Adalah’s stated goals are to achieve equal individual and collective rights for the Palestinian citizens in Israel in different fields including land rights; civil and political rights; cultural, social and economic rights; religious rights, women’s rights, and prisoners’ rights, as well as involvement in the protection of human rights in the OPT. Adalah’s involvement in the struggle against the violation of human rights in the OPT came at a later stage, after the outbreak of the second Intifada. Abeer Baker, a senior attorney at Adalah explained that Adalah started to deal with the OPT after Israel’s policies led to the almost complete erasure of the Green Line. Even though the Palestinians inside the Green Line have citizenship, she notes that many commonalities are to be found in the way the State of Israel treats the Palestinian people as a whole:
Israel controls and hierarchises people. First there are the Israeli Jews [who are also hierarchised into Ashkenazis, Mizrahis, Ethiopians, Russians… ]. In the second tier, we then find the non-Israeli Jews. Subsequently, and in descending order there are the Arab citizens, residents of East Jerusalem, those in the West Bank and finally Gaza. Between you and me, this is already a single state and Israel controls it all. In Adalah this reality is reflected in the fact that we are also dealing with the Occupied Territories.34
Initially, Adalah focused its work on appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court but due to its awareness of the limitations that typify this kind of activity it expanded its work beyond litigation. Today it operates as a human rights organisation that deals with a wide variety of issues concerning the Palestinian citizens of Israel and uses public tools and international platforms to achieve and advance its goals. It advocates legislation that will ensure equal individual and collective rights for the Palestinian citizens; appeals to international institutions and forums; provides legal consultation to individuals, non-governmental organisations and Arab institutions; organises study days, seminars, and workshops; and publishes reports on legal issues concerning the
rights of the Palestinian minority in particular, and human rights in general. Adalah is consciously working to challenge the power relations from within the institutions of the state. It therefore directs its campaign at influencing Israeli public discourse through high visibility in the Hebrew media, regular participation in conferences organised by Israeli universities and involvement in human rights campaigns in cooperation with Jewish-Israeli organisations (Payes 2005: 124).
Adalah’s focus on collective rights reflects its commitment to subverting the attempt of the Israeli state to disaggregate and individualise the Palestinian citizens in Israel, dividing them into sub-groups based on religious or other affiliation. For Adalah, the Palestinian community in Israel is a national-indigenous minority, characterised by its own language, culture, history and collective memory. The organisation proclaims a liberal conception of social relations, viewing the personal autonomy of the individual as an aim in itself. Nevertheless, it simultaneously advocates a multicultural approach that connects personal autonomy to recognition of the collective rights of the group to which the individual belongs, so that he/she can act freely and without oppression. Indeed, Adalah seeks to harmonise civil-political rights with the collective rights of the Palestinian minority as a national-indigenous minority.
Following this line, Adalah selects its court cases on the grounds that they constitute a precedent-setting legal challenge that significantly affects the rights of the Palestinian community as a collective. Usually, its cases are initiated and court petitions are filed on a proactive basis, based on in-house research. Thus, Adalah is sometimes its own client on behalf of Israel’s Palestinian population. Abeer Baker explained that Adalah is using the law as both a shield and a sword:
We see our role as pushing forward positive rights and not only negative rights. This means that we do not only defend citizens against something that happened to them, such as land expropriation or arrests during political protests, but we are dealing also with positive rights, which means that we are demanding that things will be done in a way that will promote the rights of the Palestinian community in Israel.
A combination of factors led to Adalah’s establishment in the mid-1990s. These explain better Adalah’s role and position in the struggle for the collective rights of Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. Adalah was established in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, signed in September 1993 between the Israeli government and the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the series of related agreements and negotiations that followed. During that period there was an increasing need for the Palestinian citizens of Israel to emphasise the importance of citizenship and civil rights issues for defining state-minority relations. The Oslo Process did not touch on the issue of the Palestinian citizens, and made it clear to them that they were not seen as part of the same problem of the Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Territories (to whom the Oslo process was addressed), nor were they included in the negotiation process to find a possible solution. At the same time, it was clear that they were also not part of the Israeli state as full and equal citizens (Payes 2005: 125; Zreik 2003: 45).
It was at this juncture that the Palestinian community took matters into its own hands, and in order to get out of its isolation it adopted an assertive agenda of positive struggle: “We have started to demand what we haven’t asked for before. Now the main issue is the connection between the Jewishness of the state and our status, and we want change” (Jabareen 1996: 24). This understanding also contributed to a major shift in the operational logic of Adalah (among other newly established NGOs), and led to its increased professionalism and outreach to the international community, in an attempt to generate public opinion and attract attention to the status of the Palestinian citizens inside the Jewish state (Soehnchen 2007).
Additionally, Adalah’s establishment filled a gap that existed in the arena of legal advocacy in Israel, which until then had been dominated by the ACRI, the Association for Human Rights in Israel. Hassan Jabareen, Adalah’s co-founder, explains that Adalah does not follow the same premise that is the basis of the ACRI’s work: “We Palestinians cannot work from this perspective [of the Jewish democratic state]. Our problem is about minority rights, as well as human rights and rights from a collective perspective” (Quoted in Soehnchen 2007: 176). Jabareen testifies that he was inspired to establish Adalah following his short internship at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the strongest and biggest Black organisation in the United States. Jabareen recalls that this experience had a tremendous effect on him and he describes his ideological difficulties in working for the ACRI: “When I saw the model of the NAACP and how much it contributed to the struggle of the Blacks, advanced their rights and gave inspiration and pride to the
Black jurists, I decided to establish Adalah” (Jabareen 2009: 20).
Orna Kohn, a Jewish-Israeli lawyer who has worked in Adalah ever since its foundation, highlighted the same issue. ACRI, where both Jabareen and Kohn worked before, focused its work on individual human rights, something that they both found unfitting for the actual situation of the Palestinian population in Israel, which is determined by the political reality.
ACRI was then [in the mid 1990s] blinder to the existence of Palestinians in Israel... I remember a discussion in the legal department of ACRI, it was at the time of the campaign for the lands, before the Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow’s appeal to court about the lands.35 The slogan was ‘This land is also mine!’ We had an interesting
discussion on discrimination, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, and I said “but this is a stolen land! Let’s speak about who this land really belongs to!” People did not understand what I was talking about. The gap was too wide... The only place I was interested to go to work in, using the profession I acquired, was Adalah. 36
Finally, behind the establishment of Adalah, stood the changes and possibilities for action in the Israeli legal system, manifested in the passing of new legislation in the form of the 1992-94 Basic Laws (mentioned in the introduction). Although these laws legally grounded for the first time the character of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and were therefore founded on the same Zionist logic, they opened up a narrow space of manoeuvre within the law that did not exist beforehand. Former Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak affirms (2006) that the Supreme Court took these laws seriously, their rhetoric became that of human rights, and consequently the space for the existence of organisations like Adalah was widened.
In sum, towards the mid-1990s, the combination of the political climate of the early-Oslo years together with the enactment of these two constitutional laws underpinned the establishment of Adalah, enabling it to offer a completely novel legal discourse and practice within Israel. It then became possible to discuss issues that had previously been considered taboo. As Kohn suggested, “the court then allowed itself to
35 The Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow, an organisation representing Mizrahi Jews in Israel, filed a petition
to the Supreme Court in 1996 against the decision of Israel’s Land Administration to enable Kibbutzs and villages to privatise land and to change its original agriculture purpose to commerce, industry, residency and tourism. The Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow claimed that these decisions were illegal discrimination against the weak sectors in society, residing in the developing towns and neighbourhoods of the big cities, in favour of the Ashkenazi landowners. See http://www.ha-keshet.org.il/
be a bit braver.”37
A few years later, in the aftermath of the events of October 2000, in the violent clashes between Palestinian citizen demonstrators and the police when 13 Palestinians were shot and killed, Adalah made its breakthrough in both the public and professional spheres. At this time the organisation had already taken its first steps and it was challenged by these events. Hence, the combination of a dynamic organisation and a highly skilled and professional team enabled the organisation to respond in real time and give answers to the events as they unfolded. I explore Adalah’s involvement in the October 2000 events in depth below.
Adalah’s prominence and focus on collective rights place it on a collision course with Jewish-Israeli public opinion. Striving to make the state less Jewish and more democratic, it can be characterised as anti-Zionist. This leads to a negative public image of the organisation in Jewish-Israeli society. Salah Mohsen, Adalah’s Media coordinator explains, “When they speak about us in the Israeli media they tend to write Adallah, with a double ‘L,’ instead of Adalah. This links it automatically to something like ‘Hizballah,’ with religious and violent connotations.”38 Mohsen ascribed this to the
tendency of Israeli society to close itself off and to turn against any individual or organisation that undermines the logic of the Jewish state. However, the media is one of Adalah’s important spheres of activity since it also aims to mould, influence and mobilise public opinion as part of its operational strategy, as the groundwork for both filing petitions to the Supreme Court and as part of its public campaigning. In effect, Adalah’s lawyers and the organisation itself are mentioned many times in news outlets, since the organisation places itself at the centre of the most important junctions of the Palestinian community in Israel: October 2000 events, the disqualification of Arab parties from participating in elections and issues relating to the OPT. It is its engagement in counter-hegemonic activity, in the form of battles for collective rights using the state’s legal institutions, which make Adalah an important case study for this research.
At this point it is possible for us to dwell on three specific cases in which Adalah
37 Ibid.
was and still is involved. Throughout the analysis, different relations to the law and the legal system will surface and frame the discussion, and these reveal a full spectrum of activities shaped around the law. The three cases chosen demonstrate different layers of legal activity and their political implications: litigation, with its limits and possibilities, paradoxes and opportunities in the case of the battle against the Citizenship Law; legal representation and local and international advocacy around the events of October 2000; and finally, a proposal for a constitution, and a new political programme for the state of Israel.