Palestinians Hold On Their Land

On 30 March 1976, Israeli police killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel as they were protesting Israel’s expropriation of thousands of dunums of Palestinian land in the Galilee. Despite the Israeli attempt to displace, dispossess and dominate Palestinian citizens of Israel in the newly established state under an 18-year brutal military rule and the following attempts at Judaizing the Galilee and confronting its “radicalized Arabs”, the 1976 protests constituted mass collective action among Palestinian citizens of Israel, embodying the weariless steadfastness and resistance of the Palestinian people against the Israeli settler-colonial regime and affirming the inseparability of the Palestinian people as a whole despite Israeli attempts to systematically fragment them as part of its apartheid regime.

Since then, the 30th of March has been marked as Land Day, a central date in the Palestinian collective memory. The memory of the 1976 land dispossessions and the brutality of the Israeli response to Palestinian resistance echoes the Palestinian reality before and after that date. Since the inauguration of the Zionist settler-colonial project about a century ago, the Palestinian people have endured and resisted a ruthless project that aims at dominating the whole land of historic Palestine with the least Palestinian indigenous population as possible.