Commemorating Land Day amid lockdown in Palestine
Palestinians protest illegal Israeli settlements near the town of Beita in the West Bank, 11 March 2020
Yara Hawari writes in Al-Jazeera:
Forty-four years ago today, the Israeli police shot six Palestinian citizens of Israel dead as they were protesting against the Israeli government’s expropriation of thousands of acres of Palestinian land in the Galilee. Since then, March 30 has been known as Land Day and is an important date in the Palestinian political calendar.
This year, Palestinians will be marking Land Day at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left much of the world’s populations under lockdown and curfew. Being confined to their homes or their villages and towns is not a new experience for Palestinians which is perhaps why so many have taken it in their stride.
Indeed, Palestinians in the West Bank are confined to what amounts to bantustans connected to each other only by roads controlled by the Israeli regime, while their brothers and sisters in Gaza live in an open-air prison deemed “unliveable” by the United Nations. Most Palestinians living across the “Green Line” have Israeli citizenship, they nevertheless live in urban and rural ghettos.
Palestinians are also disconnected from their Arab brothers and sisters with many of them prevented from travelling around the Arab world, either because their documents do not permit them to do so (in the case of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship) or because they are under travel bans.
As part of the COVID-19 response, the Israeli regime has imposed even more measures restricting Palestinian movement. The city of Bethlehem has been put under lockdown, while crossings into Gaza and the West Bank have been shut down. Palestinian labourers working in Israel have also been told to either stay for an unknown period of time in shoddy and unsanitary accommodation or give up work and stay in the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority has imposed a curfew and set up checkpoints between villages and towns to limit the movement of people. Businesses have been shut down, except for supermarkets and pharmacies.
Meanwhile, Israel is continuing its practices of removing Palestinians from their land, even exploiting the lockdown amid the pandemic to do so.