Palestinian Youth Movement speaks: Commemorating Land Day is resistance!

Following is the contribution by Saleh Abbas of the Palestinian Youth Movement — focused on the history and significance of Palestine Land Day — to the Boston Coalition for Palestine’s March 30, 2026, news conference in support of the Anti-Fascist Football Coalition’s call to “Move the World Cup games out of the U.S.”

On this day, we commemorate Land Day as an important date of confrontation in our national liberation calendar. It is a key moment that reminds us that organized struggle is the vehicle of liberation.

Land Day is the reminder that the Palestinian people have never accepted that the colonizer can redraw our geography, confiscate our land and expect us to disappear quietly into material and temporal occupation. Continuing from the Nakba, the Zionist occupier’s 1950 Absentees’ Property Law set the ethnic cleansing framework for continued land theft for the metastasizing settler colony.

In 1976 we saw an expansion of that framework when the Zionist regime moved to seize thousands of dunums [a measure of land, 1,000 square meters or one-fourth of an acre – editor] in the Galilee as part of its ongoing project to Judaize the land. In response, our people answered with a general strike, mass demonstrations and a resistance that cost six martyrs, hundreds arrested and many more wounded. That is why Land Day entered our national life as a date of struggle, confrontation and collective sacrifice in defense of our land.

Land Day was historic, because, despite decades of fragmentation and erasure following the Nakba, it represented the most significant collective uprising of Palestinians in occupied Palestine ’48 against Zionist land confiscation. Land Day unified our people across the Galilee, the Triangle of Fire, the Naqab, the West Bank, Gaza and the camps around one clear truth: The struggle over Palestine is a struggle over land and, therefore, over existence itself.

Land Day reminds us the land of Palestine is the axis of battle for liberation. That the ethnic cleansing of our people is geographic, material and cumulative. It is about orange orchards, the olive groves, the roads between the cities, the fishing routes, the hills, the villages, grazing routes, neighborhood networks; it is about complete access to the land as it is about total return. 

That is why Tawfiq Ziyad’s words are true 50 years later: 

“الأرض وطن وليست فقط مصدر رزق”, “The land is a homeland, not merely a source of income.” The settler-colonial apparatus understands this well. In the entity’s conquest of the land, it also engineers to empty the land of its Palestinian meaning: to convert the memory of Palestine into managed maladies under occupation, to alienate the Palestinians from their own land and to contort the homeland into a shrinking maze of checkpoints and confiscations. In that sense, it sought to transport the Palestinian into a new space, a land fully under the occupier’s control and, therefore, a future under that same control.

Martyr Walid Daqqa wrote from prison: 

“أنا أكتب لكم من الزمن الموازي”, “I write to you from a parallel time.” Daqqa describes how even beyond the occupier’s jail cell, the settler-colonial apparatus enacts an assault in both land and time, the Palestinian between confiscated past and stolen future. Land Day and acts of conscious and material resistance interrupt that assault. It insists that Palestine is resistance through space and time together: through steadfastness, preservation, cultivation, rebuilding and resisting through every means necessary and available. The prison cell and the confiscated land are linked, because the colonizer attacks both the body and land in place and future.

This is why Land Day must be read and evoked through the present moment. In the West Bank, the colonial state is accelerating confiscation, settlement expansion, road control and forced displacement under the cover of war. In February 2026, Israeli authorities moved to restart large-scale land confiscation in the West Bank under the facade of “state lands” registration, a mechanism used to convert occupied Palestinian land into wholesale ethnic cleansing. 

This month, U.N. reports record that Israeli settlement expansion policies have displaced more than 36,000 Palestinians with over 1,700 settler attacks. Palestinian sources tied to the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission say the colonial footprint now exceeds 542 colonies and outposts, with 165 new outposts erected since October 7, 2023, including 59 in 2025 alone. In Jenin and the northern camps, an active ethnic cleansing campaign has ramped up with home confiscations, demolitions and displacement happening en masse.

And in Gaza, the question of land continues to be in the vanguard, above and below the bloodsoaked rubble. Before our eyes we are witnessing the hardening of the concrete of genocide through additional land theft. The so-called yellow line inside Gaza has been hardened into a semi-permanent line of separation, with Israeli forces implanting countless military sites and surveillance networks. We are talking about a “temporary line” that is consuming roughly 60% of the Strip. 

And this temporary line of more recent plans tied to the so-called “Board of Peace” and associated transitional bodies frames reconstruction, administration and aid access through the language of disarmament, international supervision and a new security architecture. 

This is not peace. It is the colonial attempt to convert annihilation into administration and displacement into technocratic land seizure. It is the same logic as 1976 in a more bureaucratic costume: first catastrophize Palestinian life, then redraw Palestinian space, then ask the survivors to be grateful for management under the boot of occupation.

So why do we commemorate Land Day? We commemorate it, because it names the central truth of the Palestinian struggle: Palestine is not lost when land is seized; it is lost only if the people stop confronting occupation as a political condition. We commemorate it to honor the six martyrs of 1976, to honor the refugees and those in exile from the land, to honor all those who have paid in universes of life and blood, to honor all those who paid in eternities of torture in the occupation’s prisons, years that have worsened, and to honor every honorable soul who resisted their occupier and fought for their land.

We commemorate Land Day, because its strategies and tactics of organization remain alive — its strikes, popular committees, armed resistance, rural steadfastness, refusal of depoliticized coexistence, national unity across fragmented geographies and insistence that land is the axis of liberation. And we commemorate it as a global day of action against Zionism, imperialism, colonialism and every arrangement that asks the Palestinian to surrender the homeland in exchange for managed survival.

We commemorate Land Day, because the right of return is a material commitment and a responsibility to prepare ourselves for return through the vehicle of organization. Land Day reminds us that Palestine will be liberated, that it will be Palestinian from the river to the sea and that the land will be betrothed only to those who resist and bleed for its total liberation.

Free Palestine until liberation and return!