On 30 March 1976, Israeli occupation forces in Palestine shot dead six unarmed protesters and injured hundreds more while confiscating an area of Palestinian land in the Galilee roughly the size of central London. Still commemorated annually, the atrocities have gone down in history as Land Day, and protesters across Palestine face Israeli police violence each year to ensure the dispossession is not forgotten. 

Now, almost exactly 50 years later, with genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank as backdrop, it’s happening again. As in 1976, land seizures are taking place just inland of the port city of Haifa – this time in the town of Majd al-Krum within what is internationally acknowledged Israeli territory. The communities to be dispossessed are Palestinians who hold full Israeli citizenship. 

Twenty-six notices have been handed down to families in Dheil Al-Mseel – a working class neighbourhood of Majd al-Krum – including 21 hearing orders and five demolition orders, allegedly due to unlicensed construction. Each of the buildings to be demolished has several floors and houses multiple families. More than 100 Palestinians could face the destruction of their homes. After demolition, naturally, the families will all be homeless.

“It’s the biggest escalation since Land Day,” says Raya Manaa, a 35-year-old local business owner in Majd al-Krum, whose family is native to the town and the Galilee region. “You have to remember this is a Palestinian town that already spreads today across barely a quarter of its original land due to land confiscation by the Israelis.”

Immediately south of Majd al-Kurum lies the sprawling Israeli settlement town of Karmiel. Hanging over every Israeli encroachment in the area – all of it with a large Palestinian majority – is the spectre of Israelis seeking new lands for ‘lebensraum’, a word associated with Nazi ideology and recently used in a now-deleted blog in The Times of Israel advocating for Israeli designs on the West Bank. 

Palestinians with Israeli citizenship watch these developments nervously, caught between an awareness of some higher privilege compared to those in the Occupied Territories, and of how the Israeli authorities view Palestinian life. They are unavoidably conscious of the levels of violence and racism that permeate the Israeli government, as well as the ascendant political currents it draws on and from. 

Obscuring this reality is essential to Israeli propaganda. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship lie at the heart of Israeli mythmaking; still circulated with persistence at some dinner tables is the idea that Israeli society is a democracy with something resembling a rule of law. 

When a few dissenting members of the Jewish Board of Deputies wrote this April in an open letter to the Financial Times that the genocide in Gaza risked going too far, they cited not tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza – but the threat to a “rambunctious democratic culture” among Israelis. 

Whatever the jovial understatement of such language, the claim is one to which the rights and wellbeing of Palestinians who – for all that they’ve had stolen – do hold Israeli citizenship, is integral. As Israeli officials plan to seize Palestinian homes and turn families out onto the streets of Majd al-Krum simply because their residents are not Jewish, the question is just who these belatedly and partially regretful Zionists are trying to kid – themselves or the rest of us? 

Asphalt apartheid.

The toll on locals of having this foisted upon them after seeing 19 months of Palestinians being killed in Gaza and Israeli bombings on the border with Lebanon only 20 miles away, cannot be overstated.

“People are frustrated and furious,” Raya tells me, “yet they are afraid to express themselves because administrative detention waves around their lives. Even those already facing demolition orders are afraid to express their anger and fear.”

Aside from the housing demolitions, what is taking place in Dheil al-Mseel is an instance of the Israeli method of using roads and roadbuilding to consolidate its stranglehold over Palestinian life. While the use of Jewish-only roads in the West Bankremains the most clear-cut example of a practice sometimes called ‘asphalt apartheid’, Israel also uses road design in ways that seek to separate Palestinian communities from one another and the rest of the country, doing so in a colonial fashion that leaves the native population easier to control. 

Built in 1997, the large highway that runs through the town purposefully disconnects Dheil al-Mseel from the rest of Majd al-Krum, a hardship compounded by more familiar apartheid policies of strategic underinvestment and infrastructural neglect towards basic amenities like water and electricity connection.

“They clearly want to isolate Palestinian villages and cities within the ’48 territories,” says Raya. “This was the main aim of moving the Akka-Safed route so that it cut off Dheil al-Mseel. In the past few years they also installed new junctions and streets to make entry and exit of Palestinian villages harder.”

The determination in Majd al-Krum to resist designs upon their homes and rights is born of a steely certainty, now well-understood throughout Palestine and its diaspora, that the Israeli plan to “finish the job” in Gaza will be followed by similar efforts against Palestinians in the West Bank – and finally those inside the ’48 territories. 

Benjamin Netanyahu said it best, four years before October 2023 and while still somehow a respectable figure in corridors where he now begins to cause muted embarrassment, that the Israeli project is “not a state of all of its citizens”. 

This conveyor belt of Israeli escalation, consistently rotating its targets, was felt recently in Majd al-Krum with the release of Majd Sghaier, a 20-year-old activist from the town. Sghaier was freed after 18 months in arbitrary detention for expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. 

Just as Israeli escalations in the West Bank coincided with the short-lived ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinians of the ‘48 territories are released from egregious punishment on behalf of Gaza, just as Israeli authorities ready to come for them at home. “The timing of Majd’s release only shows how everything in Palestine is linked, from Gaza to the Galilee,” says Raya.

For all the heaviness and risk inherent to the circumstances, residents of Majd al-Krum are already working to stop the demolitions. Protests and community meetings have been held. A resident of the town, currently studying in Bologna, organised a demonstration in the fervently pro-Palestine city under the banner of ‘stop the bulldozers’. 

Azusa Suga, a Japanese artist from Fukuoka with ties to photographers from Majd al-Krum, has begun to design artworks for the residents. “My feeling is the people of Majd al-Krum have been living there for a long time,” says Suga. “For sure since before 1948, so why should they leave? They have a right to live there, it’s just common sense.”

In its resolve, Majd al-Krum draws on a proud history of organising against Israeli threats, embodying the Palestinian tradition of sumud – steadfastness – that those supporting Palestine from outside must urgently emulate. 

Muhanna Krayim, a 40-year-old construction worker, has received an Israeli demolition order on his home – a building that comes with a completion certificate issued by British authorities that predate the very founding of the project now planning to make him homeless.

Others in Dheil Al-Mseel go back further and draw on Ottoman paperwork that exposes the absurdity of a confused, adolescent Israeli project in Palestine that seeks to steal their homes, along with the history and memories they contain.

“Demolition?” Krayim says his first response was when the order arrived. “They can demolish it, but with me inside. They’ll have to bury me under the rubble.”