Farhan al-Saadi

Farhan Ahmad Ibrahim al-Saadi was born around 1858 in al-Mazar, a village of the Jenin district that was depopulated in 1948. He learned to read in the village kuttab and at the elementary school in Jenin, memorised the Qur’an, and spent his youth in the study circles of the mosques, which is where the honorific attached itself: to everyone who knew him he was simply Shaykh Farhan. His grandfather taught him to ride and to shoot. He farmed, served in the Ottoman gendarmerie, fought in the First World War, and under the British served for a period as a corporal in the police of the Northern District.

He resigned from the police after the Buraq uprising of 1929 and formed a band of fighters in the Jenin district. The Mandate arrested him and held him for three years between Acre prison and Nur Shams. When he came out he went to Haifa, where he met Izz al-Din al-Qassam at the Istiqlal mosque and joined his movement. He was in the field on Qassam’s orders when the British surrounded the Ya’bad woods in November 1935 and killed him, and so survived his teacher — at an age when most men had long since stopped fighting.

In April 1936 al-Saadi opened fire on a Jewish convoy. Both of the Arabic sources this archive relies on say so in those words: WAFA has him and his companion Shaykh Atiyya Abu Ahmad attacking a Jewish convoy — هاجم الشيخ فرحان السعدي ورفيقه الشيخ عطية أبو أحمد قافلة يهودية — and Al Jazeera has him firing on a Jewish convoy on the road between Nablus and Tulkarm. That attack is generally taken as the opening of the Great Palestinian Rebellion of 1936–39; the Palestinian Museum dates it to 15 April, the Palestinian National Information Center to 17 April, and Al Jazeera’s account to 5 April. Within days the general strike had begun, and within weeks the British had declared a state of emergency. Over the following year and a half al-Saadi’s men fought a series of engagements between Jenin and the Carmel, among them an ambush on the lands of Fandaqumiya, between Nablus and Jenin, on 30 June 1936.

The British hunted him for eighteen months, and how the hunt ended is told two ways. In Al Jazeera’s account they besieged him in his own village, the mukhtar of al-Mazar interceded and asked him to surrender rather than see the houses demolished and the villagers killed, and he gave himself up with three companions on 22 November 1937 and was taken to Acre prison. WAFA records no surrender: it has the British authorities setting their informers and spies to track the Qassamites until they were able to seize Shaykh Farhan and three of his companions — بثت السلطات البريطانية عيونها وجواسيسها تتعقب القساميين حتى تمكنت من القبض على الشيخ فرحان وثلاثة آخرين من رفاقه. The trial at Acre lasted hours and heard no defence. Palestinian accounts differ on the charge — the Palestinian National Information Center records that he was tried for the killing of Lewis Andrews, the British district commissioner for Galilee assassinated that September, while Al Jazeera’s account records the formal charge as possession of a weapon, a capital offence under the emergency regulations. The record is unanimous on the outcome and not on the day. He was hanged in Acre prison, within days of his arrest, while keeping the Ramadan fast — but the Palestinian National Information Center gives the date as 22 November 1937 and Al Jazeera’s account as 27 November. Al Jazeera pairs its date with 14 Ramadan 1356 in the Hijri calendar, and that pairing does not reconcile: 1 Muharram 1356 fell on 14 March 1937, which puts 14 Ramadan around 18 November and 27 November at roughly 23 Ramadan. The archive prints the discrepancy rather than quietly choosing between the dates. Contemporary accounts put his age between seventy-five and eighty; the collection of the Palestinian publisher Mohamed Ali Eltaher, which holds a portrait of him, says eighty.

He is one of very few Palestinians of the Mandate period whose family has continued to appear in the casualty lists for ninety years: the al-Saadi family of Jenin has lost dozens of its members since 1990, and hundreds have passed through Israeli prisons. The old man who fired the first bullet is remembered in the north as the successor of Qassam.

Sources

• فرحان السعدي — الرواد، مركز المعلومات الوطني الفلسطيني (WAFA)
• الشيخ فرحان السعدي.. المقاوم الذي نجا من الاغتيال ولم ينج من الإعدام — الجزيرة نت, 27 November 2022
• Armed struggle in the 1936 Great Arab Revolt — The Palestinian Museum
• Palestine: 1937 — Sheikh Farhan Al-Saadi — Mohamed Ali Eltaher Collection