This Year's Land Day Serves As A Reminder Of The On-Going Ethnic Cleansing

On 30 March, Palestinians around the world will commemorate Land Day. It marks a day in 1976, when Israeli security forces shot dead six Palestinians and injured around 100 more, as they protested against Israeli expropriation of Arab-owned land in the country's north.

Israel had announced plans to expropriate thousands of acres of Palestinian land for "security and settlement purposes". A general strike and marches were organised in Palestinian towns within Israel. Attempts to block the protests by imposing a curfew failed, and Palestinians within Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza, and in refugee communities elsewhere in the Middle East, all turned out to demonstrate in solidarity.

The Palestinians who died that day were not those living in the occupied territories, but citizens of Israel. Land Day serves as a reminder that these citizens - who now number over 1.6 million people, or 20.5 percent of the population - still exist. They face a raft of discriminatory legislation that essentially reduces them to the status of second class citizens. More than 50 laws discriminate against Palestinians in Israel. Among these is a law allowing Jews who lost property in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during 1948 war to reclaim it, but not giving the same right to Arab Israelis who lost property in West Jerusalem or other areas during the same war.

Across the world, and particularly in this conflict, land is a singularly vexed and emotional issue. The expropriation of Palestinian land continues unabated in Israel, on both sides of the "Green Line". In recent years, international attention has focused primarily on settlements in the West Bank. These settlements, which are on occupied land, are in clear violation of international law - although the radical settlers, with their own emotional attachment to land, maintain that they have the God-given right to build anywhere in Israel. The continued expansion of settlements, however, is making the possibility of a viable Palestinian state ever smaller.

MORE...

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/5623-this-years-land-day-serves-as-a-reminder-of-the-on-going-ethnic-cleansing