Sumud, crucifixion, and poetry: The life of Palestinian leader Tawfiq Zayyad
Tawfīq Zayyād with Amal and Rābʿa Murqus, the daughters of Nimer Murqus, in Rāas an-Nāqūra
Hatim Kanaaneh reviews The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad by Tamir Sorek in Mondoweiss:
Unlike the author of this academic biography who never met the Palestinian leader Tawfiq Zayyad and only knew of him through the mainly Zionist Hebrew press, I knew Tawfiq Zayyad and respected him since the Nakba. At that life-changing juncture, he was nearly twice my age of eleven years, someone with literary promise, revolutionary bend of mind, daring, Palestinian nationalism, communist convictions and a booming voice to back it all up in his speeches. Yet this rising star was approachable even to me and my agemates. His harsh-edged voice was difficult to ignore especially with the-then-recent addition of loudspeakers.
In 1954, despite the iron fist of the Military Government that Israel had imposed on us, its Palestinian citizens, my eighth-grade classmates in Arrabeh, my home village in Galilee, led by my communist cousin, Tawfiq Kanaaneh, launched a remarkable and successful strike to protest the Head Tax that was levied from us but not from our Jewish majority co-citizens. Despite the years-long military government’s revenge against the families of its pupil leaders, the strike spread to other Arab schools and led to the abolition of that apartheid tax.
Recently, reminiscing with my cousin Tawfiq, he mentioned another successful strike from that era, one I had completely forgotten, possibly because it was limited to local peasants in Galilee. Traditionally, in early winter, agricultural laborers from our less-landed households had sought employment as olive pickers in the fields of more-landed farmers, often in other Galilee villages. With the Nakba’s ethnic cleansing of over 500 Palestinian communities from the region that became Israel to refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, the Israeli military government officials granted contracts to tend many abandoned productive olive groves to favored local bosses and collaborators. Contrary to the standard traditional practice of daily payment of hired agricultural laborers with a standard measure of the produce they had picked, those contractors started to delay payment till the end of the season when they would decide, retroactively, how much to pay their hired help. Communists in Arrabeh, including my cousin, led a successful strike here as well. This significant victory had somehow faded from the public’s memory. Doubtless, Tawfiq Zayyad inspired this one as well.