Songs of the 1936 Revolt

The Great Palestinian Rebellion of 1936–39 produced the largest body of Palestinian popular song before the Nakba, and it did so because the revolt needed it. The fighters were in the hills; the intelligence about British columns was in the towns. The link between them was a relay of women — city women passing what they knew to village women, village women carrying it up to the fighters along with food, water, and ammunition hidden in the bundles of firewood they balanced on their heads. Some of what they carried was information encoded as song.

The Palestinian Museum records one instance by name. In the village of Anata, a woman called Jamila needed to warn the fighter Ahmad al-Issawi and his companions, hidden in the village, that a British raid was coming. She sang it: a string of nonsense instructions about praying for the Prophet, playing with the laurel, petting the cat, jumping like a monkey — the kind of thing an adult sings at children in a courtyard, and the kind of thing a British patrol walks past without hearing. That mechanism, repeated across the country, later hardened into folklore: songs that began as operational messages were kept and sung after the operation was over, and after everyone in them was dead.

Alongside the coded chants ran the zajal — colloquial, semi-improvised, half-sung verse, the register of the majority of Palestinians who could not read the classical Arabic of the published poets. Its master was Nuh Ibrahim, a printing-press worker from Haifa’s Wadi al-Nisnas who called himself the Student of Qassam. He composed an elegy for Izz al-Din al-Qassam within days of his killing in November 1935 that was picked up and sung across Palestine; he composed for prisoners while inside Acre prison in 1937; he composed for peasants working vines and wheat. His work became sufficiently dangerous that the Mandate’s press censor issued a formal warning against printing or publishing his collected poems, openly or in secret. He was killed in a British engagement in the Galilee in October 1938 at twenty-five.

The songs are what survived the defeat. The revolt itself was ground down by 1939 — the leadership exiled or killed, the field commanders picked off one by one, the outbreak of the world war closing the door — and Palestinians lost the political initiative they would not recover before 1948. But the verse stayed in circulation without any institution to keep it, transmitted mouth to mouth through the Nakba and the camps, and was recorded in the 1970s and 1980s by ensembles who understood exactly what they had inherited. That is the peculiar economy of Palestinian memory: what was written down was confiscated, and what was sung could not be.

Sources

• Armed struggle in the 1936 Great Arab Revolt — The Palestinian Museum
• Samih Shabeeb, “Poetry of Rebellion: The Life, Verse and Death of Nuh Ibrahim during the 1936-39 Revolt,” Jerusalem Quarterly 25 (Winter 2006) — Institute for Palestine Studies
• From Acre prison, with love — The Palestinian Museum