Dear Friends,

Many greetings to you from Adalah. 

This update follows-up our previous report from December 2017 concerning the transport for 3- and 4-year-old Arab Bedouin children from the unrecognized villages in the Naqab (Negev) to preschools, as promised by the Education Ministry. 

Having twice violated a court decision to provide the school buses, Adalah filed a motion for contempt of court on 28 February 2018 in the Be’er Sheva District Court on behalf of parents from three unrecognized Bedouin villages of Al Sira, Al-Jaraf and Umm Namila against the Israeli Education Ministry and Al-Qasoum Regional Council.

Adalah wrote in the motion that the authorities are in contempt of court due to their failure to abide by two court decisions:

“Failure to abide by the court decisions amounts to a lack of good faith on the part of the Education Ministry and Al-Qasoum Regional Council ... The petitioners anticipated – and with reason – that the authorities would abide by their commitments.”

The authorities’ violation of the court decisions constitute a serious, ongoing violation of the most basic rights of the children and their parents:

“Due to the conduct of the respondents, the petitioners have been forced time and again to appeal to the legal system in order to obtain basic services – services which no one is disputing their right to receive, and which they have been repeatedly promised would be provided.”

The Israeli Compulsory Education Law provides that the state must provide education for children starting at age 3, however, there are no preschools in these villages and there is no public transport to neighboring villages with schools. 

At a hearing held in March 2018, the Be’er Sheva District Court ordered that buses must be provided for the children in the three villages within 5 days. The court also ruled that the state had 30 days to provide transport in the other Bedouin villages, to around 5000 preschoolers. The parties need to update the court on 10 April 2018 regarding compliance.

Adalah hopes that with the filing of the motion for contempt of court and the court’s subsequent rulings that the Education Ministry will begin to implement its promises and abide by the law.

Dear Friends,

Just over one year ago, on the night of 18 January 2017, heavily-armed Israeli paramilitary police entered the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in order to demolish homes. Just before dawn broke, officers opened fire on 50-year-old math teacher Ya'akub Abu Al-Qi'an as he was driving his jeep. Ya'akub was seriously wounded by the gunfire and lost control of his jeep, running over and killing police officer Erez Levy. Israeli police prevented paramedics from reaching Ya'akub and, as a result, he died on the scene. After the killing, Israeli authorities demolished his family's home and agricultural buildings.

The killing of Ya'akub was only one of the most recent blows to the Abu Al-Qi'an Bedouin tribe. Israel's displacement of the community began 70 years earlier.

In 1948, the Israeli military forcibly displaced the community from ancestral lands they had worked for generations and moved them from place to place. Eventually, in the 1950s, the military ordered them to settle near Yattir. It was there that they established Umm al-Hiran, which is today one of 35 unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab (Negev) desert in the south of Israel.

In 2003, more than 50 years later, Israel informed the 500 Umm al-Hiran residents that it intended to demolish their village. In parallel, Israel began to plan a new Jewish-only town that would be built upon the ruins of Umm al-Hiran to be called "Hiran".

This is one of the most blatant examples of racially-motivated displacement in Israeli history.

The same day that police killed Ya'akub, Israel's public security minister and police chief both announced that Ya'akub supported terror and had intentionally attacked police – claims that were repeatedly disproven. Israeli police subsequently refused to hand Ya'akub's body over for burial, only doing so once the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of Adalah's petition on behalf of Ya'akub's family and ordered them to.

Adalah also demanded a probe of the killing and that those found responsible be prosecuted. But more than a year later, in January 2018, the Israeli authorities reportedly closed their investigation into the shooting death of Ya'akub Abu Al-Qi'an. Adalah will take additional legal actions in this regard.

Adalah is continuing to fight for the family of Ya'akub Abu Al-Qi'an and their neighbors, but we cannot do this without your help.

Your support is crucial to our defense of the Bedouin residents of Umm al-Hiran. Your support has helped Adalah to help the community to remain in their village for almost 15 years, despite the state's plans to remove them. Donate today and help us #Save_UmAlHiran

In solidarity,

Rina Rosenberg (Jabareen)
International Advocacy Director

Making the global, local: protecting the right to protest 

Dear Friends, 

Greetings and warm hellos from Adalah! In this report back, we want to highlight some of Adalah’s work before the UN, and our efforts to make the global, local to protect the protest.

Adalah has been working before UN human rights treaty bodies for 20 years, making international human rights law. In these processes, we document and expose human rights violations; inform the international community, including UN experts from around the world, of these practices; and frequently obtain favorable recommendations, which give international legitimacy and credibility to our claims. We then call on the Israeli authorities to implement these human rights recommendations, and we reference them before Israeli courts in further support of our legal arguments. In this way, Adalah tries to make the global, local and to work toward the full realization of international human rights.

Recently in October 2017, Adalah joined a delegation of Palestinian women’s rights defenders and NGOs from Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) to participate in UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women’s (CEDAW) review session on Israel in Geneva. Israel ratified the women’s rights convention in 1991 and, like all other state parties, is reviewed regularly by the committee.

Ahead of the review, Adalah submitted reports and held meetings with members of the committee, and presented detailed information on Israel’s violations of Palestinian women’s human rights in all aspects of life. Importantly, Adalah highlighted Israel’s failure to protect the rights of freedom of expression and assembly, to peaceful protest, and to use social media platforms to voice dissent, and the police and military’s excessive use of force and extreme violence to suppress protestors.

The most serious illegal practices used by the police in Israel to suppress Palestinian protests, include: dispersing the demonstrations illegally and arresting protestors; refusing to give authorization for protests, claiming threats to public order; summoning protestors for interrogations with the General Security Service (GSS)/police; making illegal preventive arrests including those of family members of lead demonstrators; using excessive force and brutality against demonstrators; arresting protestors as groups, with the courts upholding “group detentions”; demanding lengthy times of pre-trial detention and house arrest; and failing to abide by special procedures that apply to children. Israeli Jewish protestors do not receive this treatment.

The CEDAW Committee issued its concluding observations in November 2017. The committee raised many of the concerns highlighted by Adalah and its partners. Regarding women’s human rights defenders and NGOs in Israel, the Committee noted that:

"Following the adoption of the Anti-Boycott Law and Naqba Law in 2011, human rights defenders, including Israeli and Palestinian women, have been subjected to severe restrictions on their activities, including through limitations to their financing." The committee recommends that "the State party take specific steps, including through legal amendments, to create an enabling environment in which Israeli and Palestinian women human rights defenders and NGOs working on gender equality and women’s empowerment may freely conduct their activities without undue restrictions, including on funding by foreign sources." (para. 38, 39) 

Regarding suppression of protest of women and girls’ in the OPT, the Committee stressed that:

“Israeli security forces continue to use disproportionate force in response to acts of violence, protest demonstrations and in its law enforcement operations in the context of counter-terrorism measures, with disproportionate impact on women and girls”, and called on Israel to ensure that it “complies with the Basic Principle on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Personnel.” (para. 18, 19)

In December 2017, Adalah wrote to the Israeli Attorney General (AG) to urge him to anchor these concluding observations in internal directives obliging government ministries to take measures to eradicate discrimination against women. Adalah argued that Israel ratified all of the international human rights conventions – including the women’s rights convention (CEDAW) – thus expressing its intent to act in accordance with its standards and norms. Further, Adalah and women’s rights groups in Israel asked for a discussion of CEDAW’s recommendation in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, headed by MK Aida Touma-Sulieman, a member of the Arab Joint List, has scheduled a hearing for 12 March 2018. We will keep you posted about the outcomes - the AG's response and the conclusions of the Knesset hearing. 

Thank you again for your generous contributions to Adalah, which make this crucial work possible. Please continue to help Adalah to protect the protest!

In solidarity,

Rina Rosenberg (Jabareen)

International Advocacy Director, Adalah