On Land Day, MPPM expresses its solidarity with the Palestinian people

Today, in Palestine and in all its diasporas around the world, Land Day is celebrated. This year, the Palestinian people recall the events of 1976 in a particularly difficult situation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The predictable advance of the disease, propelled by the deficient sanitary conditions in which the majority of the Palestinian population lives, especially in the refugee camps and in the Gaza Strip, makes us fear the worst. At the same time, Israel is intensifying its abuses against the Palestinians, raising obstructing measures of support and prevention of the pandemic taken in the Palestinian communities and exploiting the situation to speed up the de facto annexation of the Palestinian territory.

On March 30, forty-four years ago, the Israeli army brutally repressed a large popular movement that had risen among the Palestinian community within the territory of the State of Israel in protest against the plan decided a month earlier for the expropriation of an area of about 20 square kilometers in the North of the country. As a result of the general strike and the demonstrations that took place, six Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed and about a hundred were injured. In the wave of repression that followed, many hundreds were arrested.

The events of 1976 were a defining moment in the struggle of the Palestinian people for recognition of their national cause and have since been marked as Land Day. The popular protests of 1976 once again drew the world's attention to the process of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population with a view to the total judaization of the territory incorporated into the State of Israel.

This process, carried out meticulously and violently from the end of 1947 onwards (that is, during the British Mandate, even before the creation of the State of Israel) in a large-scale military operation which resulted in the expulsion of more than 700,000 people, continued after the 1949 armistice, targeting those Palestinian communities that had managed to resist the expulsion and that remained in their land, especially in the North. At the same time, the resistance of the Palestinian population in the territory of Israel, as well as the repression that befell it, made evident, in the most painful way, the segregationist and discriminatory nature of the State of Israel, belying the slogan of “the only democracy of the Middle East”.

The large demonstrations by Palestinian citizens of Israel and their impact on other segments of the Palestinian nation, particularly in the West Bank territories and in the refugee camps in Palestine and in the countries of the region, were a powerful affirmation of unity against the attempt to systematically erase their existence as a people and to silence the reasons for their struggle.

Year after year, the symbolism of Land Day and its deep political significance are reinforced, as demonstrated by the Great March of Return that began in Gaza precisely two years ago. Completely unarmed, like the demonstrations of 1976, it has been repressed by the Israeli army with the brutality that characterizes it, with, at this time, more than 300 dead and about 30,000 wounded.

This year, the commemoration of Land Day takes place in a political framework marked by the disclosure, by the US Administration, at the end of last January, of the so-called “deal of the century”. In the wake of a series of measures taken by the United States of America in open defiance of international legality, an example of which is the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel, that plan aims to seal once and for all the total annexation of Palestine, burying the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to the establishment of a state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital and which is recognized and reiterated in hundreds of United Nations resolutions.

The announcement of the US plan, drawn up in close collaboration with the Israeli government, was immediately seized by Netanyahu, in the midst of an election campaign and facing legal proceedings on charges of bribery and fraud, to intensify measures to confiscate the Palestinian territory in the West Bank and the expansion of Zionist colonization. Such measures are accompanied by the continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, through the destruction of trees and cultivated fields and houses and economic infrastructure, or by their confinement and segregation, through the Israeli army's narrow mesh of checkpoints and the Wall, which the International Court in The Hague has ruled illegal, and of which the criminal blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip is the most dire example.

The unconditional support of the US administration, along with the silence, if not the active complicity of many countries of the European Union, some of which are governed by the extreme right, has also fuelled the expansionist aggressiveness towards the states of the region, particularly Syria, which Israel  frequently bombs while proclaiming its intention to annex the Golan Heights, sovereign territory of that country occupied in 1967.

On the pretext of measures to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, Netanyahu imposed on the borders of the State of Israel a regime of curtailment of freedoms that includes the generalized geo-referencing of the population, police tools that fill the oppressive daily lives of the Palestinians under occupation. The repressive action of the Israeli army, far from slowing down, has intensified, a fact sadly highlighted by the recent murder of a young Palestinian, Sufian Khawaja, in Nilin, on the West Bank.

The COVID-19 pandemic affects the entire Palestinian population, but the situation is particularly dramatic in the refugee camps, where the crisis in the funding of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, is making itself felt as a result of US policy, and in Israeli prisons, where about 5,000 Palestinians are incarcerated, including men, women and children, subjected daily to humiliation, torture and deprivation of all kinds.

The situation in Gaza is also very worrying, a territory that the UN has estimated is already unsustainable for supporting human life. The thirteen-year blockade imposed on nearly two million people and Israel's deadly military offensives have left health services barely able to function. Under these conditions, the impact of the pandemic could be catastrophic. More than ever, it is urgent and imperative that there be no lack of international solidarity in demanding the lifting of the criminal Israeli blockade and in mobilizing the necessary resources to address the seriousness of the situation there.

Faithful to its longstanding commitment to the national cause of the Palestinian people, MPPM, in marking the Land Day, salutes all men and women in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem or at the borders of the State of Israel, in the refugee camps and in the diaspora, who continue a firm, courageous and determined struggle for the affirmation of their inalienable national rights, against the occupation and for the establishment, in accordance with international law and legality, of the free, independent, sovereign and viable State of Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem, and a just solution to the plight of the Palestinian refugees, in accordance with relevant United Nations resolutions.

30 March 2020

The National Directorate of MPPM