Land Day
A Palestinian woman holds an olive tree during land day in the West Bank village of Qalandiya, March 30, 2019. 'Land Day' is held every year to commemorate the six Palestinian protesters who were killed by Israeli police and army during mass demonstrations on March 30, 1976, against governmental plans to confiscate Palestinian lands in the Galilee.
In 1975 Israel stepped up its campaign to appropriate Palestinian-owned land in Israel and to confine the Palestinians to isolated enclaves; that year, the Palestinians and their leaders woke up to the gravity of the Israeli plans. They gradually grew more mobilized, better organized, and more united, and declared 30 March 1976 as a day of widespread protest in defense of the Palestinian land that Israel was threatening to confiscate for Jewish settlements.
The overwhelming success of
The Palestinian campaign began on 21 May 1975, when political activists and Arab intellectuals took the initiative of holding a consultative meeting in
The initiative committee in turn called another consultative meeting on 14 August in
The general congress was the largest public gathering of Palestinians in Israel since 1948, with hundreds of delegations and thousands of participants from all the Arab communities in Israel. A declaration read by Hanna Naqara on behalf of the participants laid out Israel's settlement plans and the methods and pretexts that the Israeli authorities were using to appropriate Arab land. The congress also gave rise to several resolutions, such as ones calling for an end to the policy of confiscating Arab land, “a danger that threatens the national and day-to-day existence of the Arab masses,” and setting up a committee to follow up implementation of the conference resolutions. The participants also discussed the possibility of calling a general strike in Arab communities all over the country if the government did not abandon its confiscation plans, though no date was set for such a strike.
At the end of the year the Israeli authorities decided to confiscate about 3,000 dunams (about 740 acres) of land owned by the people of
In response to this measure, more than 5,000 area residents rallied in the village of Sakhnin on 14 February. In the statement the rally called for repeal of the decision to designate the land as a military area and for a comprehensive general strike. To prepare the Arab inhabitants for the strike, the local land defense committees stepped up their efforts, as did local branches of the
In the tense atmosphere that arose as the Arab population called on the Israeli authorities to abandon their land confiscation measures and appeared increasingly willing to confront these authorities, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin decided on 29 February to confiscate 20,000 dunams (about 4,900 acres) of land in Galilee as part of a “Develop Galilee” plan. The National Committee for the Defense of the Land reacted by calling a large meeting in Nazareth on 6 March 1976, attended by seventy delegates from the various Arab villages, including the chairmen of local councils and local defense committees. The meeting decided to call on the Arab population, representative institutions, and all other groups in the country “to hold a general strike on 30 March 1976, and to declare this day to be Land Day in Israel, the day on which the Arab masses will raise their voices to demand an end to the official policy, which has started to threaten the future of the Arab masses in this country.”
On 19 March 1976, the steering committee of the Israeli Labor Party
, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,
On 25 March, after pressure and threats from the Northern District Commissioner and police officers, some of the chairmen of the Arab local authorities met in the town of
The first confrontations between the citizens and the Israeli security forces broke out in the villages of Deir Hanna and Arraba on 29 March, the eve of Land Day. On the afternoon of that day residents of the two villages came out in demonstrations, set fire to car tires, and closed off streets in Deir Hanna. The demonstrators in Arraba called for the release of
At dawn on the day of the strike, Israeli troops, police, and border guards in military trucks, tracked vehicles, and tanks raided Arab towns and villages, including Sakhnin, Arraba, Deir Hanna, Nazareth,
Despite these repressive measures, the strike was total in most Arab towns and villages. The most violent confrontations took place in Sakhnin, Arraba, and Deir Hanna. Six people were killed:
The events of Land Day included elements of civil disobedience and violent confrontation, like confrontations between a military force and insurgents. In addition to the clashes between Israel soldiers and the demonstrators, especially women, four policemen and six soldiers were trapped in a house in Sakhnin, and some residents of Sakhnin tried to reach them while thousands of others imposed a siege on the house. They were prevented from doing so when a number of people and the owner of the house intervened and opened channels for negotiation with the army commanders in order to get them out of the village safely. A military armored vehicle with troops inside was also trapped in part of Arraba village, and a channel of negotiation was opened between the villagers and the military commander of the Northern Brigade, Rafael Eitan
, who was later chief of staff of the Israeli army during the invasion of
To show solidarity with the Arab population in the 1948 areas and to help make the Land Day strike a success, representatives of Palestinian mass organizations and institutions had held a meeting in
Land Day was a turning point in the orientations and tools adopted for Palestinian struggle inside Israel. After Land Day the Palestinians in Israel gradually structured their presence as a national group inside Israel in a way that went beyond their local struggles. At the same time they had created the one occasion around which Palestinians everywhere could rally (in addition to the commemoration of the
Beinin, Joel. “From Land Day to Peace Day and Beyond.” In Zachary Lochman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against the Israeli Occupation, 205–216. London: I.B. Tauris, 1989.
“Revolt in Galilee.” Journal of Palestine Studies 5, no. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1976): 192-200.
Wolfsfeld, Gadi, Eli Avraham, and Issam Aburaiya. “When Prophesy Always Fails: Israeli Press Coverage of the Arab Minority's Land Day Protests.” Political Communication 17, no.2 (2000): 115–131.
Yiftachel, Oren. “Minority Protest and the Emergence of Ethnic Regionalism: Palestinian-Arabs in the Israeli ‘Ethnocracy’.” In Shlomo Ben Ami, Yoav Peled and Alberto Spectorowski, ed., Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation State, 145–184. Basingstoke Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000.
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