On this day 30 March forty-five years ago, the Israeli police shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel as they were protesting against the Israeli government’s expropriation of thousands of donums of Palestinian land in the Galilee. Since then, March 30 has been known as Land Day and is an important date in the Palestinian political calendar. But Palestinians have been terrorized and brutalized for 100 years in the racist cause of Zionism.
Although Palestinians had been driven from their homes from the inception of Zionism in Russia in 1885 by Theodore Herzl it was the pogroms against the Jewish community mainly in Eastern Europe that caused many Jews to seek refuge abroad. Terrified Jews fled to other European countries, despite the purges, massacres and expulsions of Jews in these same countries in earlier centuries. Despite these and the expulsion by King Edward (1) in 1290 of all Jews who survived the earlier massacre of thousands of Jews, they were prepared to risk a return to Britain.
Britain’s antisemitic rulers responded with tentative plans to send Jews to other remote parts of the British Empire and soon prepared the 1905 Aliens Act to prevent poor Jews without money from entering Britain. These proposals gave rise to new waves of anti-Semitism in the UK and world-wide and created an atmosphere where Theodore Herzl’s proposal to combine religious Judaism with the nationalism of growing national liberation movements, seeking independence from Imperialism world-wide, to call for “a home for Jews in Palestine”, whilst concealing it’s secret plan for a “Jewish State in Palestine” with racism built into its very title.
Simultaneously in 1901 a group of Zionists established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to purchase land from Palestinian owners not living on their estates. On acquiring the land the JNF quickly and ruthlessly embarked on a program that continues to this day, of evicting the tenant farmers, their families & their employees from their homes and the land that sustained them for generations. The completely furnished Palestinian homes and land were then given to Zionist families.
The JNF registered as a charity in UK, USA, Canada & several other countries used the pogroms, and wide-spread anti-Semitism in Europe to collect $Millions to fund lawyers to claim ownership of lands occupied & worked by Palestinian families for several generations, even centuries. The JNF to this day, use lawyers to evict Palestinian families unable to produce undisputable evidence of ownership of their homes and land.
Imperial Britain used is imperial army and mandate authority from the League of Nations over Palestine to ensure that no Palestinian institutions or organizations would be created, to oversee prosperity, peace and justice, over their own state at the end of the British mandate.
On the contrary Britain appointed a Zionist Sir Herbert Samuel as governor who aided the Zionist movement to grow and to create all the necessary institutions to establish a Zionist Para-State ready to take control of every aspect of power at the earliest opportunity, including well trained armed gangs, to the extent that they demanded that Britain end it’s mandate so that the Zionists could assume complete control. When Britain hesitated about leaving, the Zionists decided to force them out by bombing their HQ at the King David Hotel. Britain even trained and integrated a Zionist battalion into its army in Palestine, who showed their gratitude by publicly hanging two British Officers and set booby traps under their hanging bodies.
Britain had now created all the conditions necessary – a disarmed Palestinian people with no legal army or weapons to defend themselves. The unarmed Palestinian people were subjected to the Zionist Plan Dalet in the spring of 1948 involving the massacre & ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s largest and most prosperous urban centers including 60,000 survivors of Haifa and the Palestinian neighborhoods of West Jerusalem and scores of Palestinian cities, towns and villages and bombed & besieged Jaffa – planned to be the heart of the Free Palestinian state following UN Resolution 181. Jaffa was thus ethnically cleansed of 60,000 survivors of the massacre by May 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues to this day.
Zionists from across the world raced across the world to occupy the houses that were the homes of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women and children, who were left without their friends and neighbors, land, homes, tools, utensils, books, historical papers that had been in the family for hundreds of years.
Thousands of Palestinian villages and hamlets have been destroyed and the residents either driven our or executed in what Ilan Pape calls The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
This year, Palestinians will be marking Land Day at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left much of the world’s populations under lockdown and curfew. Being confined to their homes or their villages and towns is not a new experience for Palestinians which is perhaps why so many have taken it in their stride.
Indeed, Palestinians in the West Bank are confined to what amounts to Bantustans connected to each other only by roads controlled by the Israeli regime, while their brothers and sisters in Gaza live in an open-air prison deemed “unlivable” by the United Nations. Most Palestinians living across the “Green Line” have Israeli citizenship, they nevertheless live in urban and rural ghettos.
Palestinians are also disconnected from their Arab brothers and sisters with many of them prevented from travelling around the Arab world, either because their documents do not permit them to do so (in the case of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship) or because they are under travel bans. Palestinian footballers and their supporters in besieged Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank to play football and vice-versa and their national team need to queue for up to 8 hours to travel to other countries to play, and may then be refused permission to travel.
Meanwhile, Israel is continuing its practices of removing Palestinians from their land, the demolitions of Palestinian homes continue, despite the outbreak. The Israeli regime claims these buildings are illegal in order to justify demolishing them, yet Palestinians are consistently denied building permits.
Already, last week there were three cases in which illegal Israeli settlements razed Palestinian land and there has been an overall rise in attacks against Palestinian properties.
Palestinians from Beita village near Nablus held a sit-in to try and protect land from being stolen by settlers. The Israeli security forces came out in full force to give cover to the settlers and in the process shot 15-year-old Mohammed Hammayel in the head killing him instantly.
With COVID-19 restrictions partially lifted the planting of the first tree to commemorate the NAKBA (catastrophe) of the deliberate destruction and ethnic cleansing of thousands of Palestinian is devoted to the destroyed village Dayr Nakhkhas and you can read all about the village at this link https://bit.ly/39VP2p5