Acre

Summary

Coastal town that frames the booklet: Ghassan Kanafani’s birthplace, the site of the prison where the Mandate hanged revolt prisoners, and the town of two of the executed martyrs of Ibrahim Tuqan’s epic and of the popular poet Awad’s last poem.

Details

• Ghassan Kanafani was born in Acre in 1936; the closing biography gives the date as 9 April 1936 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.3 / printed p.4-5; PDF p.35).

• Archbishop Gregorius Hajjar’s story to the Peel Commission concerned the village of Roma in the Acre district, whose inhabitants lived off olive oil production and faced a government-assisted competing Oil Company (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.22-23).

• Two of the three martyrs of Tuqan’s epic on the Mandate death sentences, Muhammad Jumjum and Ata al-Zir, were of Acre; the third, Fuad Hijazi, was of Safad (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.30-31).

• The popular poet Awad, the night before his execution in 1937, wrote a poem on the walls of his cell in Acre, referring to the battles of Bal’a, Wadi al-Tuffah and Beit Amrin (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.16 / printed p.31).

• Kanafani gives the repression figures for the revolt’s second phase as including 148 persons executed by hanging in Acre prison (PDF p.26 / printed p.50); his loss estimate elsewhere in the same essay counts 112 Arabs executed, a conflict recorded on the source page under Open questions (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28 / printed p.54).

• Sayegh lists Acre among the Arab towns and villages on which massacres and other outrages were visited in the Zionist-occupied territories of Palestine, dated June 1965, in his programme of racial hate as state policy; the excerpt gives no further detail of the Acre event, a gap recorded on the Sayegh source page under Open questions (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.14 / printed p.219).

• In Said: Acre is named among the principal Palestinian cities built in the main by Palestinian Arabs, who continued to live there even after the encroaching Zionist colonies expanded very close to them (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.33 / printed p.12).

• Edmund Wilson’s portrait, quoted by Said, takes a large Arab town like Acre as its scene: the squalor of its swarming streets inspiring in an Israeli the same distaste as in the visiting Westerner (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.55-56 / printed p.34-35).

• In Pappe’s Chapter Five, Acre withstood heavy daily shelling in early May 1948 despite overcrowding with refugees from Haifa, until typhoid germs were apparently injected into its water supply from the Kabri springs aqueduct; the Red Cross reports he cites point to the Haganah as the suspected source, and a 6 May meeting of British medical officers and the Red Cross delegate counted seventy casualties, fifty-five of them British soldiers, and concluded the infection was undoubtedly water-borne (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.129-130).

• After loudspeakers called on the city to surrender or be destroyed to the last man, the fallen city was subjected to widespread and systematic looting, reported by the French UN observer Lieutenant Petite (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.130).

• Sitta’s register opens with Acre district (S 1-28): the town of Acre is dated 16-05-48 with the note “Pop rem’g 3000”, an Arab Population 48 of 14,280 on 1,949 dunums, and 33,126 UNRWA-registered refugees in this list; the district subtotal is 47,038 people and 310,571 dunums (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.1).

• In Manna, in the same days as the Lydda and Ramla expulsions, the Israeli army general staff asked Ben-Gurion’s consent to expel about four thousand Palestinians from ‘Akka, either across the border or to Jaffa; Bechor Shitrit strongly objected, and Ben-Gurion reversed his initial approval after one official insisted on the need for a written order from the minister of defence — so ‘Akka’s remaining residents were saved from expulsion, as Nazareth’s were, out of fear of the reaction to written orders (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.74).

• Najib Susan, seventeen when expelled from ‘Akka after its occupation in May 1948, returned from Lebanon during the cease-fire, joined Abu Is’af’s unit in the Shaghur, retreated to Lebanon when central Galilee fell, and then returned again on his own to ‘Akka and his family (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.81).

Related pages

The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Ghassan Kanafani, Ibrahim Tuqan, Resistance Poetry, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine