, called him, and said: “Your apology isn’t acceptable; I’ll take my rights through the law.” Days later, he came to my office leading a group of men who arrived to make peace, the mosque’s preacher first among them. He walked in and blamed me before apologizing: “You’re stubborn; you work by the law and know nothing of the spirit of the law.” I asked him: You’re a bank manager, and you deal with loans every day; if someone came for a loan without guarantors, would you give it? He said: No, that’s the law. I said: And I, too, want to apply the law. He didn’t answer. I saw his face change in front of everyone. One of those present later told me: “We didn’t expect you to be this strong.”

After that experience, the change wasn’t just in the hall; it spread through the town. Men started visiting the school to ask about its needs or to check on their daughters. The village council, which used to drag its feet on the school’s maintenance requests, began handling them faster. Even on public transport, I noticed some people greeting me or offering help on their own.

I stopped to think: What exactly had changed? I hadn’t changed, the same woman, the same experience, the same values. What changed was that they saw authority in action, not just in words. And I kept turning over that sentence: “We didn’t expect you to be this strong.” Why did they need all of this, a public statement, tears in the car, a confrontation, and a full reconciliation delegation in all its gravity, to be convinced of something that should have been obvious from the moment I took over the hall? Here I understood something that still hurts me today: a man reaches a leadership position and his legitimacy comes with him; he doesn’t need to prove it to anyone. As for me, I reached the same position, yet there were still those who wanted to make sure, again and again, that I truly had the right to be here. The officer’s problem wasn’t with the decision; it was that I was the one who made it. And the bank manager didn’t come to discuss the room assignments; he came to tell me, indirectly, that the same strictness which, if a man showed it, would be called firmness, was called in my case “stubbornness.”

This isn’t personal; it’s a pattern. The picture of “the manager” in all our minds, women and men alike, is by default a man. When a man reaches a position, he steps into a space already prepared for him; no one needs to re-check it. When a woman reaches the same position, she’s an exception, and every exception has to prove itself again, before every new person who hasn’t yet seen her making a decision.

This is where I feel the real difference between the polling hall and a boys’ school. The polling hall is a single test, one day, that ends when the sun sets. But the school is a test that never closes. Every school year, new students enter who have never seen my day of proof, new parents who haven’t heard the story, and a new teacher who may, on his first day, carry the officer’s same question, even if he doesn’t say it out loud. There, my legitimacy, if I’m not careful, may never build up; instead, it resets with the start of each year, and I have to prove it again, student by student.

So if I ever became the principal of a boys’ school, the first thing I’d do isn’t impose decisions, but understand the place before stepping into it. Who are the teachers? What’s the nature of their relationship with the previous administration and with each other? Who among them holds real influence even without an official title? And where do the vice principal and the secretary sit on this unwritten map? This understanding is what makes a decision hold.

Then, I’d set clear boundaries from day one. No open administrative office for coffee, cigarettes, and side conversations, as many are used to. This isn’t arrogance; it’s a message: my relationship with you is professional, and my decision is based on the law, not on my personal opinion. And so my legitimacy doesn’t reset every year, I’d make sure my first decisions are clear, documented, and known before anyone feels the need to test me personally, just as the elections committee stood behind me when I needed official backing before any confrontation.

I won’t fool myself that this will happen overnight, or with a loud voice, or through hasty decisions. It will take months of patience, one small step before a bigger one, until those around me get used to seeing me as a principal, not a woman managing men.

And there’s a question I don’t want to dodge: Does all this mean I have to stop being a woman? No. I’ve seen many of my colleagues in coed schools overdo modesty in dress, as if that were the price of entry into a space dominated by men. I’m already veiled and modest; this is my choice and conviction, but I won’t change anything in myself to please anyone. A woman doesn’t have to turn into a copy of a man to lead, just as a man doesn’t gain the legitimacy of leadership just by being a man. Respect is built on competence and balance, not on imitation.

Election day ended with the sunset, and with it the test ended. But a boys’ school knows no such sunset. Every morning in it is a new kind of election day, and every student who walks in for the first time is that officer who asks me, in silence or in voice: You’re a woman, how can you give me orders? The only difference is that this time I won’t wait one day to prove the answer, but years, student by student, until a woman in a position of decision feels normal, needing neither justification nor a test at all.