Peace Now and more than a dozen Palestinian landowners have petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice to halt the construction of a pending 7,000-unit housing project in the occupied West Bank settlement of Efrat, over the issue of land discrimination. The planned settlement is intended to double the size of the settlement of Efrat while…
Following an initiative by the Joint List, the Knesset’s Finance Committee debated on Monday, December 30, the possibility of placing a five-year freeze on a controversial amendment to the Building and Planning Law that stiffens penalties against “illegal construction.” Passed in 2017, this amendment is Known as the Kaminitz Law. A vote in favor placing a…
The day before last Land Day, Friday March 29, a protest was held in Jadeidi-Makr, a merged Arab-Palestinian local council east of Acre in the north of the country. The protest was against the intention of Israeli authorities to approve a development plan which is expected to dramatically increase the number of residents of Jadeidi-Makr…
Concerned tenants in Haifa are protesting local urban renewal plans threatening the rights of some of the most vulnerable public housing residents. In the urban renewal process known as “vacate and build” (pinui/binui), residents stay in temporary housing while their old homes are demolished and replaced with modern facilities which the residents then return to.…
Dozens of residents of the northern city of Afula demonstrated on Wednesday afternoon, June 13, against the sale of a house to an Arab family. Protesters waved Israeli flags and carried racist signs condemning the sale and the homeowners who sold their home to Arabs, one of which read: “Traitors against the Jews will get…
Peace Now’s 2017 annual report on settlement construction in the West Bank (excluding occupied east Jerusalem) reveals that, last year, building activity exceeded the yearly average over the better part of the past decade by more than 17%. Of the new construction, 78% took place in isolated settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) “beyond…
Hadash has slammed as racist a decision by the local council head of the northern town of Kfar Vradim in Upper Galilee, Sivan Yechiel, to freeze plans for its expansion after half of the successful bids in a first round of tenders for new housing went to Arabs. Hadash accused Yechiel of enacting an apartheid…
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel sent a letter on 4 August 2016 to Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Machluf Deri and Interior Ministry Director General Orna Hozman Bechor demanding that they reject a request from the Harish Local Council to expand its jurisdictional boundaries. The letter, sent by Adalah on…
At the end of July, the Housing Cabinet approved a proposal to establish a new community for the Arab-Bedouin residents of Wadi al-Na’am in the Negev, and to move all village residents to an area south of their present location, adjacent to the Bedouin township of Shaqib al-Salam (Segev Shalom). The Association for Civil Rights in…
To discuss his plans for how Israeli society can better relate to its Arab minority citizens, Joint List chairman, MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash), recently granted an exclusive interview to The Jerusalem Post. The interview was published on Sunday, July 31, just one day after scores of activists commemorated six years to the destruction of the…