Friday • March 29 • 7:30 PM

Al Aqsa School • 7361 W. 92nd St. • Bridgeview

Download a PDF version of the March 29 Land Day Forum flyer.

For more information, email cdpchicago (at) aol.com or call 773-531-8667.

Guest speakers include:

• Samir Miari, Ph.D. Chicago State University, speaking on “Land confiscation and the displacement of Palestinians”.

• Mufid Qassoum, Ph.D. Candidate. University of Illinois at Chicago, Urban Planning & Public Analysis, speaking on “The relationship between the leadership and the Palestinians of 1948”.

• Ghassan Barakat, Ph.D. President, The Palestinian American Council, speaking on “Palestine-1948 within the historical context from the PLO perspective”.

• To endorse this event, or for more info, please email: cdpchicago (at) aol.com, or call (773) 531-8667

Why Land Day?

On March 30, 1976, thousands of Palestinians gathered to protest Israeli government plans to expropriate 60,000 dunams of Arab-owned land in the Galilee. In the resulting confrontations with Israeli police, six Palestinians were killed, hundreds wounded, and hundreds jailed. In the intervening years, those events have become consecrated in the Palestinian memory as Land Day.

Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel comprise approximately 19 percent of the total population of the country, numbering close to 900,000. They live predominantly in villages, towns, and mixed cities in the Galilee region in the north, the Triangle area in central Israel, and the Negev desert in the south. In 1947, the Palestinian Arabs comprised some 67 percent of the population of Palestine. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, approximately 780,000 of the pre-1948 Palestinian population fled or were expelled, becoming refugees in the Arab states and in the West.

Of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the new Israeli state, approximately 25 percent were displaced from their homes and villages, and became internal refugees. From 1948-1966, Palestinians in the 1948 territories – despite the fact that they were now officially citizens of Israel – were forced to live under military adminstration which severely restricted their fundamental civil liberties, including freedom of movement, speech, and association. Up until 1965, attempts to organize the Arab community in Israel in pan-Arab movements were forcibly stopped and these associations outlawed. The Israeli authorities also continued to confiscate Palestinian-owned land, and denied Arab towns and villages basic services provided to neighboring Jewish communities. By 1993, over 80 percent of the land owned by Palestinian Arabs living in the 1948 territories had been confiscated by the Israeli state.

Land Day 1976 was the first act of mass resistance by the Palestinians inside Israel against these Zionist policies of internal colonialization and apartheid. Land Day reaffirms the Palestinian minority in Israel as an inseparable part of the Palestinian and Arab nation.

(excerpted from an article by Arjan El Fassed. Graphic by Jihad Mansour)