The Martyr's Testament

On 16 June 1930 the British Mandate allowed three condemned men in the fortress prison at Acre to write home. All three wrote something other than a private farewell. Fuad Hijazi of Safad sent his to the Haifa newspaper al-Yarmuk, which printed it on 18 June — the day after the hanging — in his own handwriting and over his signature. Muhammad Jamjoum of Hebron addressed his to a notable, Salim Abd al-Rahman, and framed it as instructions to a nation. Atta al-Zir of Hebron, a labourer with no schooling, dictated his to his mother in the peasant dialect, in rhyming rhythmic speech closer to zajal than to correspondence. The three documents, kept together by the Palestinian news agency WAFA, are the founding texts of a Palestinian genre.

What makes them a genre and not three letters is that each refuses the one thing a farewell is for. Hijazi forbids mourning and converts the date of his own death into a public holiday: the day of his hanging must be a day of joy, and 17 June must be marked every year with speeches and songs in memory of the blood spilled. Jamjoum turns his into policy — hold the land, sell the enemies not one span of it, do not trust foreign powers, and write on our graves: complete independence or a bitter death. Al-Zir tells his mother to dance, forbids her to wear black, and gives her horticultural instructions: above the grave plant the olive, and the grape, the fig and the lemon, and feed the young men of the quarter from them. The translations here are the archive’s own.

Two features recur in every Palestinian testament written since. The first is that it is addressed past its recipient to a public — which is why these were sent to newspapers and notables as often as to families, and why the writer’s mother appears in them as a figure to be instructed rather than consoled. The second is the reversal of mourning: the insistence, in a culture with elaborate rites of grief, that this particular death be met with singing. That instruction was obeyed almost literally. What came out of the Acre executions was not a period of national mourning but a song, and a poem by Ibrahim Tuqan that gave the day the name it still carries, Red Tuesday.

The form outlived the men who set it. Palestinian testaments have since been written on cigarette-packet foil in Israeli prisons, dictated to relatives, filmed, and posted; the register changes and the two features do not. The archive holds the 1930 letters in the entries for the three men — Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir — because a testament is one of the very few kinds of document in which a Palestinian of that generation speaks in his own words, at length, without an intermediary, and knowing exactly who is listening.

Sources

• الثلاثاء الحمراء: تسعون عاما على إعدام جمجوم والزير وحجازي — WAFA (Palestinian News and Information Agency), 16 June 2020
• From Acre prison, with love — The Palestinian Museum
• The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: History and Experiences — Palestinian Prisoners’ Solidarity Network