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…
Police arrested nine Arab-Bedouin and Jewish activists in the unrecognized village of Al-Araqib in the Negev on Sunday, July 24, as they attempted to block bulldozers from performing earthworks as part of plans to turn village lands into a Jewish National Fund (JNF) forest. According to Al-Ittihad, the daily Arabic-language newspaper of the Communist Party…
On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the mass social protests for affordable housing in Israel, the far-right, neo-liberal coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu rejected on Sunday, July 10, a proposal by Hadash MK Dov Khenin (Joint List) to amend the Basic (constitutional) Law, Human Dignity and Liberty, to include the recognition of housing as…
The Prime Minister’s Office is holding up the transfer of NIS 2.5 billion (shekels; $645 million) to Arab communities in Israel because “the state has still not developed a mechanism to enforce planning and construction laws in these towns,” Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon told the Knesset yesterday, June 13. He was responding to a query…
Hundreds of protesters, Arabs and Jews, marched on Thursday, March 3, in Beer-Sheva, against the government’s plans to demolish two Arab-Bedouin villages and build a new Jewish settlement in their place. Under a government-sponsored plan, the residents of the unrecognized Arab-Bedouin villages of Atir and Umm al-Hiran in Israel’s southern Negev Desert are slated to…
Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, has reported that the Supreme Court has rejected the organization’s extraordinary motion for a second hearing on the ordered eviction of the residents of the Arab-Bedouin village of Atir-Umm al-Hiran. Adalah had requested that the court reconsider its decision to approve Israel’s plan to evict…