From Acre Prison
من سجن عكا
Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin
The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.
من سجن عكا طلعت جنازة
محمد جمجوم وفؤاد حجازي
ويقول محمد أنا أولكم
Watch
Recording: Firqat al-ʿAshiqin — فرقة العاشقين
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. The record of the sentence is kept in the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedia of the Palestine question. The mourning was national; the poet Ibrahim Tuqan named the day Red Tuesday.
Out of the funerals came this song. Its opening lines — from Acre prison the funeral went out, Muhammad Jamjoum and Fuad Hijazi — carry the names themselves, so that anyone who sings it performs an act of remembering. It is a folk lament in the oldest sense: no single author, passed voice to voice, sharpened by each generation that needed it.
The verse Palestinians quote most is the one this archive has taken as its epigraph. In the song’s telling, the three men do not wait to be taken — they argue over who will hang first: and Muhammad says, I will be the first of you. Defiance at the foot of the gallows. The scaffold at Acre was meant to end an uprising; the song turned it into a beginning, and that inversion — the execution that galvanised instead of silenced — is precisely why the remembering matters, and why the song has never been allowed to fall silent.
The rendition most Palestinians know belongs to Firqat al-ʿAshiqin, the ensemble founded in Damascus by refugees of 1948, who made the prison songs of Mandate Palestine into anthems of the revolution’s generation. Nearly a century after the gallows at Acre, the song is still sung at prisoners’ solidarity vigils — the three men of 1930 stand at the head of the line the Palestinian prisoners’ movement claims as its own beginning.