Before the Nakba
The Black Hand
الكف الأسود
- Founded
- c. 1930 — Haifa
- Founders
- Izz ad-Din al-Qassam
- Ideology
- Islamic revivalismanti-colonialismarmed strugglepeasant mobilisation
By the late 1920s Haifa had become the industrial mouth of Mandate Palestine — a deep-water port under construction, a railway yard, an oil terminal at the end of the pipeline from Kirkuk — and around its edges had grown a belt of tin-and-sacking shanty towns filled with peasants who had lost their land. They had lost it in two ways at once: to the Ottoman land registrations of the previous century, which had turned village commons into the private property of absentee city landlords, and then to the sales those landlords made to the Jewish National Fund, whose leases barred non-Jewish labour on the land afterwards. The men in the shacks at Ard al-Raml had been cultivators in the Galilee and the Jezreel plain. In Haifa they were casual dockers and quarrymen. This, and not a seminary, was the constituency of the Black Hand.
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam had come to them as a refugee himself. Born around 1882 at Jableh on the Syrian coast, educated at al-Azhar in Cairo, he had preached resistance to the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and had led a band against the French in the Syrian mountains after 1918; a French court sentenced him to death in absentia, and he crossed into Palestine in 1921. In Haifa he became imam of the Istiqlal Mosque, a marriage registrar for the Sharia court — a post that took him constantly into the villages — and a teacher in the night school of the Young Men’s Muslim Association. He preached in the peasants’ own idiom, insisted that the fellahin learn to read, and told them that the loss of the land was neither fate nor the will of God but a thing done to them by men, and answerable. Around 1930 he began to organise the listeners into cells of about five, armed slowly out of subscriptions, and drilled in the hills. Contemporaries and the British called the network al-Kaff al-Aswad, the Black Hand.
What the cells did between 1931 and 1935 was small in scale and enormous in consequence. Attacks on settlements and on British installations were attributed to them; the movement had no manifesto, no newspaper, and no charter, and its aims survive mainly in the testimony of those who followed him and in the reports of the police who hunted him. What is not in dispute is the break Qassam represented with the politics of the notables. The Arab Higher Committee’s leaders were petitioners: they wrote memoranda, gave evidence to commissions of inquiry, travelled to London. Qassam went to the hills. In November 1935 he left Haifa with a small band for the country around Jenin. On 20 November, British police surrounded them in a cave and woodland near the village of Ya’bad. Qassam refused to surrender and was killed in the firefight along with three of his men.
The funeral was the event. Thousands walked with the coffins from Haifa; the police were kept away from the procession; the mourning turned into the largest political demonstration Palestine had seen. Within six months, on 19 April 1936, the country was in general strike — the longest general strike in the history of the colonial world, running for 175 days — and by the summer the strike had become an armed revolt across the hill country that would take the British three years, two divisions, and the demolition of large parts of Jaffa’s old city to put down. The revolt’s field commanders included men of Qassam’s network: Farhan al-Sa’di, who had been with him in the hills and who was hanged by the British in 1937 at the age of about eighty, having been arrested with a rifle during Ramadan while fasting. The rebellion’s fighters were widely called Qassamiyyun.
The name did not go away. The armed wing Hamas formed in the Gaza Strip took the name Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in 1990, and the rockets fired from Gaza were called Qassams; Fatah’s Black September and the PFLP’s cadres both claimed his lineage; Palestinian communists in the 1930s and 1940s read him as a peasant revolutionary. This is the ordinary fate of a founding figure with no text: he became available to everyone. What can be said with confidence is narrower and more interesting. Qassam was the first to organise Palestinian villagers as villagers, on the argument that dispossession was a material process that could be materially resisted, and to act on it without waiting for the permission of the Arab kings or the mercy of the Mandate. Every Palestinian movement afterwards begins somewhere downstream of the woods at Ya’bad.