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The Significance of March 30

Palestine Center Information Brief No. 150 (29 March 2007)

By Nadeem Muaddi

Overview: For the past 31 years, Palestinians have observed Land Day or Youm Al-Ard on March 30. Like many decades-old anniversaries pertaining to Israel's occupation and/or expropriation of Arab and Palestinian land, Land Day is a reminder of the Palestinian people's ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. While Land Day originated from within Israel'and specifically involved the expropriation of agricultural land and death of six Palestinian citizens of Israel'it is also honored by Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Each year, Palestinians use Land Day as an opportunity to commemorate all those who have lost their lives and ancestral lands to Israel's policies of colonization.

What is 'Land Day?'

On 29 February 1976, the Israeli government announced that it planned to confiscate 21,000 dunum (5,500 acres) of Arab-owned land in order to create eight Jewish industrial centers. While government officials claimed that this expropriation was necessary in order to develop the region of Galilee, Israel's Palestinian citizenry perceived it as another attempt by Israel to geographically marginalize the state's Arab community and strip it of its agricultural livelihood. Their fears were later confirmed when Israel's Ministry of Agriculture declared the plan's primary purpose to be the creation of a Jewish majority in the Arab Galilee.¹

Having experienced institutionalized discrimination since the Jewish state's inception, the Palestinians of Israel decided to challenge this latest measure. Almost immediately after the announcement of land expropriation was made, community leaders met in an attempt to organize and communicate a unified message of objection. To deliver this message, a public demonstration was planned at the Knesset. Rather than risk a violent encounter with Israeli police, community leaders decided to cancel the protest and, instead, encourage members of their community to remain indoors'making their objections known through a general strike.

Anticipating Palestinian repudiation of the measure, Israeli authorities imposed a curfew on the lower Galilee on the evening of 29 March 1976. The following morning, Israeli police and military forces entered the striking Arab villages'a move which provoked some Arab youth into a stone-throwing demonstration. To the protestors' dismay, Israeli forces responded with live ammunition, indiscriminately opening fire upon the unarmed protestors. By the day's end, six residents of Sakhnin, Arabeh, Kufr Kana and Taibeh were killed'96 others were injured and 300 arrested.²

Israeli authorities eventually confiscated the land in question under the guise of 'security.' The territory was later converted to Jewish settlements and an Israeli military training camp.³ The events of 30 March 1976 have not been forgotten in the minds and hearts of the Palestinian people. To this day, Palestinians'whether Israeli citizens or not'annually mark March 30 as 'Land Day' to demonstrate their connection to the land and to honor the memory of those who died defending Palestinian rights to the land.

Manipulation of Domestic Law

In March of 1950, the Israeli government enacted its now infamous Absentees' Property Law, which sought to transfer the ownership of land temporarily abandoned by fleeing Palestinians during the 1948 war to the state's development authority for the exclusive use and ownership by Jews. Through this policy, between 1948 and 2003, nearly one million square dunum of land from Arab villages located within Israel's borders were confiscated.⁴ The law was later applied to Arab East Jerusalem in 2004 to further isolate the holy city from the West Bank. Barring the return of 750,000 Palestinian refugees and 32,000 internally displaced persons'now numbering approximately seven million people'to their rightful homes and villages, the Jewish state began a systematic policy of discriminating against what remained of its Arab population with the intent of achieving depopulation through intolerability.⁵

As of 2004, Palestinians comprised 23.6 percent of Israel's citizenship.⁶ Though they are a minority population'UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (29 November 1947) calls upon Israel to recognize them as such'they are instead relegated to second-class status, only referred to as 'Israeli-Arabs' or 'non-Jews.'⁷ Having endured nearly 60 years of policies aimed at suppressing their national/Arab identity'including the prevention of natural expansion and the development of municipal infrastructure as well as budgetary discrimination in the public administration of educational, health, socio-economic and cultural programs'Israel's impoverished Palestinian community is struggling to assert its rights to freedom and equality within the confines of a state created for Jews.⁸

Within the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel applies its domestic laws regarding land in combination with a military occupation created in order to sustain a system of control similar to that of apartheid-era South Africa.

According to The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, prior to Israel's 2005 unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, it formally maintained 169 illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory'that is fourteen in Jerusalem, 17 in Gaza and 138 in the West Bank.⁹ The Foundation for Middle East Peace reports that in 2004 there were over 400,000 Israeli settlers living on land expropriated from Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.¹⁰ Settling upon thousands of confiscated dunum of land and water resources, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem reports that Israel has created 'a separation cum discrimination regime, in which it maintains two systems of laws, and person's rights are based on his or her national origin.'¹¹ Adding to this, the geographic divisions caused by the creation of settler bypass roads, hundreds of military checkpoints and road obstacles as well as Israel's annexation of the Jordan Valley and Palestinian territory captured within its internationally condemned separation wall, the West Bank has been reduced to less than 50 percent of it's original size'making a contiguous and viable Palestinian state impossible.¹²

Breaching International Law

Whereas the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (12 August 1949)'a cornerstone of international human rights law that was ratified by Israel in 1951'establishes an occupying power's minimum obligations to those populations it controls, Israel stands in violation of a number of articles forbidding the construction of settlements on occupied territory, unilateral annexation of lands and resources, the arbitrary destruction of homes and property and the transfer of populations to and from the land in question.¹³ Because the Fourth Geneva Convention takes the needs of military forces into consideration and provides proper legal accommodation for their operations, the infringement of any article for reasons of 'security' is strictly prohibited.

While UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (11 December 1948) calls for the return of all Palestinian 'refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors,' UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (22 November 1967) and 446 (22 March 1979) require Israel to withdraw military forces and dismantle all settlements built in the territories occupied since the war of 1967'respectively.^14-16

According to a 2 August 2005 Palestine Center lecture entitled 'Re-claiming Palestine: The Legal Basis for Rights of Return and Restitution,' Susan Akram, associate professor of law at Boston University, explained:

[T]he legal basis for a refugee's Right of Return is established in three main bodies of law: the law of nationality and state succession, human rights law, and humanitarian law. In all three' the Right of Return is both a 'rule of customary international law and codified in international treaties.' Pointing to numerous treaties that Israel has ratified, which bind it to recognize and implement this right, Akram argued that Israel is the state entity responsible for creating the refugees and is thus held responsible for the implementation of Palestinians' Right of Return.¹⁷

To this day, Israeli domestic policies prohibiting the national rights of Palestinians'on both sides of the Green Line'violate numerous United Nations resolutions and basic tenets of international law.¹⁸ Addressing the same subject as Arkam, lecturers Bert Thiele and Souad Dajani contributed the following:

Thiele noted that despite the basis for Palestinian rights in international law, Israel has enacted its own laws enabling the expropriation of Palestinian land and property.¹⁹

[Dajani] explained that some laws enacted by Israel are designed to 'sever the links between the indigenous Palestinian people and the land,' while other laws create links between Jews and the land in order to 'replace the now-legalized broken bond' of Palestinians toward the land.²⁰

Whereas Israel's 14 May 1948 'Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel' states that the nation will 'ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex'and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations''the Jewish state has even breached the principles of its own declaration of independence.²¹

Nadeem Muaddi is Grants and Accounts Associate at The Jerusalem Fund For Education and Community Development. The above text may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. This information brief does not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.

2. Sharif Hamadeh, 'The First Yum El-Ard Protest: An interview with Fr. Shehadeh Shehadeh' Electronic Intifada (31 March 2005).

3. Orly Halpern, 'Israel's Arabs to Mark Land Day,' The Jerusalem Post (English Online Edition) (30 March 2006).

4. Nayef Hawatmeh, 'Remembering Land Day,' Al-Ahram (English Online Edition) 737 (April 2005): 7-13.

5. BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. 'Al-Nakba: The Continuing Catastrophe,' Occasional Bulletin No. 17 (May 2004).

6. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 'Israel,' The World Factbook (2007). https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/is.html.

7. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, Chapter 2 - 'Religious and Minority Rights.' (29 November 1947):

'No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex. All persons within the jurisdiction of the State shall be entitled to equal protection of the laws. The family law and personal status of the various minorities [Arab and Jewish] and their religious interests, including endowments, shall be respected'

8. Marwan Bishara, 'The Forgotten Million: Land Day and Israel's Palestinian Minority,' Palestine Center 'Info Brief' 73 (30 March 2001).

9. Foundation for Middle East Peace, 'Statistics,' Settlement Information. http://www.fmep.org/settlement_info/statistics.html.

10. Ibid.

11. 'Land Expropriation & Settlements,' B'Tselem. http://www.btselem.org/English/Settlements/.

12. Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network, 'Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign' (30 July 2003). High resolution PDF map: http://stopthewall.org/downloads/maps/wallpostermap2.69mb.pdf.

13. Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (12 August 1949). http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm.

14. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 (11 December 1948):

'Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damaged property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.'

15. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (22 November 1967):

'Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles: (i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; (ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force''

16. United Nations Security Council Resolution 446 (22 March 1979):

'Affirming once more that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War or 12 August 1949 is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem' Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East''

17. Susan Akram, Souad Dajani and Bret Thiele, 'Re-claiming Palestine: The Legal Basis for Rights of Return and Restitution,' Palestine Center 'For The Record' 231 (2 August 2005).

18. The 'Green Line' is the 1949 armistice line differentiating between land conquered by Israel during its 'War of Independence''referred to by Palestinians as 'Al-Nakbeh' or 'the catastrophe''and the West Bank.

19. Susan Akram, Souad Dajani and Bret Thiele, 'Re-claiming Palestine: The Legal Basis for Rights of Return and Restitution,' Palestine Center 'For The Record' 231 (2 August 2005).

20. Ibid.

21. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 'The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel' (14 May 1948). http://www.mfa.gov.il.

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