Betty Dagher Majaj

Betty Dagher Majaj (b. 1926 in Lebanon) is a woman who married a Jerusalemite and moved to the city at a pivotal point in its history, right on the eve of the Nakba. She became deeply involved in health care in the city, working for decades and through two wars to tend to the sick, wounded, and disabled, and helping to build major health care institutions.

Betty Dagher Majaj was born on December 4, 1926, in Lebanon to Angele Cesar Nahhas and Yousef As‘ad Dagher, a noted bibliographer. She had two brothers and one sister. She grew up in the village of Majdalouna, northeast of Sidon, and was raised Catholic.

As a child, Betty Dagher first went to the Sidon American Girls’ Boarding School, and then moved to Beirut where she attended the Ahliyyah National School. At the age of 17, she knew she wanted to study nursing—a career choice that was not encouraged at the time. She graduated from Junior College (later renamed Beirut University College), and then went to Nursing School at the American University of Beirut (AUB), which is where she met the man who would become her husband, Amin Majaj.

While she was working at the Pediatric Department of the American University Hospital, Betty Dagher met Amin Majaj, an intern. The couple got married on June 25, 1947, at the Presbyterian Church in Beirut, and moved to Jerusalem soon thereafter.

Dagher Majaj knew of Jerusalem from her father’s stories of studying at St. Anne’s Monastery in the early 1920s. His stories “seemed like fantasy lands in the imagination of us children. He would paint Jerusalem like the golden city and tell stories from when he was studying at St. Anne’s Convent.”1 With that said, she recognized that she was moving to a city in turmoil.

As a new nurse and a newly married woman, Dagher Majaj took on an overwhelming mission. Shortly after she moved to Jerusalem with her husband, the 1948 War began, and with it the Palestinian displacement (Nakba). The couple worked day and night to attend to the needs of the sick and injured under the threats of attacks and bombs during the war.

Together with her husband, Dagher Majaj had a key role in turning a convent in al-‘Izariyya (Bethany), located on the main road between Jericho and Jerusalem, into an emergency hospital (newly accredited by the Red Cross). Amin Majaj was also the one to turn the Lutheran hospice for pilgrims into the Augusta Victoria Hospital; he headed the first Palestinian Pediatric Unit.

Seven years after moving to Jerusalem, Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, the medical director of Augusta Victoria Hospital, offered Dagher Majaj the position of assistant matron at the Nursing Department; she soon thereafter was promoted to matron. In 1956, she had a pivotal role in acquiring accreditation of the Nursing Association with the International Council of Nurses—England.

Ten years after her marriage, Dagher Majaj gave birth to her first child. Eventually the family included three daughters (Lina, Randa, and Hala), and one son (Saleh).

Twenty years after she moved to Jerusalem, war broke out again. During the 1967 War, people were killed and displaced, and homes were destroyed; even hospitals were bombed. Once again, Palestinian civilians were in urgent need of medical care, and Dagher Majaj would take it upon herself to assist them.

In a 2021 interview, Dagher Majaj (Umm Saleh) recalled the war and described that they were unable to leave their home at all, not even to get groceries. “We lived on water, and some chocolate and fruits we had kept in the pantry room.”2 

She went on to add, “The food supply I had bought, together with some supplies I already had, were our salvation and kept us going. A war is an assault on humanity, but a war without chocolate would be unbearable.”3

In June 1967, the new children’s ward at the Augusta Victoria Hospital was completely destroyed. The doctors and nurses did their best to transport and serve the casualties during the war.

In addition to having directly witnessed the wars of 1948 and 1967 in Palestine, Dagher Majaj had to watch from a distance as war convulsed Lebanon. She had made it a point to go to Beirut every year to connect with her family, yet there was no way she could have been prepared for what followed. The civil war began in 1975, escalated in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, and did not really end until Israel withdrew in 1990.

Living in West Beirut, Dagher Majaj’s parents had been attacked and robbed three times by rival militias; burglars beat up both of her parents and also raped and tried to strangle her mother. She rushed to Lebanon and found her parents in hospital, “united but understandably devasted . . . Their bodies healed in time, yet their souls never recovered from the sorrow and shame of the events that had befallen their own and other Lebanese families.”4

Having personally seen the cost of three wars made Dagher Majaj aware of the impact of “inhuman cruelty” whether through “the faces of the Israeli soldiers manhandling powerless Palestinians, or the packs of militias in Lebanon.”5

Such intolerable realities may have turned someone else hateful and bitter, but what stands out in Dagher Majaj’s memoir and in the interview is her lack of bitterness. She has retained a sense of tolerance and eschews stereotypes of any group.

Dagher Majaj helped hundreds of people in her capacity as head nurse at the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem. She also served as a vital board member of the Arab Women’s Union in Jerusalem, which supported the Palestinian cause. She assisted its president, Zulaykha al-Shihabi, largely through offering medical aid to the wounded, taking care of orphaned children of slain fighters, and helping displaced families.

She was vice chairperson at the YWCA, and board member of Rawdat el-Zuhur. She also served as member of the congregation at St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem.