To those who remember,

The struggle for Palestinian sovereignty is inseparable from the land. When the Zionist regime announced that it would seize thousands of dunams of Arab-owned land in the Galilee on March 30, 1976, Palestinians rose up in defense. Six unarmed demonstrators were killed during the ensuing protests, and hundreds more were injured or arrested.

The collective, organized response, which included a general strike from the Galilee to the Negev, forged a new political solidarity between ‘48 Palestinians and Palestinians in the West Bank. A Palestinian national identity was reborn. We commemorate this day every year as Land Day (Yawm al-’Ard).

The fight to defend the land against settlers and their benefactors—including real estate moguls, private equity firms, and agri-tech think tanks—can be fought on the streets of the West. Illegal sales of stolen Palestinian land happen in synagogues across our cities. And efforts by organizers to disrupt these illegal sales have been successful enough to invite an institutional response. 

Last week, the New York City Council passed Intros 1-B and 175-B, two bills tasking the NYPD with establishing anti-protest buffer zones around houses of worship and educational institutions—a blatant attack on pro-Palestine protest and protected dissent in general. 

The fight over these bills demonstrates that the halls of power still reflexively suppress Palestine, while flinching at the movement’s strength. Sustained grassroots pressure succeeded in gutting the legislation so thoroughly that the NYPD itself declared the laws would neither change its practices nor create any new legal authority—a humiliating defeat for Speaker Julie Menin and her attempt to institute sweeping anti-Palestinian protest bans.

Still, the council members who voted yes—including the so-called Progressive Caucus—betrayed their constituents by narrowing their avenues for legitimate protest and exposing them to intensified NYPD brutality, mirroring the federal administration's own crackdown on dissent.

At City Hall, an unprecedented coalition of grassroots organizers reiterated the necessity of protesting in front of synagogues: "We directly called on our officials to address the issue that these bills seek to protect in the first place: the illegal sales of stolen Palestinian land taking place in our city." While council members moved to stifle free speech, "real estate companies are still using houses of worship in our neighborhoods to commit state, federal, and international crimes."

These municipal bills are a coordinated effort between Zionist lawmakers in NYC and Albany to criminalize protests against the hawking of stolen Palestinian land. Now, the coalition will bring the fight to the capital and resist Governor Hochul’s state-level buffer zone bills, which include even more severe criminal penalties, and whose path has now been cleared by the city council's capitulation. The protests against genocide and land sales will not stop.

Read the coalition’s full statement here.

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Resist the weaponization of antisemitism 

Zionists malign pro-Palestinian thought as antisemitic with such ubiquity that the term has become essentially meaningless, as farcical as the victim narrative Israel pushes while accelerating its expansionist aggression against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran. 

Nobody is buying Israel’s perpetual claim of self-defense anymore. 

One example: In January, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, an ardent genocide apologist and billionaire heiress, announced that there were more incidents targeting Jews in NYC than all other hate crimes combined. Her analysis used the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel. 

It is our responsibility to speak out against the genocide in Gaza, against the slaughter of children, and against the ethnic cleansing of our people across the Global South, no matter what our enemies want to call it.

Stop the illegal land sales

Land sale protests are an essential form of community response to collusion between religious institutions, the state and city legislatures, the police, real estate, and finance capital which arms and equips the transnational infrastructure of Zionism that has usurped Palestine from its indigenous inhabitants and forced the transfer of land over the last hundred years. Of course this must be protested, whether or not it is facilitated inside houses of worship.

Read our full piece from January on the New York War Crimes website. 

Honor the martyred journalists of Lebanon

“This Israeli soldier standing here does not dare to come any closer to me, because we are under the protection of Hezbollah,” said journalist Ali Shoeib on Sept 19, 2022. “I am standing on liberated Lebanese land, and he is standing in the occupied Lebanese land of Shebaa Farms.”

Shoeib was killed this week alongside Al-Mayadeen journalist Fatima Ftouni and her brother, photojournalist Mohammad Ftouni, in a targeted drone strike on their press vehicle in southern Lebanon. As medics arrived at the scene, Zionist forces carried out a double-tap strike, killing paramedic Ahmad Oneisi and a young man, Mohammad Daher.

Often described as a “one-man army,” Ali was the voice of the resistance during the liberation of the South in 2000 and again in 2006. “The knight of resistance media has dismounted after a long struggle, and Al-Manar’s lens and platform have once again bled the most precious blood,” said Al-Manar TV. “Al-Manar mourns him as a true media front, a support and companion to generations of resistance fighters, and a teacher and role model for generations of journalists.”

Fatima was a rising journalist who bravely reported on the Zionist entity’s violations, including the massacre of seven members of her own family earlier this month. “We are now in front of a building in which yesterday the Israeli occupation committed a massacre of an entire family who resided in this house in the town of Toul,” said Fatima in front of the rubble. “They were my family."

Israel has assassinated over 270 journalists in Gaza and 25 in Lebanon since Oct 7, 2023, in addition to over 1,700 medical workers, who are often targeted in a deliberate attempt to prevent emergency responders from reaching the scenes of Zionist strikes.

Steadfast in the face of Zionist aggression, these heroic journalists and medics risked their lives for their people.

The Public Source has been documenting the killing of journalists and other civilians since the start of the war.

Join the defenders of the land

The settler colony continues to illegally authorize home demolitions and new settlements on stolen Palestinian land. IOF-backed settler violence across the occupied West Bank remains at an all-time high. The US-backed IOF continues to carry out kidnappings and assassinations of Palestinians protecting their families and land without due process, or prosecuting the settler goons. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 1,697 Palestinians have been displaced as a result of settler violence in 2026 alone, with 38 communities emptied since 2023. Since the start of the imperial war on Iran, there have been more than six recorded settler attacks per day. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East reports that more than 1,071 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 2023 (including at least 233 children). 

Real, material solidarity with the people of Palestine is possible. 

The following organizations insist settler colonial violence is upheld by action rather than observation. They ask us to join Palestinians in protecting Palestine and to bear witness not as passive observers, but by intervening. These organizations are:

• Faz3a (Arabic colloquialism for long-standing Palestinian tradition of community rescue, reinforcement, or coming to someone's aid in a time of need): A Palestinian-led initiative that organizes international protective presence volunteers to deter and document violence from Israeli settlers and military forces in the occupied West Bank.

• International Solidarity Movement (ISM): A Palestinian-led movement founded in 2001 that uses non-violent methods to resist occupation. Activities include accompanying children to school, staying with families threatened with eviction, and standing with farmers in their fields.

• Palestine Shield Initiative (PAL-Shield): A Palestinian-led initiative what mobilizes protective presence, medical readiness, and real‑time mapping to deter violence and safeguard rural Palestinian communities. PAL-Shield works in coordination with other Palestinian led protective presence organizations on the ground including Faz3a to provide tools.

على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة

“We have on this land that which makes life worth living” - Mahmoud Darwish

Taking shifts, Sinjil’s land defenders use high-powered flashlights to watch for settler incursions. Read our full piece about novel defense networks developing in the West Bank in the next edition of the New York War Crimes. 

Read and watch with us

• Al Natara: Meet Palestine’s DIY night watchers | Dazed

• Harvesting Olives in the West Bank, in Photos | The Cut

• Land Day and the People’s Pledge to Liberate Palestine | PFLP Bulletin, 1978 (Page 14)

• You can also read the PFLP Bulletin from the first land day here. 

• Watch Monica Maurer’s Land Day short film free on YouTube. It is only 15 minutes.  

• Watch Yom El Ard / Yawm al-Ard [Land Day], a Palestinian Documentary from 1978

• Watch Ms. Chantal speak at the site of murdered Lebanese Journalists.

We leave you with the words of June Jordan from her 1984 essay “Life After Lebanon”:

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the complicity of Americans through tax monies that supported the invasion, the slaughter of Lebanese peoples, the decimation and rout of the Palestinian peoples, the awesome determination by whitemen, in this country, to silence or to discredit American dissent, the vicious wielding about of the term anti-Semitic whenever anyone protested the interminable carnage executed and precipitated by that invasion, left me extremely embittered, shocked, and wondering about life after Lebanon: What would that be like?