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The Voice

الصوت

Activist1902–1930· 3 min read

Muhammad Jamjoum

محمد جمجوم

Rebel of the Buraq uprising, hanged at Acre

Hanged with Fuad Hijazi and Atta al-Zir at Acre on 17 June 1930. His last letter asked that the nation not sell one span of its land — and that the words on his grave read: complete independence or a bitter death.

Red TuesdayAcre prison1929Hebronmandateprisoners

Muhammad Khalil Jamjoum was born in Hebron in 1902. He took his primary schooling in the city and completed his university studies at the American University of Beirut, and was known for his opposition to Zionism and to British rule. In August 1929, after weeks of escalating confrontation in Jerusalem over the Buraq — the wall Muslims hold as an Islamic endowment and Jews call the Western Wall — violence spread out of the city. In Hebron, sixty-seven Jewish residents were killed. That is part of the record of those days and is not disputed in the Palestinian account of them; the same account records 116 Palestinians and 133 Jews killed in the clashes overall, from Hebron and Bir al-Sabi’ in the south to Safad in the north.

The Mandate arrested some nine hundred Palestinians after the uprising and passed twenty-seven death sentences; twenty-four were commuted and three were carried out. Jamjoum’s was one of the three. The count of the men taken with him is not settled even within the Palestinian record: the same WAFA account that gives the twenty-seven and the twenty-four says in its biography of Jamjoum that he was arrested in 1929 along with twenty-five other Palestinians, all of whom were sentenced to death and all but three of whose sentences were commuted to life — which would make twenty-six. The archive states the discrepancy rather than choosing between two numbers printed on the same page. On 17 June 1930, at nine in the morning, he was hanged in the citadel prison at Acre with Fuad Hijazi of Safad and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.

A day before the execution he wrote a letter addressed to the notable Salim Abd al-Rahman. It is a political document rather than a farewell. Standing, as he put it, at the gates of eternity, he asked Palestinians not to forget the blood that had been spilled, to keep the nation united in its struggle, and above all to hold onto the land: that it keep its lands and not sell the enemies one span of them. He asked the kings and princes of the Arab and Muslim world not to place their trust in foreigners and their policies. He asked that his family be entrusted to God and to the nation. And he asked what should be written over the graves: to the Arab nation — complete independence or a bitter death; in the name of the Arabs we live, and in the name of the Arabs we die. The translations here are the archive’s own, from the Arabic text kept by the Palestinian news agency WAFA.

His name is the first proper noun in the song that came out of the funerals, and the verse Palestinians quote most often has him arguing at the scaffold over who will hang first — and Muhammad says, I will be the first of you. The Palestinian record of the executions says otherwise: Fuad Hijazi went first. The song was composed after the fact, by the Haifa poet Nuh Ibrahim, and what it preserves is not a court transcript but a people’s understanding of how its sons met the rope. Ibrahim Tuqan gave Jamjoum the second of the three hours in his elegy, and swore in it by Jamjoum’s mother, calling out a song at the moment of her son’s death.

Ninety-odd years later the Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs still marks 17 June, naming Jamjoum, al-Zir and Hijazi in the same breath as the prisoners who have died in Israeli custody since 1967 — and arguing, as the prisoners’ movement has long argued, that the two carceral systems are one continuous line.

Sources

Further reading

An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.

wafa.ps(opens in a new tab)https://www.wafa.ps/pages/details/3433

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  1. Atta al-ZirRebel of the Buraq uprising, hanged at Acre
  2. Fatima GhazzalFighter of the 1936 revolt
  3. Fuad HijaziRebel of the Buraq uprising, hanged at Acre

Connected in the archive

17 connected records

17 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

born in — 1 record

named in this record — 6 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

names this person — 6 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • From Acre PrisonPoems

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at Acre prison for the events of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.

  • Khalil Beidasخليل بيدسFiguresNovelist, translator and editor of al-Nafa'is · 1875–1949

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In Acre prison he wrote a short book describing the imperial prison system and the treatment of nationalist prisoners inside it — one of the earliest works of Palestinian prison literature, written in the same fortress where the Mandate would hang Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir a decade later.

  • Red TuesdayPoems

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged three men at the fortress prison of Acre for their part in the Buraq uprising of August 1929: Fuad Hijazi of Safad, and Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir of Hebron.

  • Red Tuesday — the executions at Acre prisonTimeline

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Three of the condemned — Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir — were sentenced to death, and on 17 June 1930 the Mandate hanged them at Acre prison.

  • The Martyr's TestamentCulture

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Muhammad Jamjoum of Hebron addressed his to a notable, Salim Abd al-Rahman, and framed it as instructions to a nation.

  • The Prison SongsCulture

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The tradition has a datable beginning: 17 June 1930, when the British Mandate hanged Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir at the fortress prison in Acre.

on a related subject — 4 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.

Chicago
“Muhammad Jamjoum.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/figures/muhammad-jamjoum.
MLA
“Muhammad Jamjoum.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/figures/muhammad-jamjoum. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-muhammad-jamjoum, title = {Muhammad Jamjoum}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/figures/muhammad-jamjoum}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }