On 30 March 1976, thousands of people belonging to the Palestinian minority in Israel gathered to protest Israeli government plans to expropriate 60,000 dunams of Arab-owned land in the Galilee. In the resulting confrontations with Israeli police, six Palestinians were killed, hundreds wounded, and hundreds jailed. In the intervening years, those events have become consecrated in the Palestinian memory as Land Day. After years of military rule and political docility, Land Day 1976 was the first act of mass resistance by the Palestinians inside Israel against the Zionist policy of internal colonialisation, a systematic process of expropriation that had reduced Palestinian land ownership from around 94 per cent of all territory in pre-1948 Palestine to less than three per cent in what is now considered to be Israel. After years of quiet ostracism by the PLO and the Arab states, Land Day reaffirmed the Palestinian minority in Israel as an inseparable part of the Palestinian and Arab nation.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 10:10:32 +0000
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