Palestinians reject fragmentation at Land Day Event
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 1, 2021
CONTACT:
Sandra Tamari | [email protected]
Palestinian Activists Reject Fragmentation & Reflect on Future of Palestinian Liberation Movement in Land Day Event
Adalah Justice Project and American Friends Service Committee host activists Soheir Asaad, Mariam Barghouti, and Ahmed Abu Artema in public conversation
On the eve of the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, Israel unleashed a new round of violence on Palestinians. While mainstream journalists continues to ignore context of Israel’s brutal occupation and daily violence against Palestinians in their reporting, creating a dishonest and dangerous narrative rooted in Israeli state propaganda, Palestinians are uniting across geographies to reject such attempts to dehumanize and fragment the Palestinian people and highlight on the root cause of the suffering and violence: Israel’s deadly Apartheid regime against Palestinians.
On Palestinian Land Day and the fourth anniversary of the Great March of Return, Palestinian activists from Gaza, the West Bank, and 1948 Palestine shared their reflections and analyses of the current situation on the ground across Palestine, and what recent moments of popular resistance mean in the broader context of the Palestinian struggle for liberation in a public conversation hosted by Adalah Justice Project and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
The first Land Day took place in 1976, when Palestinians organized large demonstrations and a nation-wide strike against Israel's plan to expropriate large swaths of Palestinian land for Jewish-only settlements. They were met with brutal Israeli repression that ultimately led to the massacre of six Palestinians. On March 30, 2018, more than 100,000 Palestinians joined the historic Great March of Return in Gaza to protest Israel’s inhumane blockade and express the fundamental demand of millions of Palestinian refugees: the freedom to go home.
This week’s event highlighted transformations taking place within the movement for Palestinian liberation through uprising such as the March of Return that not only challenge the geographical fragmentation of Palestinians, but also psychological fragmentation of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, ‘48 Palestine and the diaspora.
“I think the March of Return was only one part of a long series of the Palestinian people to continue their struggle, to continue their refusal to adapt to Israeli colonization, and ask for their right to live normally and with freedom,” said Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the lead organizers of Gaza’s Great March of Return and a writer and journalist based in Gaza. “It was a scream of life, a scream of freedom. And it was a strong message that even after 70 years, the Palestinians didn’t forget their right to return to their homes.”
This sentiment was echoed by Soheir Asaad, a feminist organizer and human rights attorney based in Haifa, while reflecting on the lasting impact of the Great March of Return on the greater movement for Palestinian liberation. “We’ve seen the inspiration and the ability of Palestinians elsewhere to link this and be able to see that despite the fragmentation and the different situations across Palestine, that this specific condition is a result of the bigger condition that all of us are experiencing. We used to look at Palestinians in ‘48 as Palestinians who will go out in solidarity with other Palestinians - this is how it was framed for us in order to keep this fragmentation and make it look as if we’re in solidarity with other people,” said Asaad.
However, in the Unity Intifada in May 2021, Palestinians collectively rejected this internalized fragmentation - the legacy of decades of physical, political, and structural violence against Palestinians as part of Israel’s Zionist agenda - with a scope of mass moblilization of Palestinian resistance across Palestine that hadn’t been seen since the Arab Revolt of 1936.
“What we saw in the Unity Intifada is really this sense of agency in Palestinians - despite years of defeat, despite disappointment from political parties and political factions and Palestinian leadership - going into the street and from their own position, from their own pain, from their own experiences with poverty, with violence, with home demolitions and forced displacement, to link it to the wider struggle,” continued Asaad. “And this was the main thing for me from the Unity Intifada - our ability to imagine ourselves as part of a people and to see this amazing social solidarity internally and to imagine what it could look like in a long process, a revolutionary process, not a one-time event.”
Non-violent resistance in Palestine — led by a new generation of Palestinian youth — has been met by tremendous suppression by Israeli occupation and Palestinian security forces alike, as emphasized by Mariam Barghouti, a Ramallah-based writer, researcher and activist.
“The dilemma that we are facing is how can we shake up the status quo, reclaim and take back a lot of power that has been taken by the Palestinian Authority on our behalf, and move towards a more representative and meaningful future that is just and equal for Palestinians themselves. But how do we do that against that PA while still trying to remain protected? While still trying to feed your five kids, and make sure that they’re still going to go to school? These are the things that are really standing in our way,” said Barghouti. “It’s the banalities of life and this very instinctive yearning to continue and build a future.”
Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, noted that the growing movement of popular mass mobilization across Palestine over the past few years are not distinct and isolated moments of resistance, but rather part of a broader pattern of social transformation and revolution bringing Palestinians closer to decolonization.
“Our resistance is constantly building, and we learn with each iteration,” said Tamari.
Discussing his rejection of Israel’s strategic attempts to fragment Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, and ‘48 Palestine, Abu Artema reiterated unity in the path to liberation for Palestinians across geographies: “I am not a Gazan, I am a Palestinian. So it’s one problem when it comes to the settlement and the annexation and the racial discrimination everywhere,” said Abu Artema. “When it comes to the national level, we cannot see on the horizon a political solution for Gaza, as Gaza. We need to end this colonization, we need to work together to fell this apartheid regime then we can all as Palestinians get our freedom and our dignity.”
The event commemorating the 46th Palestinian Land Day comes just weeks after the Sierra Club, the 120-year old conservation organization, backtracked on its commitment to a coalition of Palestinian, Indigenous, Black and Jewish organizations to end its nature outings to Apartheid Israel after being pressured by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council. Sierra Club's Interim ED Dan Chu's statement, like the trip descriptions, does not mention Palestine or Israel's brutal occupation of the Palestinian people.
The shameful decision makes Sierra Club complicit in the greenwashing of Israel’s Apartheid regime and also dismisses the growing support in the U.S. for Palestinian liberation and justice.
This week, Indigenous fighters at NDN Collective who are 500 years into their struggle for freedom also released a position paper committing Indian Country’s solidarity with Palestine. In February 2022, Amnesty International released a report finding Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid against Palestinans, reaffirming Palestinian activists’ long calls for awareness and accountability and echoing the finding of previous reports from human rights groups B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch. Additionally, a new national poll from AFSC found that the majority of Americans oppose Israel’s blockade on Gaza, now entering its fifteenth year.
“The continuing threats of displacement and demolition of Palestinian communities are urgent, and those of us living in the U.S. must continue to find creative ways to hold accountable the politicians, the corporations, and the organizations that profit from continued Israeli apartheid, colonization, war, and military occupation,” said Jennifer Bing, director of the Palestine Activisim Program at the American Friends Service Committee.
Adalah Justice Project and AFSC are calling on supporters of Palestinian liberation to act by writing their members of Congress and demanding an end to Israel’s cruel and illegal blockade of Gaza on the AFSC website and on the Adalah Justice Project’s Gaza is Palestine website.
Ahmed Abu Artema was a main organizer of the Great March of Return. Ahmed’s family was expelled from their home in the Ramle district in 1948, and he was born in 1984 in Rafah, Gaza, where he now lives with his wife and four children. As an independent journalist in Gaza, he has written for dozens of publications (and in English in several U.S. publications The New York Times, the Nation, and the Journal of Palestine Studies) and authored a book in Arabic called “Organized Chaos.”
Soheir Asaad is a political and feminist Palestinian organizer and a human rights advocate. She received a Master's degree in international human rights law from the University of Notre Dame (US). Soheir is the advocacy team member of Rawa - Creative Palestinian Communities Fund, and the coordinator of the Palestine Feminist Anti-Violence Movement pilot of Global Fund for Women. Previously, she worked in legal research and international advocacy in human rights organizations.
Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian writer and researcher based in Ramallah. She earned a BA in English Language and Literature from Birzeit University, and an MSc in Sociology and Global Change from the University of Edinburgh. She worked as a journalist and reporter with a focus on the Levant, and published various sociopolitical commentaries from Palestine. She has undertaken monitoring and evaluation missions of humanitarian and development aid in Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon for various governmental and non-governmental organizations. Her reporting and analysis have been featured in Al-Jazeera English, the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, and Middle East Eye, amongst others.
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