Solidarity with People and Land
As we commemorate and pass another Day of the Land in Palestine (30 March), without restitution for a century of dispossession; this time we mark the 36th year of its remembrance. As symbol of the continuous loss of land, an essential element of self-determination, the solidarity with the land and its people in Palestine takes on special significance in 2014.
Last November, the UN General Assembly designated this as the Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. While the UN program for 2014 is punctuated with commemorations and high-level meetings on the Palestine Question, little action is scheduled for restitution of Palestinian land, the essence of the people’s sovereignty.
Land Times/أحوال الأرص has chronicled the developments—and lack thereof—toward entitled reparations for Palestine’s colonization and other gross violations of Palestinian human rights. In this issue, we note a further tactic of land dispossession in Palestine, namely the conversion of Palestinian lands into waste dumps, together with the profit-seeking collaboration of extraterritorial actors prohibited under international law from doing so. They and their host states, thus, become liable parties in this innovative act of expanding deprivation. As reported, these acts are not without consequence for their authors and accomplices.
The year 2014 is significant in another important way for the Palestinians’ national calendar and their struggle over their land. We now come upon the 10th anniversary of the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the illegality of the Hafrada Wall, not least as a means of Palestinian land and resource dispossession and as part of the “associated regime” of settlements and segregation. Last year, the World Bank calculated that the deprivation of land by Israel’s foreclosure of Area C amounted to a loss calculated at some $3.4 billion. However, this figure is as only a fraction of the reparations bill owed to the Palestinian people over the expandingtime and space of acquisition of all material—and other—values that are rightfully Palestinian. At the heart of all these is the land, both rural and urban.
Also with this issue, HLRN announces the publication of its latest compilation of the wider region’s civil society contributions to the discourse on the defining struggles over the land and the peoples thereon. This issue also recognizes the struggles of men and women to ensure gender justice in the access to, and usufruct of land in the wider Muslim world. In the urban context, insecure land tenure is a common feature of informal settlements, whereas this issue of Land Times/أحوال الأرض reports original research of an HLRN Member to enumerate an officially neglected, undercounted and unrecognized community in Cairo (Batn al-Baqara) for the purpose of popular, alternative planning toward a durable solution to their own deprivation.
Embodying this recognition, research and historic memory of the value of land to human struggle, HLRN took these findings into the global discourse at the World Urban Forum (Medellín, Colombia). Land tenure remains at the heart of the matter in struggles for a world with living conditions in dignity and rights. While Palestine, with its centrality, teaches about the value and meaning of the land to its people, we take that lesson forward in all that we do to uphold this primordial, this inextricable relationship.
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