Yacoub Zayadin: Jordan’s ‘Communist Doctor’ dies

On Sunday, life-long communist activist and leader Yacoub Zayadin died in the Jordanian capital Amman. He was 95.

Zayadin was born in 1920 in the village of al-Samakiyya in the governorate of Karak south of the kingdom.

He was one of the foremost Arab Marxist leaders and thinkers. He joined the Communist Party in 1943, and rose through the ranks to become the longest-serving secretary general in the history of the party.  

Yacoub Zayadin, who was known to be shy and quiet in social circles, but firm and resolved in politics, studied medicine at the University of Damascus, graduating in the 1940s. He became the first Jordanian physician to earn himself the nickname the ‘Communist Doctor’.  

After finishing medical school, he opened a private clinic in East Jerusalem. At the time, the city was under Jordanian sovereignty following the Act of Unity of 1950. The ‘Communist Doctor’, in addition to his medical practice in the city, also became an activist, recruiting and organizing locally. 

Zayadin’s name is often cited whenever the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship is mentioned. In 1956, the communist politician was elected to Jordan’s parliament for the Christian seat in Jerusalem, without being dogged by racist and sectarian accusations. But when he ran for the Christian seat in Amman in 1989, he did not win.  

The dedicated communist rejected the Anti-Communist Act that Jordan enforced from the early 1950s until the restoration of democratic mechanisms in 1989.

He paid the price for his beliefs by spending 8 years at the notorious Jafr desert prison, from 1957 to 1965, where was subjected to various forms of torture. He was released under a general amnesty, but held on to his communist principles that he refused to renounce under pressure from his jailers. 

With the return of a semblance of  democratic life in Jordan, Zayadin helped re-establish the Communist Party with an official license from the Jordanian Interior Ministry in 1993. He served as secretary general of the party until the late 1990s.  

He left his post after a falling out with yesterday’s comrades, whom he accused of deviating from the principles of communism. After he disowned them, he resigned from the party that he served more than half a century. 

Zayadin made his last political move in 2001, when he along with a group of disenfranchised communists, founded the Jordanian Communist Workers Party, which was seen as a splinter faction of the Communist Party. He did not assume any leadership positions in the new party, of which he was largely seen as a spiritual mentor.  

However, Zayadin moved away from the new party soon after. The new political entity merged again with the parent party in 2008, following the enactment of a new political parties law that raised the required threshold number of founding members of a political party to 500, which neither party could muster on its own.  

Zayadin left partisan party politics but did not leave politics, which preoccupied him right up until his death. His home was until his last days was a mecca for people engaged in politics and a place where many public figures gathered. 

‘The Communist Doctor’, who was long described as Jordan’s Oak Tree for his stoutness, left behind a number of books, including Al-Bidayat [The Beginnings], Laysat al-Nihayat [These Are Not the Ends], and Law ‘Adat Biya al-Ayam [If the Days Took Me Back in Time].