Red Tuesday — the executions at Acre prison

After the Buraq uprising of August 1929, British Mandate courts tried hundreds of Palestinians. 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 Institute for Palestine Studies keeps Hijazi’s photograph in its encyclopedia of the Palestine question; the caption records the simple fact that has carried the day into memory: “The British Mandate sentenced three rebels to death on the 17th of June 1930. They were Mohammad Jamjoom, Atta al-Zir, and Fu’ad Hijazi.”

The executions did not pass into silence. They passed into song. The funeral lament that begins “from Acre prison the funeral went out” — min sijn ʿAkka — named Jamjoum and Hijazi in its opening lines and spread through Palestine and the Arab world; it has been performed continuously since, most famously by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin, and is sung to this day at commemorations, in the camps, and by prisoners. The day itself is remembered as Red Tuesday, the title the poet Ibrahim Tuqan gave his elegy for the three men.

The three hanged men of 1930 stand at the head of a longer line. The Palestinian prisoners’ movement traces its own roots to them: as the researcher Ra’fat Hamdouna argues in the movement’s own historiography, its story is not limited to the post-1967 prisons but goes back to the Mandate — to Acre, to the men of 1930, to Farhan al-Saadi executed in 1937 and Yusuf Abu Durra in 1939. What began at the gallows of Acre continued as the organised movement inside Israeli prisons that turned captivity into what its members call an academy.

Sources

• Martyr Fu’ad Hijazi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Institute for Palestine Studies)
• The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: History and Experiences — Palestinian Prisoners’ Solidarity Network
• Min Sijn ʿAkka — performed by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin