Candle in the storm

The main Land Day march in Israel this year was like an oasis in a region in turmoil. That precisely was its significance. Graham Usher reports from the Galilee village where Land Day began 25 years ago
The six women knelt before freshly tilled graves on the worn steps leading up to the stone monument in Saknin, a village of 24,000 Palestinians in Israel's Galilee. The inscription on the memorial reads "In memory of those felled on Land Day, 30 March 1976." But the mothers and sisters were not grieving the six Palestinians shot dead by Israeli police 25 years ago. They were mourning their sons and brothers, two of the 13 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli police six months ago, when they and thousands of others protested, not this time against land confiscation, but for their nation in solidarity with their kin in the West Bank and Gaza.
Land Day this year interwove the two causes of land and nation like never before. Nationally, it recalls the day the million or so Palestinian citizens of Israel finally threw off the 1948 "defeat of their fathers" and took on the Jewish state, embodied, typically, in policies aimed at seizing 5,000 acres of their land in the Galilee. Politically, it consecrates the moment when those same citizens ceased being anonymous and often derided "Israeli Arabs" and became again part of the wider Palestinian people. And the resonance of that transformation has been felt ever since, both within them and beyond.
In Saknin this year, for example, tens of thousands of Palestinians from all over Israel marched under a flotilla of Palestinian flags, splashed here and there with the red of Lenin and the green of Mohamed. And for the first time ever they were joined by several hundred Jews from Israel's various peace movements under the white and blue banner of "Equality for Israeli Arabs" and, among the more radical streams, "Down with Israeli apartheid."
For the leader of Israel's Communist Party, Mohamed Baraka, this coming together was the true import of the event, especially after a week in which 14 Palestinians and three Israeli Jews had been killed, most of them civilians, five of them children.
"It demonstrates the unity of all Palestinian political forces with Israel's genuinely democratic forces, and that the divisions between us are not Jew versus Arab, but political divisions caused by civil inequality and the denial of our national rights," said Baraka. He also emphasised that the march in Saknin was peaceful. "Not a stone was thrown," he remarked, "because not a police officer was in sight."
The same could not be said in the occupied territories -- where the only coming together between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs these days is conducted with tanks and helicopter rockets on one side and stones and machine guns on the other. And where the only political struggle is an utterly callous media war over which people commit the worst atrocities.
It is pretty clear which side commits the most. As the marchers stretched from Saknin to its sister Galilee village of Araba, elsewhere five Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli army fire as they approached the blockaded southern exit of Nablus, aptly nicknamed the "death trap". Two more were killed in Ramallah in a similar cul-de-sac and by similar hands. Meanwhile, tank-versus-gun battles exploded in Hebron, Gaza and Beit Jala.
Land Day was scarcely cooler across the region. In Lebanon, some 50,000 Lebanese and Palestinians marched through Beirut's southern suburbs bound together by slogans of "Death to America! Death to Israel!" And in Amman, Jordanian and Palestinian demonstrators assailed Arab leaders for bringing "peace with the Zionist enemy" when what was really needed was "guns."
For these protesters "Land Day" is the harbinger of another war between an Israel led by an unreconstructed Ariel Sharon on one side and their oppressed, occupied and humiliated nation on the other. In response, opinion polls in Israel show that 50 per cent of Israeli Jews hold "negative views" toward those one-in-five of their citizenry who are Palestinian and that 70 per cent seek not peace with the Arab world but a "unilateral separation" from it.
Buffeted between such gales, the tentative joining of hands in Saknin was not only rare but also courageous, thought Marwan Darwish, an inhabitant of Galilee's Umm Fahim village, who fought on the first Land Day and marched on the 25th.
"On the Palestinian side, it shows a new level of political maturity among our political and community leadership," he said. "And that maturity says we cannot denounce the Israeli Jewish left for abandoning us during the events of October and then refuse their participation when they seek to show solidarity with us on Land Day."
And on the Israeli Jewish side the march shows the first signs of humility. For as the marchers wound their way from Saknin to Araba, the procession was led by Palestinian community organisations hoisting the Palestinian flag, followed by various Palestinian political parties with their political and civil slogans, and tailed by the Israeli Jewish peace groups who, mostly, kept their mouths shut.
For Darwish that sequence and that silence was as significant as the march's size. "For once it showed the Israeli left accepting to follow our agenda rather than dictate it, and accepting finally that our agenda today is national as well as political and civil."
Against the storms gathering over the region, maturity and humility may seem frail candles. But they need to be sheltered. They are the only lights there are.
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