Thousands of people arrived in Sakhnin Tuesday (March 30) to attend a ceremony marking the 34th anniversary of ‘Land Day’. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee has planned another rally for the evening, to take place in the Negev.

Participants waved red flags and Palestinian flags and called, “Barak, Barak, defense minister, how many children have you killed today?” Mosques throughout the northern city called on worshippers to participate in the rally and churches rang bells of mourning for the deaths of six Arab-Palestinian who died protesting the confiscation of their lands in 1976.

“‘Land Day’ has long ceased to be a day of ashes – it expresses the battle for existence and life,” told Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel) Chairman MK Mohammad Barakeh. “After they took and are still taking our lands, the current government also wants to take our IDs,” he added.

 Chairman of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee Mohammad Zeidan added that policies had not changed since 1976. “Today we are also dealing with the razing of homes and confiscation of land,” he said. “We witness it in the Negev, in the center, and in the Galilee.”

At Saturday (March 27) in a rally held in the West Bank Palestinian village of Izbet Al-Tabeeb, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad marked ‘Land Day’ by calling on Palestinians to “hold on to their lands” instead of “a popular uprising in the West Bank” and that “every day in which the Palestinian people hold on to their land is ‘Land Day’.”
 
Other speakers at the rally included Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi of the Palestinian National Initiative Party, Palestinian Parliament Members Mahmoud Al Aloul, top Fatah official Hatim Abdulqader, Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery and communist Knesset Member Barakeh.
 

‘Land Day’ commemorates the killing of six Arab-Palestinians, 96 wounded and 300 arrested on March 30, 1976, in the Galilee. The anticipated peaceful demonstration by Arab-Palestinians was a response to Israeli authorities that had announced the confiscation of thousands acres of their land which Israel classified as “closed military zones” for “security and settlement purposes.”

The government decision to confiscate the land was accompanied by the declaration of a curfew to be imposed on the villages of Sakhnin, Arraba, Deir Hanna, Tur’am, Tamra and Kabul, effective from 5 p.m. on March 29, 1976. Local Arab leaders from the Communist Party of Israel, such as the mayor of Nazareth, Tawfiq Ziad, responded by calling for a day of general strike and peaceful protest against the confiscation of lands to be held on March 30. The government declared all demonstrations illegal and threatened to fire ‘agitators’, such as schoolteachers who encouraged their students to participate, from their jobs. The threats were not effective, however, and many teachers led their students out of the classrooms to join the general strike and marches that took place throughout the Arab towns in Israel, from the Galilee in the north to the Negev in south