Land has always been central to the Palestinian national identity. I learned this lesson in 1971 when I spent time in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan collecting people’s stories of the Nakbah. Their memories of the homes and lands they left behind, their deep longing to return, and their determination to keep alive their village culture was deeply moving. The powerful connection of Palestinians to their land became even more clear when I got to know and learn from the works of some of the great Palestinian poets like Tawfiq Zayad and Mahmoud Darwish or the Palestinian artists like Ismail Shamout and Kamal Boulatta. The images they created and the feelings they evoked have inspired generations.

You can learn more about a people through the songs they sing, the stories they tell, or the art they love than you can from the political speeches of their leaders. In all of these forms of Palestinian popular culture, attachment to land looms large. Palestinian refugees will recall their ancestral homes. Those whose lands have been confiscated by the Israelis will recall the simplicity of their village lives. The land they nourished was where their histories are buried under the earth waiting for a new spring in which to be born again. In short, their past lives, their present sorrows. and their hopes for the future are bound up in their attachment to their land.

Given this, it should be no surprise that Land Day (or Day in Defense of the Land) has become so important to Palestinians worldwide.

The history of this day is important. The first Land Day was called in 1976 in response to Israeli government plans to seize control of large areas of the Galilee region in order to expand the area’s Jewish population. Such seizures of Arab-owned lands to make way for Jewish immigration had been Israel’s modus operandi from the beginning of the state. In the three decades before 1976, Israel had laid the foundation for their fledging “Jewish state” by confiscating one and a half million acres of Arab-owned land and demolishing some 500 Palestinian villages – from which most of the Arab inhabitants had been expelled during the 1948 Nakbah.

During those same three decades, the Palestinian citizens of Israel faced other significant hardships. They had emerged from the 1948 War shell-shocked from the horrors of the Nakbah during which so many members of their families were........

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