At Briefing for Embassy Representatives from 23 Countries, Adalah Urges Participants to Raise Issues Regarding Racist Anti-Arab Laws and the October 2000 Killings with their Governments and with Israel

On 18 November 2008, Adalah held a briefing on legal developments concerning Palestinian citizens of Isarel in 2008 for representatives of foreign embassies in Israel at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Tel Aviv. Ambassadors and political officers from 23 countries attended the briefing, including the United States, the Delegation of the European Commission, Japan, South Africa, Russia, Belgium, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Norway, Spain, Finland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Portugal, Slovenia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia, Hungary, Argentina and Albania. The General Director of Adalah, Hassan Jabareen, Adalah Attorney Suhad Bishara, and Adalah's International Advocacy Director, Rina Jabareen, represented the organization at the briefing.

Attorney Hassan Jabareen analyzed the new anti-Arab legislation enacted during 2008. He emphasized that although discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel is not a new phenomenon and has always been part and parcel of governmental policies, the government is actively enacting legislation designed to anchor this discrimination in primary laws. He discussed a new amendment to the Citizenship Law, for example, that allows Israel to revoke citizenship of individuals considered to have committed a “breach of trust” against the state. This law has not yet been used against anyone, but the terminology of the law suggests that it is targeted primarily against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Attorney Jabareen further raised the issue of the extension of the Citizenship Law, which bans family unification between Palestinian citizens and Palestinians from the (OPT). Another new piece of legislation that targets the Arab minority in Israel is an amendment to the Basic Law: The Knesset, which authorizes the state to disqualify individuals who have visited “enemy states”, such as Lebanon and Syria, over the past seven years from running for Knesset office. Attorney Jabareen urged the embassy representatives to raise issues regarding the new "anti-Arab" legislation and discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel as crucial causes of concern with their governments and Israel in order to defend and secure their rights.

Attorney Jabareen also reported on the Attorney General's decision in January 2008 that no police officers or commanders would be indicted for the killings of 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel in October 2000, despite the conclusions reached by the Or Commission that police used excessive force. This decision, he explained, sends the message to the Palestinian community in Israel that the life of a Palestinian is not considered sufficiently valuable to warrant the indictment of police. In this regard, he called upon the embassy representatives to urge Israel to resolve these matters, and to hold those responsible for the October 2000 killings to account for their actions. He also urged them to pay close attention to the increasing racism against Palestinian citizens of Israel, as manifested in the Akka (Acre) events which took place eight years later in October 2008.

Attorney Suhad Bishara then analyzed Adalah’s recent land and planning cases in the Naqab, where the government has stepped up efforts to re-locate and concentrate the Arab Bedouin in government-planned towns to encourage Jewish settlement of the remaining area. She discussed in detail the case of the unrecognized Arab Bedouin village of Atir-Umm el-Hieran, whose entire population has been served with evacuation orders by the state. The villagers were relocated from their original land over 50 years ago by the Israeli military, but face evacuation once more because the area has been designated for a new Jewish town . The same policies of re-location and concentration are in evidence in the new master plan for metropolitan Beer el-Sabe (Beer Sheva). The plan includes three ‘research areas’ that the government has earmarked as potential locations for Arab Bedouin villages. However, highways, tunnels, and army-controlled land cuts through these areas and therefore they would be totally unsuitable as residential areas for Arab Bedouin communities that have been evacuated from their villages. Attorney Bishara stressed that the government of Israel is seeking to erase the history, culture and heritage of the Arab Bedouin with these actions, and she called upon the embassy representatives to urge Israel against these moves of home demolitions and the evacuation of the Arab Bedouin villages.

Rina Jabareen, the International Advocacy Director of Adalah, also called upon the participants to encourage their governments to pose tough questions to Israel regarding its human rights violations against Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) in the upcoming Universal Periodic Review of Israel to be conducted by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in December 2008. Further, she urged the EU member state representatives to seek strong human rights language and human rights benchmarks in the new EU-Israel Action Plan to be signed in 2009.