The celebration of Yawm al-Ard (Earth Day) goes back to the 30th of March in 1976, when the Palestinian “Sons of the Nation” stood against the Israeli authorities in the lands that were occupied in 1948. They stood against the authorities that practiced various forms of repression and terrorism against them and deprived them of any right to expression or assembly. These authorities worked to conquer the greater portion of the land by any means, including the utter destruction of many villages, leaving Palestinians with no shelter or source of livelihood. Because of this pressure, which Palestinians living in the lands of ’48 endured for twenty-eight years, a popular outburst erupted in the form of a general strike and a rally. The Zionist occupation faced this outburst with excessive brutality, killing six (among them a woman), wounding dozens, and arresting more than three hundred people.
The spark that ignited Palestinian anger was the confiscation of 21,000 dunim (roughly 5,000 acres of land) from a number of Arab villages, and the designation of these villages for Zionist settlements under the banner of “The Plan for the Development of Galilee.” This plan was announced in 1975 and represented the fruition of a long plot to erase the identity of the Galilee region (Northern Palestine) by forcing Palestinian citizens to emigrate. Zionist authorities confiscated more than one million dunim of the Galilee and the Palestinian Triangle in the period from 1948 to 1972, in addition to millions of dunims that were seized by force, after a series of massacres, during the War of 1948.
Yawm al-Ard was the first Palestinian protest in the 1948 lands. In it, Palestinians used stones, axes, against the authorities armed with machinery, guns, and gas canisters. Yawm al-Ard thereby became a day to express resistance and solidarity with the Arab identity of the land in all the Palestinian territories. Yawm al-Ard became a day to stand against the Western-Zionist media’s allegations that the Palestinians sold their own land, for statistics prove that the percentage of the land Zionists acquired by purchase was extremely tiny. They purchased this land using overly elaborate methods, such as seizing the lands of poor civilian farmers through real estate banks, or those of landowners who didn’t live in Palestine in the first place. Rather, they acquired the vast majority of their lands both with the help of the British Occupation and by force of arms.
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Translated by Emma Moros
Translation reviewed by Emily Drumsta
29 / 03 / 2015, 50 : 02 PM
