In Palestine, March 30th marks the memory of Land Day. This day represents a tragic event, one amongst many others that are a consequence Israel’s ongoing occupation. On that day in 1976 that the Israeli army killed six unarmed Palestinians, injured hundreds of others and imprisoned many more. The Palestinians were shot during a peaceful mass resistance and general strike while protesting against vast land confiscations in the Galilee by the Israeli government. The measures implemented by the Israeli army and police in order to shut down a peaceful protest that day are truly a drop in the ocean of crimes committed against the Palestinians. However, this event and this day remain extremely important to Palestinians everywhere. It was the first time Palestinian Israeli citizens had a mass act of resistance within Israel after the Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe) in 1948.
Palestinian Israeli citizens are a small minority of Palestinians who remained in the land on which the state of Israel was established in 1948. Though these Palestinians were granted Israeli citizenship they were treated as second-class citizens, made distinct in official identification cards and faced general and institutional exclusion from Jewish Israeli society. Part of this exclusion was the confiscation of over 85% of Palestinian-owned land, in Israel, by the government. The land confiscated in March of 1976 represents only a portion of the total land confiscated.
To the many people familiar with this conflict, this is a regular occurrence. For those unaware of this, since the year of 1967 Israel has subjected the Palestinians to a military occupation, a system of apartheid, displacement, and denial of the right of refugees to return. In addition to this, Palestinians are constantly losing their land to the illegally built settlements, which contravene the Fourth Geneva Convention. This aspect of the conflict continues to leave its impediments on people living in present-day Palestine.
Land Day and the resistance emphasized particularly the harsh encounters that Palestinian citizens of Israel experience, whose suffering is often misrepresented and understated. This may be due to the fact that the conflict involves over 11 million Palestinians, many of whom tolerate much more intense aggression in their daily lives. Nonetheless, Land Day has helped shed light on the situation of one of the minority group of Palestinians, those with Israeli citizenship.
This event, like many others, helps spread awareness of the conflict. The practices implemented by the Israeli authorities in order to steal land in the Occupied Territories (West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights) for settlement use is still on-going. This despite many rulings of their illegality, rulings such as the UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 446, the Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as by bodies like International Court of Justice and the EU. Furthermore, all peace process attempts have also failed to put an end on such Israeli policies, possibly because Israeli negotiators consistently refuse to withdraw, or even halt construction of, settlements in the Occupied Territories (with the exception of Gaza).
Land Day has therefore become an annual event for all Palestinians, a mixture of political events and cultural ones, a celebration of lost homeland and heritage. It acts as a focal point, allowing ordinary Palestinians all over the world, in Israel and in the Occupied Territories, to remember, to educate their children in order that they might remember, and to reconnect themselves to the lands that they lost through public statements of resistance to the continuing occupation. Whatever else happens, Land Day will remain an important day in the Palestinian calendar for generations to come.