Sakhnin

Sakhnin lies in a broad valley in the Lower Galilee, between the Battuf plain and the hills that run down to Acre — an old agricultural town of olive terraces and field crops whose lands, like those of its neighbours Arraba and Deir Hanna, were the basis of its economy and its social order. It survived 1948 with its population largely intact, and its people became citizens of Israel under military government.

From the early 1970s the town’s land came under systematic pressure. A 1972 amendment to the property tax law sharply raised the tax on Arab-owned land, with the declared intention of pushing owners to sell; settlements were planted on the ridges around Arab villages; and in 1975 the state announced a further programme of expropriation in the Galilee, part of an official policy of increasing the Jewish population of a region where Palestinians remained the majority.

The response was organised rather than spontaneous. On 21 May 1975 lawyers and political figures — among them Hanna Naqara and Mohammed Miari — met in Haifa; on 29 July a wider meeting resolved to form an Initiative Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Land; on 14 August, in Nazareth, they established the National Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands in Israel, 121 members drawn from the Galilee, the Triangle and the Naqab. On 18 October 1975 a general congress in Nazareth — the largest public gathering of Palestinians in Israel since 1948 — set out the case against the confiscations. On 29 February 1976 the Rabin government decided to confiscate 20,000 dunums in the Galilee under a “Develop Galilee” plan; on 6 March the National Committee called a general strike for 30 March, and declared that day Land Day.

Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna saw the most violent confrontations of that day, though the strike was total in most Arab towns and villages and the raids to arrest organisers ran from Nazareth and Tamra to Kafr Qasim, Haifa and Acre. Six people were killed by army and police fire: Raja Abu Rayya, Khidr Khalayleh and Khadija Shawahna of Sakhnin, Khayr Yassin of Arraba, Muhsin Taha in Kafr Kanna, and Ra’fat Zuheiri — a refugee from Nur Shams camp — in the clashes at al-Taybeh. About fifty people were injured and some three hundred protesters detained. Land Day has been commemorated every year since, in Israel, the occupied territories and the diaspora, and it remains the founding political event of the Palestinian community inside Israel — a community whose precarious citizenship was underlined again in October 2000, when Israeli police shot dead thirteen unarmed young men in protests across the country, among them Asel Asleh, whose funeral was held at Arraba next door, without a single prosecution following.

Sources

• Land Day, 30 March 1976 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• The October 2000 Killings (October Uprising) — Adalah