Adalah’s News

On 15 May 2022, Palestinians commemorated the 74^th anniversary of the Nakba (“The Catastrophe”), the events that followed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Nakba marks the killing of thousands of Palestinians; their mass-scale dispossession, internal displacement and expulsion, numbering approximately 750,000; and the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages. These events have irrevocably altered the demography, socio-economic structures, and landscape of Palestine, and have led to the dispersion of the Palestinian population over three distinct geographical areas:  Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and in the Arab world and beyond.

Israel has since continued its colonial practices of expulsion and dispossession by systematically enacting and using laws and policies to forcibly displace Palestinians across the West Bank, East Jerusalem and inside Israel.

Resource: The Nakba Files: The Nakba, the Law, and What Lies in Between
 

Thousands of Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Naqab (Negev) in the south face imminent threats of eviction by the state to make way for more Jewish-only towns, military bases, and other major infrastructure projects that exclude them and their development interests.

The 500 residents of Ras Jrabah, an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Naqab, together with Adalah, are waging a legal battle against Israeli state plans to expel the villagers in order to expand the primarily Israeli Jewish city of Dimona, and to resettle them in segregated, impoverished towns designated solely for Bedouin. 

Click to see pictures from Ras Jrabah. Photos by Waleed Al-Obra and Mati Milstein. 

On 22 and 23 May 2022, the Beer Sheva Magistrates’ Court will hold hearings on the case. Experts and villagers will testify against the evictions and home demolitions that would cut the residents off from Dimona, on which they heavily rely for employment, health and welfare services. The state cynically portrays the Bedouins who have lived in Ras Jrabah for generations as “invaders” or “trespassers”, in its attempt to expand Dimona on the ruins of the village.