Palestinian Land Day, From the Start until Today
Written by: Mohammad Shaaban, MINA correspondent in Palestine
On the thirtieth of March of each year, the Palestinians, at home and in the diaspora, commemorate the eternal Land Day, which dates back to 1976. On this day, the first confrontation took place between Palestinian citizens and the Israeli occupation forces since 1948. As a result, six Palestinians were murdered, dozens were wounded and hundreds were arrested. So, what is Land Day? Why do Palestinians celebrate this day every year?
From its inception, the Zionist movement worked hard to show Palestine as a land without a people, where military forces terrorized and attacked its people, and committed horrific massacres to displace its original inhabitants.
After 1948, the Zionist governments pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, by enacting laws to seize Palestinian money and land and give it to Israeli settlers, based on religious beliefs that Palestine is the promised land and that it belongs to the Jews and the Palestinians have no right to this land.
Land Day Story*
The story of Land Day began when the Israeli government approved on February 29, 1976, the confiscation of 21,000 dunams belonging to Palestinian farmers from the Palestinian towns of Sakhnin, Arraba, Deir Hanna, and Arab al-Sawa’id to allocate them to build more illegal Israeli settlements.
This came after the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin announced in 1975 a plan to Judaize the Palestinian Galilee region.
It was not the first time. During the years between 1948 and 1972, the Israeli authorities confiscated more than one million dunums of land from Palestinian villages in Galilee and the Palestinian Triangle. In addition, it seized millions of dunams in 1948, the year known as the Nakba, meaning the catastrophe of ethnic cleansing the Israeli occupation practiced against Palestinian citizens.
However, the Palestinian landowners rejected the violations of the occupation and its unjust settlement policies and plans on their own lands. Thus, they announced a comprehensive strike titled “Defending the Land”. This strike was planned to be peaceful and express the determination of the Palestinians to defend their legitimate rights and their rejection of the inhuman Israeli practices.
At first, the organizers of the strike recorded great success, as tens of thousands of Palestinian workers, shop owners, and students participated in it.
On the other hand, the occupation forces rushed to respond bloodily to the peaceful protests and fired indiscriminately at Palestinian demonstrators on the morning of the strike day, which led to the killing of six Palestinians, in addition to 49 wounded and about 300 detainees.
It is worth noting that the area of historical Palestine is about 27 thousand square kilometers, where the Israel occupation controls about 85% of the total area of the land. As for the owners of the land, the area they use does not exceed 15%.
Occupation robbery of Palestinian properties after 1976
The occupation robbery of Palestinian lands did not stop in 1976 when the Israeli occupation forces demolished about 11,900 homes and displaced nearly 73,000 Palestinians from 1967 until the end of 2021.
According to the Palestinian Land Research Center, the occupation bulldozers demolished about 11,900 Palestinian homes, including 7,440 homes in East Jerusalem only, during the period from 1967 until the end of September 2021.
It stated that during the same period, the occupation’s bulldozers and warplanes demolished about 21,000 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip, the most brutal during the wars on the Strip in 2012, 2014, and 2021, displacing about 189,000 Palestinian citizens.
In its report, OCHA noted that in 2021, 311 Palestinian facilities were confiscated either without warning or by giving Palestinian owners short-term reprieve, using numerous military orders that prevent people from being able to object in advance to the orders.
A report by the Al-Maqdisi Foundation issued on March 30, 2015, stated that between 1967 and 2000, the occupation forces demolished more than five hundred buildings, while between 2000 and 2014 the number reached about 1,342 in Jerusalem alone, which caused the displacement of at least 5,760 people.
As for the Nakba in 1948, the Center stated that Israel has demolished a total of 172,900 Palestinian homes, and displaced 1,324,000 Palestinian citizens from the lands of historic Palestine, all in order to bring in and settle more than 5 million Jewish immigrants.s
Israeli settlement project still increases
Land Day is commemorated this year, and settlement, which represented the most prominent weapon of the Israeli occupation since its inception, continues to swallow up Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem, amid continuous Palestinian resistance and struggle.
The Israeli occupation violations against Palestinian are not limited to the confiscation of Palestinian lands and the demolition of their houses. It still expanding its settlement scheme over the occupied Palestinian lands. The occupation government approved dozens of settlement projects, which increased during the year 2021-2022.
In the West Bank, the number of military and settlement outposts reached about 409 in 2013, while the number of settlers increased to about 581,000.
The number of settlers is about 21 settlers for every 100 Palestinians in the West Bank, while the percentage in occupied Jerusalem is about 69 for every 100 Palestinians.
As for the settlements in Jerusalem, the occupied city of Jerusalem is threatened by a large number of settlement projects in addition to the Judaization plans in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and the neighborhoods of Jabal Al-Mukabber and Sheikh Jarrah, the occupation is working to implement dangerous settlement plans.
The occupation is currently working to encircle Jerusalem with settlement blocs separating it from the West Bank, through illegal settlement projects linked to each other.
One of the plans targets the abandoned village of Lifta, which the occupation monitored for its Judaization of about 78.5 million shekels, to build 9 settlement towers on the village’s lands near the northwestern entrance to the city of Jerusalem.
In another huge project, the occupation aims to demolish dozens of Palestinian homes in the abandoned village of Al-Malha, southwest of Jerusalem, which is located five kilometres from the walls of the Old City.
After 196, the occupation carried out extensive excavations in the area to falsify Islamic history, and the walls of Jerusalem were subjected to continuous Judaization operations under the pretext of restoration work within the occupation’s projects to change the features of Jerusalem and the names of its neighborhoods and streets. (AKG/RE1)
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
