Yom Al-Ard, also known as Land Day, in which the Palestinians commemorate the killing of six Palestinians during protests against israeli land expropriation on March 30, 1976.

Despite the israeli attempt to displace, dispossess and dominate Palestinians in the newly established zionist entity under an 18-year brutal military rule and the following attempts at Judaizing the Galilee and confronting its “radicalized Arabs”, the 1976 protests constituted mass collective action among Palestinian citizens of Israel, embodying the weariless steadfastness and resistance of the Palestinian people against Jewish settler-colonial regime and affirming the inseparability of the Palestinian people as a whole despite israeli attempts to systematically fragment them as part of its apartheid regime.

Since then, the 30th of March has been marked as Land Day, a central date in the Palestinian collective memory. The memory of the 1976 land dispossessions and the brutality of the Zionist regime’s response to Palestinian resistance echoes the Palestinian reality before and after that date. Since the inauguration of the Zionist settler-colonial project about a century ago, the Palestinian people have endured and resisted a ruthless project that aims at dominating the whole land of historic Palestine with the least Palestinian indigenous population as possible. 

Historical and Ongoing Palestinian Land Theft

Before 1976, controlling Palestinian land with the least Palestinian people took the form of the mass forcible displacement and dispossession of 85 percent of the indigenous Palestinian people during the Nakba of 1948. In the immediate aftermath of the establishment of the zionist regime, the regime placed the 160,000 remaining Palestinians under an 18-year “structure of exception into its everyday system of governance, placing them outside the law by racializing their presence as a threat.” The military rule was a tool to dominate and contain the Palestinians and above that to displace and massively dispossess their land. For example, the discriminatory Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, made the properties of the Palestinian refugees to whom zionist regime had denied the right of return, as well as those who remained in occupied Palestine as internally displaced persons, eligible for confiscation and possession by the state.

After committing another wave of displacement and dispossession in 1967, and being in control of the Palestinian people as a whole and the whole territory of Palestine, zionist occupation regime would transfer its military rule and land expropriation policies to the occupied territory and design a discriminating coercive environment that would drive ongoing Palestinian displacement, transfer in more and more illegal settlers, while condensing Palestinians in an open-air prison in the Gaza Strip and in Bantustans in the West Bank.

The Palestinian people continue to face the ongoing Nakba, exemplified in their denial to return to their homes and the ongoing displacement on both sides of the Green Line. Rendering Palestinian homeless during a pandemic does not halt zionist regime from expanding its settler-colonial project. While Israel continues to fail to fulfill its obligation under international law to provide vaccines for Palestinians in the occupied territory, apart from Jerusalem, as part of its institutionalized regime of racial oppression and domination, it continues to subject them to the ongoing threat of displacement.

Hamas called for participating in “Land Day” gathering in eastern Gaza

Meanwhile, the Hamas Movement has urged the Palestinian masses to participate in the central popular gathering to be held on Thursday afternoon in the eastern border area of Gaza City to mark the occasion of Land Day and to emphasize the Palestinian people’s right to their land.

“The Palestinian people’s commemoration of Land Day confirms their attachment to their land and their willingness to defend it and reflects the unity of the Palestinian land and the inevitability of our people’s return to it,” spokesman Abdul-Latif Qanu said in a statement on Wednesday.

Spokesman Qanu stressed that all the Israeli attempts to change the identity of the Palestinian land and Judaize it would be doomed to failure.

He added that the Palestinian people and their resistance would continue their struggle against the Zionist occupation entity until its removal from the entire Palestinian land. (ILKHA)