Israel/Palestine

Legal advocacy
Many of Adalah's cases involve first-time legal challenges and affect Arab citizens as a collective group. Adalah’s legal advocacy focuses on appealing to the Israeli Supreme Court. Between 1996-2000, it brought over twenty cases before the court dealing with equality for Arab citizens, including language rights cases, budgets of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, health and education in the unrecognized Arab Bedouin villages in Israel.

Adalah’s legal department is divided into three units: Land and Planning; Economic, Social, and Cultural; and Civil and Political (including Criminal Justice and the Occupied Palestinian Territory).

Land and planning rights
Adalah is challenging discriminatory land and planning laws and policies in a wide range of fields. Its litigation efforts include petitioning the courts and planning committees against forced evictions and home demolitions in the Naqab; challenging the policies of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) for making land available only to Jews; challenging the state's refusal to recognize or provide services to Arab villages and neighborhoods; objecting to planning decisions which prioritize Jewish settlements over Arab towns; and seeking to overturn policies which discriminate against Arabs in the provision of mortgages and housing assistance.

Economic, social and cultural rights
Some of Adalah's main litigation includes: ensuring that the state implements a 2006 Supreme Court decision which declared that the 'National Priority Area' discriminates against Arab citizens; seeking to secure basic social services – such as water, electricity, schools, roads, and mother and child health clinics – in the Arab Bedouin unrecognized villages; challenging regulations which prohibit Arab citizens from opening their stores on Saturday (Sabbath); and achieving equal treatment for the Arabic language on road signs and in governmental operations, as befits its status official status.

Civil and political rights
Adalah's litigation activities include ensuring citizens' right to peaceful protest, including the representation of demonstrators; defending Arab MKs in political criminal cases; challenging laws which violate freedom of expression, including laws that restrict Nakba commemoration; and demanding investigations and accountability when the state employs violence against its own citizens, as it did in October 2000 with the killing of 13 Arab protesters.

Occupied Palestinian Territory
Adalah's work focuses on Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem and the rights of prisoners and detainees. Adalah monitors rights abuses in the OPT, both during and outside of military offensives, and submits impact litigation cases to expose and challenge these practices. Adalah has argued cases dealing with the denial of tort compensation to Palestinians harmed by Israeli military operations, demanding investigations into home demolitions; fighting against techniques of collective punishment imposed against the civilian population; and seeking an end to inhumane detention conditions at Israeli prisons.

A basic underlying presumption used to condemn 21 of the 57 laws, is that any enactment defining or promoting Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people discriminates against Arab citizens of Israel (e.g., the flag law and the law to support Yad Ben Zvi, a prominent institution promoting Zionist study and values). But this flawed premise would delegitimize the vast majority of the world’s democracies, which are also nation states – that is, states established by and for a predominant ethnic or religious majority. As I pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article explaining the proposed Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, “Most of the more than 60 democracies are built on the ethnic identity of a predominant group, which molds the character of the state while affording minorities full civil and religious rights. In this regard the Jewish state of Israel is a typical democratic country.”

West Bank woman married an Israeli Arab and moved here decades ago; she is now ill but ineligible for medical treatment

A Palestinian woman whose late husband was an Israeli citizen and whose son serves in the Israel Defense Forces has been denied Israeli citizenship for the past 21 years.

According to a report by Channel 2 TV on Wednesday, the woman — who was not identified — was originally from the West Bank city of Jenin and moved to Israel after marrying an Arab Israeli man from Haifa over two decades ago. Her husband has since died and she is ill, but remains unable to get medical insurance or work in Israel because she is not a citizen.