Exhibition, Hagar Gallery
Curator: Tal Ben-Zvi
The exhibition “Story of a Monument: Land Day Sakhneen 1976-2006” is centered on the Sakhneen monument commemorating Land Day, as a space of struggle, remembrance and identity of the Palestinian minority in Israel.
The first Land Day took place on 30.3.1976, in protest against the government’s decision to expropriate 20,000 acres in the Sakhneen area for “Galilee Judaization” purposes. The leaders of the Rakakh political party, together with the heads of the Arab municipalities in the Galilee region, called for a day of general strike and protest demonstrations on the 30th of March. The demonstrations took place mainly in the villages of Sakhneen, Arrabi and Deir-Hanna. IDF forces confronted the demonstration participants, resulting in six dead demonstrators and many wounded. The six people killed were: Khir Mohamed Yasin from Arabe, Raja Khasin Abu-Ria, Khader Abed Khlaila and Khadija Shuhana from Sakhneen, Mohamed Yusef Taha from Kana and Rafet Zuheiri from Nur-Shames, who was shot in Taibe.
In the course of the years following the Land Day events, Abed Abdi and Gershon Knispel decided to build a monument commemorating the Sakhneen Land Day, with support from the Sakhneen mayor at the time, Jamal Tarabeih. On the 30th of March 1977, exactly one year after the demonstrations, the artists presented a model of the monument to the Arab Municipalities Committee and to the wide public.
