47 YEARS FOR LAND DAY:
THE DISPOSSESSION AND DISPLACEMENT OF PALESTINIANS CONTINUE

ISRAEL’S FAR-RIGHT GOVERNMENT AND THE ACCELERATION OF JUDAIZATION AND ANNEXATION

The far-right government, which was sworn in three months ago, began advancing a raft of discriminatory and racist legislation and policies, including those aimed at consolidating Jewish supremacy and racial segregation through Judaization on both sides of the Green line, and annexation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
 
Adalah is launching legal actions to challenge some of these laws and policies. 

FORCED DISPLACEMENT IN THE NAQAB

For decades, Palestinian Bedouin residents of the officially ‘unrecognized’ villages in the Naqab have been living under constant threat of forced displacement at the hands of the Israeli authorities. Israel is attempting to forcibly displace 500 Palestinian Bedouin residents of Ras Jrabah in order to expand the Jewish city of Dimona. The state also filed evacuation lawsuits against the residents of Al-Bqeea, attempting to present them as “trespassers'' or “intruders”. Even though the residents have lived in their villages for generations, where they established their homes, families and social and economic lives, Israel refuses to consider recognizing their villages and is attempting to displace them to government developed, urbanized Bedouin townships. Adalah is representing residents from both Bedouin villages before Israeli courts to stop these unjust evictions.

LAND GRAB AND DISPOSSESSION UNDER THE GUISE OF DEVELOPMENT PLANS AND NATURE RESERVES

Israel continues to advance plans that would harm Palestinians’ livelihood and development. Israel routinely greenwashes land grabs and the confiscation of Palestinian land by declaring it as new nature reserves and strategically uses Palestinians’ land as sites for various development plans, while damaging their livelihoods and curtailing the development of their towns.
 
For example, in the north of Israel, a plan to construct the Afula-Jenin railway line threatens to confiscate agricultural land in the Palestinian town of Muqeibleh, while the plan for the Alonim nature reserve in the Galilee entails the re-designation of private agricultural land around three Bedouin villages. These plans would restrict the future development of these towns and severely harm the residents’ livelihoods from agriculture. Adalah is challenging these plans before the Israeli planning and building authorities.
 
In January 2023, the Israel Land Authority and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) resumed planting of trees on lands surrounding several unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab. Afforestation work is part of Israel’s long-term project to displace Bedouin residents from their lands and expand the reach of Judaization in the Naqab, and the new government has committed to expand this Israeli practice. On 29 January 2023, Adalah published a paper about the latest round of the JNF’s afforestation work and a brief explanation of the history of the JNF and its colonial project. 
 
In East Jerusalem, the East Jerusalem City Center Plan threatens to impose heavy restrictions on Palestinian residents in all areas of their lives, including housing, the economy, employment, trade, education, culture and transportation. Adalah and the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem have filed an objection to the plan on behalf of 322 Palestinian residents.
• Read an interview with Adalah Attorney Suhad Bishara about the plan- The Jerusalem Story, 18 January 2023.
• Read Adalah’s position paper about the illegality of the plan.
 
The Israeli authorities also continue to advance a plan for the construction of a new US embassy compound in Jerusalem on land that is Palestinian private property, illegally seized by the state under the 1950 Israeli Absentees’ Property Law. Adalah is representing descendants of the original landowners and has filed an objection to the Jerusalem District Planning Committee, the United States Ambassador to Israel Thomas R. Nides, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.