Palestinian land day

Presented by the Belgian Coalition for Palestine, this Land Day commemoration brings together two of today’s foremost voices for justice: Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, and Noura Erakat, professor and human rights attorney.

Moderated by Maha Abdallah, PhD fellow of International Law and Genocide at the University of Antwerp.

Land Day is not a memory. It is a structure.

Settler colonialism is not a moment in time, nor only an “occupation.” It is a system designed to reshape land, law, and life itself to ensure permanent domination. As Patrick Wolfe reminded us, it is a structure, not an event: a project to erase Indigenous political presence. In Palestine, this project appears in the daily machinery of control: permits, checkpoints, revoked residency, and fragmented legal regimes. All to make Palestinian life precarious, conditional, and constantly under threat.

Edward Said warned that empire sustains itself not just through force but through representation, by creating knowledge that represents the colonised as a problem, not a people. Fanon exposed how colonialism dehumanises; Mbembe revealed how modern sovereignty decides who may live and who must die.

In Palestine, these are not abstract theories. They are the organising logic of the past and present: seen in the bureaucracy that administers annexation, in the siege and apartheid policies that dehumanise, in policies of punishment that seek erasure of the Palestinian people; from the genocide in Gaza to the death penalty push and mass detentions.

This Land Day, we gather not only to remember but to confront the enduring machinery of the Zionist project, to affirm our determination and uphold our collective responsibility to dismantle it and pursue justice, no matter how long it takes.