Today, March 30, is the 32nd Land Day observed by the Palestinian citizens of Israel and their allies around the world. It marks the day in 1976 when Israeli police killed six protesters in Northern Israel as part of an operation to seize private Palestinian land on the pretext of "security and settlement" needs.
You can read about Land Day here. This year's event are reported in Ha'aretz, the Israeli daily, here.
This history speaks for itself and I won't sully it with any of my purple prose. For those of you who are bored on frustrated with the controversial or complex elements of the anti-colonial struggle of those under Israeli rule, there's a great diary about the latest Gallup tracking poll here. Obama is up by ten points! Check it out.
I'm only going to say a few things about the struggle over the land between the native Palestinians and the Jewish colonists. It was at the heart of the conflict from the beginning. Over a century ago, when two rabbis were sent from Vienna to investigate the possibility of claiming Palestine for a Jewish state, the problem was stark. As they cabled to their backers: "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man."
In other words, contrary to the myth propagated by Zionists that the land was wild, virgin, and unsettled, all of the useful agricultural land was in use, and all the easily habitable land settled, when Zionists first arrived in Palestine. They had to get the land away from its owners, piece by piece, if they were ever to achieve their ultimate goal of Jewish control over Palestine.
What has followed has been like a guided tour of every possible way powerful people can flinch land from people who are not. Under Turkish and later British rule, Zionists used capitialism -- buying prime land from absentee owners, then expelling the peasents who had worked on it for centuries. This was extremely slow, and expensive, however. After sixty years of these practices, Zionists had obtained less than 7% of the private land in Palestine! There followed a more direct approach.
From 1947-1949, as the Palestinians struggled and failed to hold on to their freedom in their own land, the Zionist forces ethnically cleansed about 700,000 Palestinians, and seized their land. Those villages they could not immediately resettle with Jews, they destroyed with bulldozers or explosives, to prevent Palestinians, which had in some cases fled only a few miles during an assault of their villages, from returning.
Even in cases when the inhabitants stayed in what was now Israel, the state often seized their land as "absentee" property, on the grounds that they were not in their homes on the day the census was taken. Contrary to international and Israeli law, these "trustee" properties have never been returned to their owners and have been sold (exclusively to Jews).
The post-war period marked the beginning of the legalistic phase of land theft. These are the strategies for seizure that directly inspired Land Day. Vast amounts of lands were (and are) seized for roads, nature reserves, military bases and "strategic" settlements. (Jewish landowners lose land to such measures extremely rarely -- Arab landowners are targeted). Jewish settlements are planned by the government to isolate Arab villages from one another and from water and natural resources.
The state of Israel uses planning regulations to enforce and expand their control of the land. Often, as in East Jerusalem, the state simply never approves building permits for non-Jews. Entire Jewish neighborhoods are built alongside (and surrounding) Palestinians who cannot get permission to build a single room.
Jewish settlements are kept exclusively Jewish by the use of "planning committees" which function like condo boards, or homeowners' associations -- the state gives the land to the developer, who turns decisions about who can live there to a committee, and the committee, without ever having to justify its reasoning, never approves any Arab families. In the meantime, remember, Arab villages are virtually forbidden to build. It is a favorite hobby of some Israeli Jews to use satellite photos and walking tours to identify new, illegal Arab construction -- which the authorities may then bulldoze.
We all know, I hope, the story of the settlements in the West Bank and formerly in Gaza -- the use of a military occupation to seize land, steal water, and pressure the population to emigrate, a kind of ethnic cleansing in slow motion. I won't belabor it; the account of Israeli land theft in the settlements could be as long as the rest of the diary put together. I'll merely ask readers to note that the other practices described above were carried out on fellow citizens of the state of Israel (and before, on fellow subjects under the Mandate) who happened to have the misfortune not to be Jewish.
When the deed was done, the Palestinians expelled, the "bride" abducted and taken by force. John Foster Dulles was asked what he expected to happen to the millions of Palestinians whose homes were stolen and lives destroyed. He replied: "The parents will die and the children will forget."
No one has forgotten -- or forgiven -- the crime. If anything, this 32nd land day, the memory of a hundred years of theft and lies are rising up against those that thought they could bury them.
UPDATE: The usually reliably reactionary Yediot Aharonot has published an article by a Palestinian citizen of Israel on what Land Day means in the context of increasing racism in Israeli society: see here.
The Israeli government marked the occasion by announcing 600 new illegal homes in occupied East Jerusalem: see here.
Hanna Swaid has an important report on the tactics of home demolitions and discriminatory building restrictions in Backs to the demolished wall.