Land Day
Land Day, recurring on March 30, is a day of commemoration for Palestinians, both Arab citizens of Israel and those in the Israeli-occupied territories of the events of that date in 1976 in Israel.
In 1976, the Israeli government announced a plan to confiscate some of land for state purposes between the Arab villages of Sakhnin and Arraba, of which was Arab-owned. It formed part of the Israeli government's strategy aimed at the Judaization of the Galilee. In response, Arab towns declared a general strike and marches were organized from the Galilee to the Negev. The Israeli military and police killed six unarmed Arab demonstrators, half of whom were women; injured one hundred more; and arrested hundreds of others.
Scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict recognizes Land Day as a pivotal event in the struggle over land and in the relationship of Arab citizens to the Israeli state and body politic. It is significant in that it was the first time since 1948 that Arabs in Israel organized a response to Israeli policies as a Palestinian national collective. An important annual day of commemoration in the Palestinian national political calendar ever since, it is marked not only by Arab citizens of Israel, but also by Palestinians all over the world.
Background
The Arabs of Mandatory Palestine were a largely agrarian people, roughly three quarters of whom made their living off the land before the establishment of the Israeli state. After the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight during the 1948 Palestine war, land continued to play an important role in the lives of the 156,000 Palestinian Arabs who remained inside what became the state of Israel, serving as the source of communal identity, honor, and purpose.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. 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'." The number of "present-absentees" or internally displaced Palestinians from among the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel is estimated to be 200,000, or almost 17% of the total Palestinian Arab population in Israel. Salman Abu-Sitta estimates that between 1948 and 2003 more than of land was expropriated from Arab citizens of Israel.
According to Oren Yiftachel, public protest against state policies and practices from among the 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 peripheral position in the new Israeli state. Those protests that did take place against land expropriations and the restrictions Arab citizens were subject to under military rule are described by Shany Payes as "sporadic" and "limited", due to restrictions on rights to freedom of movement, expression and assembly characteristic of that period. While the political movement Al-Ard was active for about a decade, it was declared illegal in 1964, and the most notable antigovernment occasions otherwise were the May Day protests staged annually by the Communist party.
Catalyzing events
The government of Israel declared its intention to expropriate lands in the Galilee for official use, affecting some 20,000 dunams of land between the Arab villages of Sakhnin and Arraba, of which 6,300 dunams was Arab-owned. 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. According to Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 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." Orly Helpern of 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.
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 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. 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."
Protest of 1976
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. 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. On March 18 the heads of the local Arab councils, members of the Labour Party, met in Shefa-'Amr and voted against supporting the day of action. When news of the decision became public a demonstration developed outside the municipal buildings and was dispersed with tear gas. The government declared all demonstrations illegal and threatened to fire 'agitators', such as schoolteachers who encouraged their students to participate, from their jobs. 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 in Israel, from the Galilee in the north to the Negev in south. Solidarity strikes were also held almost simultaneously in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and in most of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.The events of the day were unprecedented. According to the International Jewish Peace Union, "To preempt incidents inside Israel on Land Day, about 4,000 policemen, including a helicopter-borne tactical unit and army units, were deployed in the Galilee " During the protests, four unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the Israel Defense Forces and two more by police. 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." About 100 Arabs were wounded and hundreds of others were arrested.
The New York Times reported that the killings were carried out by police during "riots in the Galilee region to protest over Israeli expropriation of Arab land." In Arutz Sheva, Ezra HaLevi writes that the riots 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." Yosef Goell, writing in The Jerusalem Post, says that, "What actually set off the rioting that led to the deaths was a wild attack by hundreds of inflamed young Arabs on an unsuspecting IDF convoy driving on the road by the villages of Sakhnin, Arrabe and Deir Hanna. There was no prior provocation on the part of that IDF convoy, unless one insists on seeing a provocation in the very presence of an Israeli army unit in the heart of Israeli Galilee."
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." Placing the six fatalities within the context of "severe clashes" between protestors and security forces, it is also noted that there were many injuries on both sides. 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."
Impact
During the Land Day events, a new sense of national pride, together with anger toward the state and police and sorrow over the dead protesters, developed among the Arab community in Israel. 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." 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."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.
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.