Arrabeh, Israel // 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 organised 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 nationalised 93 per cent of Israel’s territory.
“Government policy was explicitly to make the land Jewish – or
Judaise 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 Defence 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 defence 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 neighbour called me to attend to his wife who had gone
into labour, I walked out of my house towards an armoured 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 neighbour stepped outside her house, she was shot and
injured, Mr Khalaila said. He and his older brother, Khader, tried to help the
woman. When they were about 50 metres 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, Mr 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 programme 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.”
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