[News] Palestinians remember Land Day

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Palestinians remember Land Day

Jonathan Cook writing from Arrabeh, The Electronic Intifada, 30 March 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10431.shtml

Palestinians across the Middle East were due to commemorate Land Day 
today, marking the anniversary of clashes in 1976 in which six 
unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli army as it tried 
to break up a general strike.

Although Land Day is one of the most important anniversaries in the 
Palestinian calendar, sometimes referred to as the Palestinians' 
national day, the historical event it marks is little spoken of and 
rarely studied.

"Maybe its significance is surprising given the magnitude of other 
events in Palestinian history," said Hatim Kanaaneh, 71, a doctor, 
who witnessed the military invasion of his village.

"But what makes Land Day resonate with Palestinians everywhere is 
that it was the first time Palestinians inside Israel stood together 
and successfully resisted Israel's goal of confiscating their land."

The confrontation took place between the army and a group usually 
referred to as "Israeli Arabs," the small minority of Palestinians 
who managed to remain in their homes during the 1948 war that led to 
the founding of Israel. Today they number 1.2 million, or nearly 
one-fifth of Israel's population.

"We were given citizenship by Israel, but have always been treated as 
an enemy, perceived of as a threat to the state's Jewishness," said 
Dr. Kanaaneh, who last year published his memoir, A Doctor in 
Galilee, which offers a rare account in English of Palestinian life 
inside Israel during the Land Day period.

In 1976, Dr. Kanaaneh, having completed his medical studies at 
Harvard University in the United States, was the only physician in Arrabeh.

Israel crushed organized political activity among Israel's 
Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966, Dr. Kanaaneh said. 
Nonetheless, popular frustration had mounted as the state 
expropriated privately-owned Palestinian land to build new 
communities for Jewish citizens, many of them recent immigrants.

During military rule, historians have noted, vast swathes of land 
were taken from Palestinians, both from refugees in exile and from 
Israel's own citizens. Jews had bought only six per cent of Palestine 
by the time of the 1948 war, but today the state has nationalized 93 
percent of Israel's territory.

"Government policy was explicitly to make the land Jewish -- or 
Judaize it, as it was called," Dr. Kanaaneh said.

The announcement in the mid-1970s of the confiscation of a further 
2,000 hectares led to the creation of a new body, the National 
Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands, which provided a more 
assertive political leadership.

The minority's decision to strike, Dr. Kanaaneh said, shocked the 
Israeli authorities, which were not used to challenges to official 
policy. "Both sides understood the significance of the strike. For 
the first time we were acting as a national minority, and Israel was 
very sensitive to anything that suggested we had a national identity 
or a unified agenda, especially over a key resource like land."

Although the strike was strictly observed by Palestinians throughout 
Israel, the focus of the protest were three villages in the central 
Galilee that faced the loss of a large area of prime agricultural 
land: Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Deir Hanna.

The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and his defense minster, Shimon 
Peres, acted on the eve of the strike.

"What was surprising was that they didn't send in the police, as 
you'd expect when dealing with citizens of a country, but the army," 
Dr. Kanaaneh said.

The government's original plan, he said, was to break the strike and 
force employees to go to work, but when villagers began throwing 
stones, the army imposed a curfew.

"When a neighbor called me to attend to his wife who had gone into 
labor, I walked out of my house towards an armored vehicle waving my 
stethoscope," Dr. Kanaaneh said. "A soldier aimed his rifle straight 
at me and I hurried back inside."

Ahmed Khalaila, who was 18 and living in Sakhnin, remembered being 
woken early by loudspeakers. "Soldiers were calling out that we must 
not leave the house ... We couldn't even look out of the windows," he said.

When a neighbor stepped outside her house, she was shot and injured, 
Khalaila said. He and his older brother, Khader, tried to help the 
woman. When they were about 50 meters from her, Khader was shot in the head.

"He was still breathing and we hoped he could be saved, but there 
were checkpoints at all the entrances to the village. We knew no 
ambulance would be coming for him."

Eventually the family managed to get him into a car and drove towards 
the nearest hospital. Held at a checkpoint, Khalaila said, the family 
watched as Khader bled to death as he lay across his younger 
brother's legs on the back seat. Khader was 24 and recently married.

No one ever came to investigate what had happened, or offered the 
family compensation. "It was as if a bird had died," he said. "No one 
was interested; no questions were asked in the parliament. Nothing."

As well as the six deaths, hundreds more Palestinians were injured 
and sweeping arrests were made of political activists.

Dr. Kanaaneh said the stiff resistance mounted by the villagers 
eventually forced the government to revoke the expropriation order.

Victory, however, was far from clear cut. The next year, Ariel 
Sharon, as agriculture minister, announced a program of new Jewish 
settlements called "lookouts" in the Galilee "to prevent control of 
state lands by foreigners," meaning Israel's own Palestinian 
citizens. The three villages were surrounded by the lookout 
communities, which came to be known collectively as Misgav regional council.

"They were intended to be agricultural communities, but Land Day 
stopped that," Dr. Kanaaneh said. "Instead they became small bedroom 
communities, and much of the land we defended was passed to Misgav's 
jurisdiction.

"Today the owners of the land pay taxes to the regional council 
rather than their own municipalities, and Misgav can decide, if it 
wants, to try to confiscate the land again. We may have got our land 
back, but it is not really in our hands."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
His latest books are 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/theelectronic-20>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the 
Middle East (Pluto Press) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/theelectronic-20>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His 
website is <http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in 
<http://www.thenational.ae/>The National, published in Abu Dhabi.



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