30/03/2010 "There, behind these borders lies our holy land, my dear." This is what Hajj Abu Imad tells his grandsons whenever they go to the Lebanese-Palestinian border, south of Lebanon.
The peak of Hajj Abu Imad’s frequent visits to the border, is on the 30th of March of every year, ever since the resistance forced Israeli occupation forces out of most of south Lebanon in 2000. The date marks Land Day.
The 76-year old Palestinian, who tasted the bitterness of the 1948 displacement from his home in Al-Khalil, accompanies his two grandsons, Ahmed and Jihad, to a point where they can see as much of occupied Palestine as they can. “When we were forced out of our homes, we kept everything we owned right where were, we closed the door and we kept the key..this key with us with the hope of returning back. I was 14 back then, today I’m 76, but I’ve never lost hope. I don’t want you to lose hope either. Everything you see across this borderline is yours, and this is the key to gain it back one day,” the old hajj told his grandsons with a shivering voice and tearing eyes.
Judith Miller and David Samuels wrote in the 2009 article (No way home: The tragedy of the Palestinian diaspora) in The Independent wrote: “For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state. Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments.”
Every March 30 of the past few decades, Hajj Abu Imad and all the Palestinians dispersed among various countries mark Land Day to protest Israel's occupation and expansionist schemes in Palestine.
On the 30th of March, 1976, Israeli occupation forces killed six Palestinians and injured dozens more as they were demonstrating against the confiscation of 5,000 acres of land in the Galilee, north of Palestine, between the villages of Sikhnin and Arrabe. Solidarity strikes were also held almost simultaneously in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and in most of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
This year’s Land Day comes after the Israeli occupation government announced the will to build hundreds of more settler homes in occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem (Al-Quds). “Building in Jerusalem is like building in Tel Aviv,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month.
This year’s Land Day also comes after more than 62 years of occupation, more than 22 Arab summits, more than 18 years of post-Oslo negotiations, two Intifadas and close to 4.5 million Palestinians living in diaspora, like young Ahmed and Jihad, all counting on Arab consciousness and steadfastness and resistance at home to guarantee their return to the holy land.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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