Palestinian citizens of Israel on Tuesday marked 45 years since the first Land Day — an annual commemoration of the mass strikes and protests held on March 30, 1976 in response to a plan by the Israeli government, then led by Yitzhak Rabin, to confiscate thousands of dunams of land in the Galilee. Israeli security forces shot dead six demonstrators during those protests.
Over the years, Land Day has turned into a major event for Palestinians around the world to protest Israel’s discriminatory land regime and policies of dispossession. Although the methods Israel has used to expropriate Palestinian land inside its pre-1967 borders have changed over the decades — particularly after lifting military rule over Palestinian citizens of Israel in 1966 — the state’s policies are still being advanced to this day.
Salim Wakim, 67, is a leading attorney who has spent the last 43 years working to protect what is left of Palestinian land inside Israel.
Wakim’s father was originally from the village of Al-Bassa, whose residents were uprooted in 1948. After the Nakba, his father arrived in the Galilee village of
— source 972mag.com | Suha Arraf | Mar 31, 2021