Death
Following the October 1935 discovery of a clandestine cache of arms in the port of Haifa apparently originating from Belgium and destined for the Haganah, Arab indignation broke out in two general strikes. On November 8 the body of a British constable, Moshe Rosenfeld, was discovered near Ain Harod. al-Qassam and his followers were believed to have been responsible and search parties set out to capture him. In this context, al-Qassam and twelve of his men decided to go underground and, leaving Haifa, took to the hills between Jenin and Nablus. There they spent ten days on the move, during which time they were fed by local villagers. The British police manhunt eventually surrounded al-Qassam in a cave near Ya'bad, in the village of Sheikh Zeid. In the long ensuing firefight, al-Qassam and three of his followers were killed, and five captured. The manner of his last stand assumed legendary proportions in Palestinian circles at the time:
Surrounded he told his men to die as martyrs, and opened fire. His defiance and manner of his death (which stunned the traditional leadership) electrified the Palestinian people. Thousands forced their way past police lines at the funeral in Haifa, and the secular Arab nationalist parties invoked his memory as the symbol of resistance. It was the largest political gathering ever to assemble in mandatory Palestine.
Two weeks later David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish workers organisation, the Histadrut, warned the political committee of Mapai that "Now for the first time, the Arabs have seen someone offer his life for the cause. This will give the Arabs the moral strength they lack." He compared al-Qassam to Joseph Trumpeldor who had been killed at Tel Hai in 1920.
Read more about this topic: Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
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“This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.”
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