What exactly is being commemorated on Palestinian Land Day? According to the Arab version, the unprovoked shooting on March 30, 1976, of six Arabs by the police. They are commemorating a lie.
Yosef Goell was present as a Jerusalem Post reporter collecting material for a series of articles on the Israeli Arabs, in central Galilee, for a number of days before that March 30 and on that day itself. Tension had been building up throughout many Arab communities in Galilee and the Little Triangle over the issue of the expropriation of Area Nine lands near Sakhnin. (In the mid-1980s those lands were returned to their original Arab owners).
What actually set off the rioting that led to the deaths was a wild attack by hundreds of inflamed young Arabs on an unsuspecting IDF convoy driving on the road by the villages of Sakhnin, Arrabe and Deir Hanna.
There was no prior provocation on the part of that IDF convoy, unless one insists on seeing a provocation in the very presence of an Israeli army unit in the heart of Israeli Galilee. Radical Israeli Arab political leaders, however, have for the past 25 years been promulgating the lie that the IDF had cold-bloodedly shot and killed “innocent” Arab demonstrators.
Israeli Jews were shocked by rampaging local Arab youths shouting “Itbah el yehud!” (slaughter the Jews) as they attacked Jewish motorists driving by their towns, as in Umm el-Fahm, and organizing for pogrom-like raids on neighboring Jewish communities.
Arabs and Israeli Jewish liberals have justly been demanding that Jews be more aware of Israeli Arab sensibilities and their sense of dignity. But this argument cuts both ways. Arabs should be just as aware of Jewish sensibilities to the “itbah el yehud” battle cry.
It may be difficult for Israeli Arabs to believe, but many Israeli Jews have not forgotten being threatened and attacked as Diaspora minorities. What makes the situation so dangerous for the Israeli Arabs is that those Jews are no longer helpless but are in command of an army and police. It is sheer madness for a minority to seek to provoke such a majority.
Watch the video filmed in bad weather conditions in Melbourne on the steps of the state library.