Living Martyrs: Salah Khalaf's Last Will

Written by: Moeen Al-Taher

On the fifty-eighth anniversary of the launch of the Fatah movement in early 1965, I did not find anything that expresses the reality of the situation, more informative than the last will of the leader in the movement, the late Salah Khalaf (1933-1991), which he wrote after the martyrdom of his companion, Khalil Al-Wazir, and a while before his own martyrdom. briefly, and his family found it on the roof of his office in his home in Tunis with his signature. And it was not his only will, as there is a previous will dated 4/28/1968, both of which are preserved in the Palestine Memory Archive at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, the first phase of which will be launched during the activities of the Palestine Forum organized by the Arab Center and the Institute for Palestine Studies in Doha in The end of this January.
Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) is one of the founding leaders of the Fatah movement, and the first responsible for its security services in all its different names, from the Revolutionary Monitoring to the Unified Security, and the founder of what was known as the Black September Organization, which was active in the field of foreign operations after the events of September 1970 in Jordan, and carried out the Munich operation It became famous during the 1972 Olympic Games, and its operations aimed at restoring respect for the revolution, proving its existence, and signaling its strength in the face of its enemies, after the resistance left Jordan. The media defined him as the second man in the Fatah movement, and Yasser Arafat was keen to confirm this saying in the third general conference of the Fatah movement in 1981, when he stood addressing Abu Iyad with the Qur’anic verse, “The second of the two as they are in the cave” (Al-Tawbah: 40). "Fatah" was not the starting point in Khalaf's relationship with Arafat. It dates back to the beginning of the fifties, when they were together during the university studies period, and he succeeded Abu Iyad Arafat in the presidency of the Palestinian Students Association in Cairo. Khalaf to Kuwait in the early sixties, and his participation in the first central committee of the Fatah movement, and it continued until the moment of his assassination in Tunisia, even if it witnessed years of tide interspersed with some periods of ebb.

On April 28, 1968, Abu Iyad recorded his first will after his return from the Battle of Karama (which constituted a major turning point in the course of the revolution) to visit his family residing in Kuwait, in the presence of his friend and colleague in the movement, Ali Nasser Yassin (Abu al-Hassan), who was assassinated by Sabri al-Banna’s group. (Abu Nidal) in 1978. In this will, Salah Khalaf sends letters to those he loves. The first is to his children, "the little cubs whom I entrust every day, and I feel that they are a piece of me," but he leaves them for what is older than him and older than them, he leaves them for the sake of his country and for the sake of his country, and for "the sake of the people whom I loved more than my children," as he wanted them to cherish With it, he serves his country with a “clean conscience, a relaxed soul,” and he leaves them to “men who carried this trust and carried it with them,” “so that we may all be martyrs,” stressing that the path is long, and “we do not know when victory will be, but history will record that this category Of the sons of Palestine, she refused defeat, and she died rejecting defeat, and she will live if a few of them lived while he was proud of himself, proud of his brothers, proud of his message.
Abu Iyad addresses his wife "with a heart full of love and full of trust," recalling that many wives lose their husbands in transient accidents, but she knows that the message he carries with his brothers is "one of the most honorable and noblest that known to peoples who carry the message of liberating homelands." He addresses his parents, apologizing to them for not fulfilling his father's desire to provide him with a comfortable life in his last days, asking: "Does my father or my mother accept that I live as a coward far from the battlefield?" stressing that he left them "for what is better, which is the dear and beloved homeland."
22 years separated the registration of the first will and the writing of the second. During these years, a lot of water occurred in the Palestinian arena, and the Fatah movement witnessed major shifts in its military and political path, and it came close to signing a peace agreement with the Zionist entity, and it lost a large number of its cadres and leaders, the last of whom was Khalil Al-Wazir (16/4/1988). ), who was martyred nine months before the martyrdom of Salah Khalaf, so the second commandment reflected the conditions of the movement when it was about to slip into the Oslo negotiations.

In his will, which they titled “The Living Martyrs,” which was written in his handwriting, Abu Iyad describes the state of Fatah and its leaders during that period, and he quotes the full text of its importance here: “Some of them were martyred while they were satisfied with their martyrdom, and may even have sought it, and some of them resisted.” But recklessly, because he feels that there is no benefit, and there are those who resist fiercely, but to no avail, because slow death is stronger than his resistance. If this is the situation of the Central Committee with Yasser Arafat, then why don't we all be the father of jihad, so we die reassured that we have been martyred? A benefit from our lives, because a large body began to die long ago, and we deal with this body, which is our movement, with drugs that may delay the end, but the end is inevitably coming. Jihad, from being living martyrs representing false testimony and practicing it daily?
Abu Iyad predicted his martyrdom, and he was decisive in that, and his certainty increased after the martyrdom of Abu Jihad. The issue here goes beyond the prophecies for a man of Salah Khalaf’s stature, to become an assessment of a position, because by virtue of his responsibility for the Palestinian security services, and his Arab and international relations, some news of secret communications leaked to him that were withheld from everyone, so he was certain that an Arab and international cover had been lifted, and that A green light was issued to eliminate those who oppose the upcoming movement, or who stand in its way, and it began with the assassination of Khalil Al-Wazir. The will describes the weakness of the Fatah movement as it is about to sign the Oslo agreement, as it sees a dying body being treated with drugs (political concessions) that may delay its end, but do not prevent it. Perhaps this is exactly what happened when the Oslo agreement was signed, which exhausted her body, aborted her revolution, and turned against her idea. It is a description that is correct as it is today, when maneuvers and drugs no longer work, and where there are those who bear false testimony and practice it daily, but there are, at the same time, those who seek resistance and martyrdom. Her first idea is still burning. About "The New Arab"