Land Day (Arabic: يوم الأرض, Yom al-Ard; Hebrew: יום האדמה, Yom Ha'adama), March 30, is an annual day of commemoration for Palestinians of the events of that date in 1976. In response to the Israeli government's announcement of a plan that would confiscate thousands of dunams of land in Arab areas, a general strike and marches were organized in Arab towns from the Galilee to the Negev.[1] The government sent in the Israeli army and police and in the ensuing confrontations, six Arab citizens were killed, about one hundred were wounded, and hundreds of others arrested.[1][2][3][4][5]
Since then, Land Day has become an important annual day of commemoration in the Palestinian national political calendar, not only for Arab citizens of Israel, but for Palestinians all over the world.[6][7]
The Israeli government adopted in 1950 the Law of Return to facilitate Jewish immigration to Israel and the absorption of Jewish refugees. Israel's Absentees' Property Law of March 1950 transferred the property rights of absentee owners to a government-appointed Custodian of Absentee Property, effectively legalizing the confiscation of lands belonging to the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from the area that became Israel in 1948. It was also used to confiscate the lands of Arab citizens of Israel who "are present inside the state, yet classified in law as 'absent'."[11]
Today, there are an estimated 200,000 "present-absentees" or internally displaced Palestinians from among the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel, representing some 20% of the total Palestinian Arab population in Israel.[11] It is estimated by Salman Abu-Sitta that between 1948 and 2003 more than Template:Sq km to sq mi of land was expropriated from Arab citizens of Israel.[12]
According to Oren Yiftachel, public protest against state policies and practices from among the Palestinian Arabs in Israel was rare prior to the mid-1970s, owing to a combination of factors including military rule over their localities, poverty, isolation, fragmentation, and their periphal position in the new Israeli state.[13] While the political movement Al-Ard ("The Land") was active in the early years, it was subsequently declared illegal and the most notable antigovernment occassions otherwise were the annual May Day protests staged annually by the Communist party.[13]
Catalyzing events
A view of Arraba from the road leading to its northern limit
In February 1976, Israel declared its intention to expropriate lands in the Galilee for official use, affecting some 21,000 dunams (5,250 acres) of land between the Arab villages of Sakhnin and Arraba.[6] On March 11, 1976, the government published the expropriation plan.
Yiftachel writes that the land confiscations and expansion of Jewish settlements in the northern Galilee formed part of the government's continuing strategy aimed at the Judaization of the Galilee which itself constituted both a response to and catalyst for Palestinian resistance, culminating in the events of Land Day.[14] According to Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the land was to be used to construct "[...] eight Jewish industrial villages, in implementation of the so-called Galilee Development Plan of 1975. In hailing this plan, the Ministry of Agriculture openly declared that its primary purpose was to alter the demographic nature of Galilee in order to create a Jewish majority in the area."[6] Ori Nir writes in Ha'aretz that only 31 percent of the land in question, or less than one-third, was actually Arab-owned and that some of the expropriated land was to be used to expand the Arab village of Makar near Acre and to build public buildings in Arab towns.[1][15] Orly Halpern of the The Jerusalem Post writes that the lands were confiscated by the government for security purposes, and that they were subsequently used to build a military training camp, as well as new Jewish settlements.[1]
Yifat Holzman-Gazit places the 1976 announcement within the framework of a larger plan devised in 1975. Some 1900 dunams of privately owned Arab land were to be expropriated to expand the Jewish town of Carmiel. Additionally, the plan envisaged the establishment between 1977 and 1981 of 50 new Jewish settlements known as mitzpim (singular: mitzpe) which would consist of fewer than 20 families each. The plan called for these to be located between clusters of Arab villages in the central Galilee affecting some 20,000 dunams (30% of which were to be expropriated from Arabs, 15% from Jews, with the remainder constituting state-owned land).[16] David McDowall identifies the resumption of land seizures in the Galilee and the acceleration of land expropriations in the West Bank in the mid-1970s as the immediate catalyst for both the Land Day demonstration and similar demonstrations that were taking place contemporaneously in the West Bank. He writes: "Nothing served to bring the two Palestinian communities together politically more than the question of land."[17]
The protest of 1976
File:Zayyad.jpgTawfiq Ziad addressing a crowd. Location and date unknown.
The government decision to confiscate the land was accompanied by the declaration of a curfew to be imposed on the villages of Sakhnin, Arraba, Deir Hanna, Tur'an, Tamra, and Kabul, effective from 5 p.m. on March 29, 1976.[1] Local Arab leaders from the Rakah party, such as Tawfiq Ziad, who also served as the mayor of Nazareth, responded by calling for a day of general strikes and protests against the confiscation of lands to be held on March 30.[6] The government declared all demonstrations illegal and threatened to fire 'agitators', such as schoolteachers who encouraged their students to participate, from their jobs.[18] The threats were not effective however, and many teachers led their students out of the classrooms to join the general strike and marches that took place throughout the Arab towns, from the Galilee in the north to the Negev in southern Israel.[1][18]
The events of the day were unprecedented.[18] During the protests, four unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and two more by police.[1] Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin write that three of the dead were women and that, "the army was allowed to drive armoured vehicles and tanks along the unpaved roads of various villages of the Galilee."[18] At least 100 Arabs were wounded and many others jailed.[3] The New York Times reports that the killings were carried out by police during "riots in the Galilee region to protest over Israeli expropriation of Arab land."[19] Ezra HaLevi writes in Arutz Sheva that the riots had started the night before, "with Israeli-Arabs throwing rocks and firebombs at police and soldiers. The riots continued the next day and intensified, resulting in many wounded members of Israeli security forces and the death of the six Arab rioters."[20]
A 2003 Israeli government document notes that, "Arab public figures tried to limit the protests, but lost control over the events. The protestors burnt tires, blocked roads, and threw rocks and molotov cocktails." The report places the six fatalities within the context of the "severe clashes" between protestors and security forces during which, it is further noted, there were many injuries on both sides.[21]Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal write that Land Day differed from the Kafr Qasim massacre in that the Palestinians in Israel exhibited a "[...] daring confidence and political awareness totally lacking in 1956; this time Arab citizens were not passive and submissive. Instead they initiated and coordinated political activity at the national level, responding to police brutality with their own violence."[22]
Impact
Within the Palestinian community in Israel, there was fury toward the state and the police and mourning over the dead, but there was also the emergence of a new national pride.[22] A split erupted between the Arab political parties of Rakah and Abnaa al-Balad. Committed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Rakah held major reservations about the involvement of Palestinians from the West Bank. Conversely, Abnaa al-Balad's commitment to the establishment a single democratic Palestine saw the issues of land, equality, the refugees and the occupation as "a comprehensive, integral and indivisible whole."[17] While Rakah remained committed to a two-state solution, it charted a delicate balance, expressing a Palestinian identity more clearly so as to be more in tune with community sentiment. For example, shortly after Land Day, Tawfiq Ziad declared that, "From now on there will be no communities and religious groups but only a single Arab minority, part of the Palestinian nation."[17]
Land Day also resulted in the Arabs gaining a presence in Israeli politics in that they could no longer be ignored. Arab civil society in Israel began coordinating with one another more and protests against government policies became more frequent with a focus on three major issues: land and planning policies, socioeconomic conditions, and Palestinian national rights.[13]
Government compound named after Yitzhak Rabin in Upper Nazareth
The protest did little to stop the 1975 land expropriation plan. The number of mitzpim established reached 26 in 1981 and 52 in 1988. These mitzpim and the "development towns" of Upper Nazareth, Ma'alot, Migdal Ha'emeq and Carmiel significantly altered the demographic composition of the Galilee. While Arabs had comprised 92% of the population of the Galilee in the years following Israel's establishment, by 1994, that number was reduced to 72% out of a regional population of 680,000, with Jews making up the remaining 28%. Large-scale expropriations of land in the Galilee have generally been avoided by Israeli governments since the 1980s.[16]
Israeli media coverage of Land Day has been analyzed and critiqued by Israeli academics. Alina Koren's 1994 study of seven major Israeli newspapers found that coverage of the preparations and outcome of the day was extensive in March-April 1976, with reports relying almost entirely on statements from official Israeli information sources such as ministers, advisers or "experts on Arabs." Hardly any space was devoted to the voices of Arab organizers and participants. All of the newspapers examined, whatever their ideological differences, minimized the causes, emphasizing instead two main themes: portraying the demonstrations as the work of a marginal and unrepresentative minority and describing them as a potential threat to state security and law and order. Daniel Bar-Tal and Yona Teichman write: "Of special importance is the finding that all the newspapers delegitimized the participants, as communists, nationalists, extremists, agitators, inciters, enemies or violent people."[23]
Bar-Tal and Teichman also cite a 2000 study by professors Gadi Wolfsfeld, Eli Avraham and Issam Aburaiya that analyzed coverage by Haaretz and Yediot Aharonot of the annual commemorations between 1977 and 1997 and found that reports prior to the event each year also relied heavily on news items from the police and military sources. The focus was on security preparations, with reports on Arabs limited to the agitation and incitement put forward by their leadership. Information on the reasons for the protest was provided in between 6% to 7% of the stories published. Almost all of the reporters were Jewish, and only Haaretz had a reporter specially assigned to cover the Arab population. The event was framed within the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict with Arab demonstrators defined as enemies, rather than citizens making demands of their government. A March 22, 1997 editorial in Yediot Ahronoth for example read: "The right to protest does not include the right to run riot, to close roads, to throw stones at passing vehicles ... Again, it has to be made clear to Israeli Arabs that most of their Israeliness is based on their loyalty that they owe to their country and its laws. If they don't want these laws no one is preventing them from leaving."[23]
Legacy
Land Day poster (1984) by Abdel Rahman Al Muzain
For Palestinians, Land Day has since become a day of commemoration and tribute to those who have fallen in the struggle to hold onto their land and identity. Often serving as a day for the expression of political discontent for Arab citizens of Israel, particularly surrounding issues of equal land and citizenship rights, in 1988, they declared that Land Day should serve as "a Palestinian-Israeli civil national day of commemoration and a day of identification with Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, to be marked by yearly demonstrations and general strikes."[1][22]
Not only did Land Day work to forge political solidarity among Arab citizens of Israel, but it also worked "[...] in cementing the acceptance of the "1948 Arabs" back into the larger Palestinian world and into the heart of mainstream Palestinian nationalism."[22] The day is commemorated annually by Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and further afield in refugee camps and among the Palestinian diaspora worldwide.[6] In 2007, the Press Center of the Palestinian National Authority described it "...as a remarkable day in the history of the Palestinian people's struggle, as the Palestinians in such a particular day embrace the land of their ancestors, their identity and their existence."[24]
Land Day poster
During the Second Intifada in 2001, a general strike and "Day of Rage" was called for by Palestinians on the anniversary of Land Day. Five Palestinians were killed in Nablus during stone-throwing protests where 10,000 people took to the streets, and one Palestinian was killed in a half-hour exchange of gunfire at Ramallah where 1,000 marched on an Israeli checkpoint; many others were wounded by rubber bullets.[25][26] In annual commemorations of the day by Arab citizens, Israeli security forces are on alert but do not interfere in the protests.[1]
In recent years, Arab citizens of Israel have focused on expressing solidarity with their West Bank and Gazan brothers and sisters. In 2002, for example, Land Day demonstrations by Arab citizens of Israel also spoke out against the "Israeli siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's headquarters."[27]
Calls to launch non-violent resistance actions to protest against ongoing land confiscations regularly occur on Land Day. For example, the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights issued a press release for Land Day 2006, calling for "boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel" and an end to "racial discrimination, occupation, and colonization."[28]
^Herb and Kaplan, 1999, p. 260. "[...] the geographical scale of the Arab identity in Israel has changed dramatically a few times during the twentieth century. Prior to the disastrous 1948 defeat, they were an integral part of the agrarian Palestinian society that was gradually building its national consciousness."
^Nassar and Heacock, 1990, p. 29. A popular slogan that emerged among Palestinians after 1967 war was al-Ard qabl al'Ard ("land before honor").
^Salman Abu Sitta in Masalha and Said, 2005, p. 287, footnote 33. Sitta also gives an estimate for the total land area owned by Arab citizens prior to the expropriations: Template:Sq km to sq mi. Half of this total, some Template:Sq km to sq mi, had been exprorpriated by the early 1960s.
McDowall, David (1990), Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond (Illustrated, reprint ed.), I.B.Tauris, ISBN1850432899, 9781850432890((citation)): Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
Masalha, Nur; Said, Edward W. (2005), Nur Masalha (ed.), Catastrophe remembered: Palestine, Israel and the internal refugees : essays in memory of Edward W. Said (1935-2003), Zed Books, ISBN1842776231, 9781842776230((citation)): Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
Nassar, Jamal Raji; Heacock, Roger (1990), Intifada: Palestine at the crossroads (Illustrated ed.), Greenwood Publishing Group, ISBN027593411X, 9780275934118((citation)): Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
Schulz, Helena Lindholm; Hammer, Juliane (2003), The Palestinian diaspora: formation of identities and politics of homeland (Annotated ed.), Routledge, ISBN0415268206, 9780415268202((citation)): Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
