The Arab leadership in Israel is conducting a new campaign to prevent Arab landowners from accepting compensation for property they owned in 1948.

The secretary of the Displaced Union in Israel, Suleiman al-Fahmawi, told Hamas’s Falastin newspaper that the campaign is titled “No giving up our fathers’ and grandfathers’ land.” It is aimed at thwarting the Israeli government’s plan, with the help of land dealers and lawyers.

According to Fahmawi, the government is struggling to convince landowners who were “displaced” from their villages to give up their properties in exchange for compensation.

The head of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, Mohammed Barakeh, says, “The Zionist movement focuses on its aggressive, settler and expansionary approach of a land without a people for a people without a land.”

Barakeh added that the existence of Arabs, the natural growth of their population and their survival on the land presents a challenge for the Zionist movement, and so it tries to use any means possible to force the Palestinian people to recognize Israel as a Jewish State and, on a private level, to convince landowners to sell their property to the state.

He is now warning Arab Israelis against giving up their lands in exchange for compensation, which he considers to be un-nationalistic and immoral conduct because the land is for Palestinians to pass on from generation to generation.