30th March, is the day when Palestinians commemorate Land Day, also known as Yom al-Ard. marking over 50 years of Palestinian land confiscation and dispossession, a day of significance for Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian diaspora everywhere.
This important day in Palestinian history commemorates the Palestinians sense of belonging to a people, to a cause and a country, to stand united against racial oppression and rules of apartheid,and the discriminatory practices of the Israeli government, giving continual potency to the Palestinians cause , its quest for justice and Palestinian rights, and its resistance to injustice,who never cease to fight for their land while holding passionately to their history and identity.
It is the right of return, recognised in the United Nations Resolution 194, that drives Palestinians to continue with the commemoration of Land Day - regardless of their geographical location.The day is commemorated annually by Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and further afield in refugee camps and among the Palestinian diaspora worldwide, with demonstrations, marches and by planting olive and fruit trees, as a symbol of their resilience to daily occupation.
Despite attempts to suppress Palestinian political movements, Land Day has remained a unifying symbol of resistance for Palestinian citizens in their fight for land, identity, and rights.While Israeli settler colonial expansionism does not rest, neither does Palestinian perseverance. Land Day continues to be poignantly relevant as Israel continues to confiscate land, expand their colonies, and continue to build their illegal settlements in flagrant violation of all international conventions, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law.
Land Day has been a day of resistance of Palestinians worldwide since 1976 when on March 30, 1976, Palestinian citizens of Israel launched a general strike and mass demonstrations to protest the state’s expropriation of thousands of acres of Palestinian-owned land in the Galilee. The Israeli state responded with a massive military and police mobilization, resulting in the killing of six unarmed protesters and the wounding of hundreds more.
The immediate catalyst for the strike was the Israeli government’s “Area 9” plan, a policy aimed at the “Judaization of the Galilee.” This involved the seizure of approximately 5,000 acres of land between the Palestinian towns of Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna.
The Labor-led government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin designated the area a closed military zone to facilitate the construction of exclusively Jewish settlements and industrial parks.This was a continuation of the “Present Absentee” legal framework used since 1948 to seize property from Palestinians who remained within the state’s borders but were displaced from their home villages.
The general strike of March 30 saw near-total participation across Palestinian communities in Israel. The construction and agricultural sectors were the most heavily impacted, as thousands of Palestinian laborers refused to report to work in Israeli cities. In Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel, shops remained shuttered and schools were closed. The strike also saw significant support from Palestinian students at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa.
On the eve of the protest, the Rabin government declared all demonstrations illegal and imposed a strict curfew on the Galilee region. Thousands of soldiers and Border Police units, supported by armored personnel carriers and tanks, were moved into position.
On March 30, in the village of Rafat al-Zuhairi, security forces opened fire on a crowd that gathered in defiance of the curfew. In Sakhnin and Arraba, protesters met the advancing armored columns with stones and burning tires. By the end of the day, six Palestinians—Raja Abu Raya, Khader Khalaila, Khadija Qasem, Kheir Yasin, Mohsen Taha, and Raafat al-Zuhairi—had been shot and killed.
At the same time the Israeli state was suppressing its own Palestinian citizens, it was deeply involved in the Lebanese civil war. The Rabin government was providing millions of dollars in clandestine military aid, training, and intelligence to the fascist-sectarian Phalangist militias in Lebanon. This alliance was aimed at crushing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its Lebanese leftist allies, who were using Lebanon as a base for operations after being driven out of Jordan in 1970.
Every year since, Palestinian communities in Israel and the occupied territories have gathered to commemorate these events,remember those fallen, highlight Israels ongoing seizure of Palestinian land, and to reaffirm their connection to the land and their struggle for justice, standing united against oppression..Land Day became a symbol of land and collective identity, Land serves as the collective memory of belonging and the right to remain.
The day has also become a symbol of sumud (steadfastness) and the deep, unbreakable bond between a people and their land. It is not only a day of mourning, but also one of dignity and unity. Across generations, Palestinians continue to honor their roots, their olive trees, and the land that carries their history, identity, and hope. Land Day reminds the world: Palestine is not just a place, it is memory, resistance, and a living promise that cannot be erased.
Before 1976, controlling Palestinian land with the least Palestinian people took the form of the mass forcible displacement and dispossession of 85 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian people during the Nakba of 1948.
In the immediate aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel, Israel placed the 160,000 remaining Palestinian citizens of Israel 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 Israel had denied the right of return, as well as those who remained in Israel 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, Israel 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.
Land Day is a day that unites everyone around one idea: land is not just soil—it is belonging, dignity, and collective memory. As a supporter of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice I will continue to join other people of conscience in supporting the global led Boycott, Divestment and sanction (BDS) campaign, intensifying our collective efforts to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people.Respecting today the Palestinians inside Israel, the Israeli-Occupied Territories of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, and those in exile, who mark Land Day and view it as an assertion of the Palestinians' right to return to their homeland.
Land Day is also the 8th anniversary of the Great March of Return, a massive march led by Palestinians in Gaza towards the lands from which they were ethnically cleansed, that lay mere kilometers away, but blocked by the colonial fence. Despite the march including elderly and children, and being a peaceful march, the IOF killed 230 Palestinians, and deliberately injured and maimed over 36,000. The popular support for the liberation struggle is embodied in the Great March of Return.
Today we have seen the most explicit and brutal expression of the systems of oppression in Palestine. It is not a new escalation rather a continuous reality of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonial violence.
In Jerusalem, Palestinian people have still been subject to a regime of displacement and genocide. The ongoing expulsions in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, and the systematic demolition of homes, are part of a deliberate strategy to fragment and remove the Palestinian presence.
The closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan represents not only a restriction of religious freedom, but an attack on collective life, memory, and identity.
As Palestinians mark the 50th anniversary of Land Day, Israeli land confiscations and forced displacements continue across the West Bank and Gaza. Thousands of dunams seized, homes destroyed, and communities uprooted reflect the ongoing struggle to defend Palestinian land and identity.
In the West Bank, military raids, arrests, settler violence, and the expansion of settlements intensify fragmentation and dispossession. Movement restrictions and land confiscation are tools of control that suffocate daily life and deny the possibility of stability.
In Gaza, the ongoing blockade and repeated military assaults have produced a catastrophic humanitarian reality and every aspect of life has been shattered. Entire communities are destroyed, and access to food, water, healthcare, and electricity is systematically denied.
In Gaza land still exists but access is increasingly denied, Near the Yellow Line families see land they cannot reach, Land becomes divided by forced separation and occupation’s restrictions.
What is unfolding is not only a crisis, but a deliberate policy of collective punishment. Across Palestine, checkpoints, surveillance, and military presence structure everyday life.
Children grow up under occupation, learning fear as a condition of existence, yet they remain children, still holding onto their innocence and the fragile spirit of childhood. Despite the depths of hardship, the laughter of children in Gaza is a testament to daily steadfastness in the face of blockade and displacement. Even in the harshest conditions, life insists on being heard.
Meanwhile amid the conflict with Iran, settler rampages and deadly incidents have surged in the West Bank. To contain the escalation, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) redeployed a battalion from Lebanon to the West Bank. Such a step came amid increasing international pressure on the Israeli government, including from AIPAC-backed US lawmakers who called for zero tolerance for settler violence.
Even so, the IDF’s ongoing engagement in regional conflicts, along with expansionist Israeli government rhetoric, could further worsen settler-driven violence. From 1 March to 23 March, at least seven Palestinians were shot and killed by settlers. Following one of the shootings, another Palestinian died after inhaling tear gas fired by the IDF. This marks the highest number of fatalities during settler incidents in a month , reached only once before, in October 2023
We should denounce the Israeli occupation and the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, as well as the genocide in Gaza and all forms of collective punishment imposed on the Palestinian peoplem while strongly condemnng imperialist interventions, foreign military presence, and the expansion of war across the region, alongside the use of sanctions and embargoes as tools of domination and control.
We must reaffirm that peace cannot be built through militarization, occupation, or imperialist intervention. Peace can only emerge from the struggles of peoples and from self-determination. Despite Israel's genocide and apartheid, Palestinians will never give up their refugees' right to return to their ancestral lands.
Land Day is a reminder of the Palestinians’ struggle against Israel’s apartheid and the cost of the persistence of impunity for violations by Israel. Palestinians are entitled to live on their lands, without discrimination, oppression and uprooting.
The 1976 Land Day strike inspired the following powerful poem by Tawfiq Zayyad, Palestinian poet, writer, scholar and politician, that continues to resonate across the Palestinian generations.
Here we will stay - Tawfiq Zayyad ( 7/5/ 29 - 5/7/ 94)
In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain like a wall upon your chest,
and in your throat like a shrad of glass,
a cactus thron,
and in your eyes
a sandstorm.
We shall remain
a wall upon your chest,
clean dishes in your restaurants,
serve drinks in your bars,
sweep the floors of your kitchens
to snatch a bite for our children
from your blue fangs.
Here we shall stay,
sing our songs,
take to the angry streets,
fill prisons with dignity.
In Lidda, in Ramla, in the galilee,
we shall remain, guard the shade of the fig
and olive trees,
ferment rebellion in our children
as yeast in the dough.
Link to poem by Mahmoud Darwish on the same theme :- https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/to-our-land-mahmoud-darwish-13309.html
Today, on Land Day, the soil of Palestine speaks. It remembers every footprint, every olive tree, every life rooted in its memory. Today, we remember that land is not a commodity; it is life itself.
The international community must go beyond solidarity and demand an end to the occupation and defend the self-determination of the Palestinian people, as recognized by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations General Assembly, and to demand our governments ends its complicity in Israel’s settler-colonialism and apartheid, and to stop arming Israel, and ban all trade with illegal Israeli settlements on stolen land.
Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, must be reunified under the Palestinian Authority. Failing this would mean that a future Palestinian state becomes an illusion. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Land Day - 1976-1986 Sliman Mansour
Land Day - 1985 Abdel Rahman Al Muzain
