Leaders of the Palestinian citizens of Israel marching in the demonstration in Jaffa commemorating the 32nd Land Day.
Each 30th of March, Palestinians
from all over the world commemorate Land Day with demonstrations in order to
remind the international community of the ongoing Israeli injustice and
oppression against them. Land Day (Yom al-Ard in Arabic), was initially established
to honour the killing by Israeli troops of six Palestinians in the Galilee on 30
March 1976, during peaceful protests over the confiscation of Palestinian land
from villages in this area. However, as land confiscation is part of a larger
policy of Israeli colonialism in the Palestinian Territories, it has now become
a day of demonstration to link all Palestinians in their struggle against the
occupation and for self-determination and national liberation. Although the
Israeli apartheid policies towards Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians
from the West Bank and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, aimed to break and
divide Palestinian society, land continued to play an important role in all
their lives, and continues to be a core issue of the conflict. For this ruptured
community, land is not only the main source of income, but also functions as a
source of communal identity, purpose and honour.
The issue of land is the ground for any
negotiation and peace process: land is the first necessary element to establish
a Palestinian state with real sovereignty, and with geographical unity between
the districts and between West Bank and Gaza Strip. Land is also where Palestinians
have to look for the implementation of their rights, the right to their own
property, the right of return, the right to self-determination, the right to work
on their land and to build their homes on it.
Following 32 years since the original Land
Day demonstration, Israeli policy has not changed: land confiscation and house
demolitions are going on constantly, to make room for illegal settlement
expansion and bypass roads that are restricted exclusively to the settlers. Only
in the past week, six homes were demolished in three villages of the southern
hills of Hebron, as part of a larger policy of deportation in this area, begun
with the expansion of local settlements in the 1990s. An additional six homes in
villages located to the southwest of Jenin were demolished without previous warnings
or orders. On the same day, another three homes were demolished in the al-Jeeb
village, located in the Jerusalem district, in order to make space for the new
settlements and construction of the Separation Wall.
These are powerful examples that Israel’s
policy towards Palestinians is one of deportation and ethnic cleaning. In
addition to this, hundreds of checkpoints and obstacles to the freedom of
movement, closed military zones and industrial zones occupy and fragment the
land needed to build a future Palestinian state.
Annapolis superficially promised the
Palestinians a real peace agreement to be reached and implemented by the end of
2008, yet the reality on the ground shows anyone who is willing to look that
reality is light-years away from this. During and after the Annapolis conference,
Israel announced it would build more than ten thousand new housing units. Tens of
thousands of dunam of land have been confiscated, and the Separation Wall and
fence barriers to protect settlements have been built or are still under
construction. This is done to prevent Palestinians from implementing their
rights.
The American plan for peace requires the cessation
of all settlement expansion. However, Bush said after Annapolis that some facts
on the ground should be taken into consideration in the ongoing peace
negotiations. These facts evidently include the Separation Wall and the settlements.
Translated into political language, this means: no real achievements based on
justice are coming.
This situation bestows the right for all
Palestinians to raise some demands of their leaders. If democratic policy
should be based on the principle of accountability, it’s now the time for the
Palestinian Authority to give the electorate an account of its work. Citizens
should receive an answer to their legitimate question of ‘where are we going?’ The
PA leadership knows full well that the demands of the Palestinian people are
not just for food, work and salary, but are first and foremost political demands,
for freedom, justice, self determination, the right of return and the
establishment of a real and sovereign state. The people need to see changes on
the ground, but yet again, the changes on the ground in all their cruelty are
going in a direction opposite of that which is hoped.
Saeb Arikat, the head of the Palestinian negotiations
team, expressed this feeling when he declared: “if there will not be a tangible
peace agreement during this year, there is a concrete possibility for the PA to
collapse.”
Actually, the Palestinian people have
already given their answers. The peace process of the Oslo Agreement is dead.
The matter now is merely to decide who will lead and issue the legal death certification.
The result on the ground of the last governmental elections is another
answer: people voted against Oslo and
against corruption, but their choice has been denied. Even Kahled Mesh’al, the
leader of Hamas, couldn’t ignore this reality when he said, two days after the
elections “as the Hamas Party, we are very surprised by this great result.” And
those who are cynically attempting to make a clear separation between the
failure of the Oslo process as a political agreement, and corruption of the
Palestinian leadership, are working against the Palestinian people—against
their vote and therefore against their rights. Corruption is the son of the
Oslo Agreement failure: it is the marriage between politics and economy.
This special day, Land Day, gathering
Palestinian people who struggle for freedom and self determination, could give
them the possibility to think seriously about the achievements of their
leadership, their real power and their possibility to defend Palestinian
rights. Now, following Palestinian society has shown their great disappoint in
their leaders and in politics in general, if Israel and the international
community didn’t accept the results of Palestinian democratic elections the
first time, what will happen next time? Where can we go as Palestinians? And
where will we decide to go?
It’s time for the Palestinian leadership to
think about the national project in the framework of what is occurring on the
ground. It’s time for them to give answers to the people and to work for the
real and primary needs of their people.
Otherwise the struggle will never be able
to find its correct path towards peace and justice.
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