Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ)

Profile

Country/TerritoryPalestinian Authority
Websitehttp://www.arij.org/
Founded1990
In their own wordsA “non-profit organization dedicated to promoting sustainable development in the occupied Palestinian territories and the self-reliance of the Palestinian people through greater control over their natural resources.”

Funding

Activities

  • Among the leaders of the political warfare against Israel, seeking to further BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions), false accusations of Israeli “apartheid” and “racism,” and support for a Palestinian “right of return” that is inconsistent with a two-state framework.
  • Employs attack rhetoric of “ethnic cleansing,” “transfer,” “land grab,” “colonialization activities” in publications and claims Israel guilty of “excessive and disproportionate violations of every existing humanitarian code.”
  • Seeks to map “communities targeted by Israeli activities on the ground to help assess the magnitude of the occurred damages and derive conclusions” and “obtain visual illustration of changes and damages” in order to convey such findings to “Palestinian decision makers, foreign representatives and the public at large.”
  • Leads a project, funded by the European Union, “Monitoring Israeli Colonizing activities in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza,” aimed at “inspecting and scrutinizing Israeli colonizing activities in their different forms in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.” (See more on this project below.)
  • On November 28, 2022, ARIJ and 197 other regional and international civil society organizations sent an open letter to the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan urging him to “Investigate and Deter Israel’s Apartheid Regime.” According to the letter, “Though mindful of the Court’s limited resources and budgetary complications, as well as your office workload and challenges, we are compelled to stress that Palestinian victims deserve justice and require equal attention as in other situations…we will continue our cooperation with your office and our support of your investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine.”
  • In August 2022, ARIJ signed a joint statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. The statement called for the international community to “take effective measures to end all other actions that deny Palestinians their inalienable human rights” and to “their support and increase funding to the organizations and engage with financial institutions to ensure the transfer of funds to the organizations.”
  • In May 2022, ARIJ was a signatory on a petition titled “The Return Appeal” calling on the United Nations to “take all necessary steps and measures for immediately holding the occupation’s state accountable for all the crimes, the latter has so far committed against the Palestinian people, within strict legal means that would not allow the occupation’s criminals to evade interrogation or possible trials.”
  • In March 2022 ARIJ released a statement bearing the EU logo and expressing “concerns about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict’s repercussions regarding the Palestinians.” The statement called on the International Criminal Court “to prevent the Jewish Ukrainian immigrants from colonizing the occupied Palestinian lands, which is [also] a war crime,” and absurdly claimed that “inviting 100 thousand Ukrainian Jews to colonize…will shatter the two-state solution.”
  • In May 2021, ARIJ was a signatory on a statement condemning the “racist and apartheid policies, laws and prosecutorial practices that Palestinians face in Jerusalem and the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
  • In April 2021, ARIJ welcomed the decision by the International Criminal Court to launch a formal investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in the “State of Palestine.” According to ARIJ, “This is a long-awaited and a critically important step towards ensuring the rule of law and ending impunity, while ensuring accountability for Israel’s crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.”
  • In January 2021, ARIJ, alongside a number of Palestinian organizations, issued a declaration that the “Vaccine Roll-Out Exposes Israel’s Inhumane Acts of Apartheid.” The NGOs falsely claimed that Israel has “legal obligations” to “ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control.” The NGOs altogether ignore that Palestinians residing in Jerusalem are part of the Israeli health care system; that under the Oslo Accords the PA is responsible for health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; and that the PA has adopted its own vaccine policy for its population.
  • In July 2020, ARIJ was a signatory on an urgent appeal to the United Nations referring to a non-existent “shoot-to-kill policy” as “contributing to the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid regime of systematic racial oppression and domination over the Palestinian people as a whole, which, embedded in a system of impunity, prevents Palestinians from effectively challenging Israel’s apartheid policies and practices.”
  • In June 2020, ARIJ was a signatory on a joint statement at the 43rd UN Human Rights Council calling for all UN Member States to “Recognise and address Israeli apartheid over the Palestinian people.”
  • In November 2019, ARIJ signed a letter to Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Fatou Bensouda, calling to open “an official, full-scale investigation into the ‘situation in Palestine’” and the “possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed” as the “absence of an official investigation…has fuelled the already existing culture of impunity.”
  • In April 2019, ARIJ released a “Daily Report” that included the classic antisemitic attack on the Talmud in its rhetoric used against Israel. The report claimed that “over 250 settlers, stormed an archaeological site in Al-Jib village…and performed Talmudic rituals” and accused Jews of performing “Talmudic rituals in celebration of Jewish holidays” and performing “Talmudic rituals in the town.” In a February 2017 report, ARIJ claimed that the “Talmudic rituals” were in “blatant provocation to local residents.”
    • ARIJ’s “Daily Report” was paid for by the EU and bears the EU logo.
  • On April 5, 2018, ARIJ and Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) published a press release accusing Israel of “longstanding impunity,” “systematic and continuous widespread targeting,” and “premeditated murder[] of innocent Palestinian people” during the Great March of Return. The press release ignored the violent nature of the protests, which have consisted of an organized armed attack on the Israeli border and IDF positions, attempts to destroy and breach the border fence, and sustained arson, rocket, and mortar attacks on Israeli civilian communities.
  • In December 2017, ARIJ accused President Trump of “overturn[ing] the longstanding international commitment to a two-state solution” by naming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and alleged that Israel had engaged in “intense [] colonization practices aimed at encapsulating the city with a belt of settlements that grow towards each other, forming physical barricade that isolates the city from the rest of the West Bank.”
  • In November 2017, Director General Jad Issac gave a lecture, “Facts on the ground – description of the current situation: Israeli policies in support of building illegal settlements,” at the First European Conference on Israeli Settlements.
  • Published a 32-page “Christmas Alert” in 2012 (together with Kairos Palestine, a central actor in promoting BDS in churches and Christian organizations), comparing Palestinians today with the “Parable of the Vineyard and the Tenants,” invoking classic antisemitic deicide themes, and casting Israeli Jews as “evil tenants” and the Palestinians as Jesus.
    • ARIJ also produced a video Christmas message on the economic situation in the West Bank. This message is also full of false and misleading “facts,” for instance, the claim that Israel imposes a 1.5 kilometer “buffer zone” along the Gaza border. In reality, this zone was no more than 500 meters, and after “Operation Pillar of Defense” (November 2012) the buffer zone was reduced.
  • Co-authored a submission in January 2013 to the Human Rights Council accusing Israel of accusations of “violence, verbal and physical abuses, inhumane and degrading treatments, forced evictions, land and property grabbing, destruction of property and housing.”
  • In 2008, ARIJ declared that “Israel Should Not Join the EU & the Nato” because of its “illegal practice of collective punishment, practice of racism, illegal military occupation, and violations of human rights.”

Palestinian Observation of Israeli Colonization Activities (POICA)

  • ARIJ and the Land Research Center (LRC) launched an EU-funded website as part of its project titled, “Advocating for a Sustainable and Viable Resolution of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The website features blatant propaganda and allegations such as “Throughout the years of occupation of the Palestinian territory, Israel has engaged in excessive and disproportionate violations of every existing humanitarian code” (emphasis added) and refers to the Israel Defense Force as the “Israel occupation Forces.”
  • The website provides a platform for ARIJ and LRC’s distorted historical account, claiming that “The State of Israel was founded on approximately four-fifths of Palestine, taking more land than the United Nations’ 1947 Partition Plan had proposed,” and that “During and after the 1948 War, a transfer policy was carried out and four out of every five Palestinians in the area inside Israel became refugees.” This “historical” summary omits the context of an Arab rejection of partition and an Arab-initiated war against Israel, and falsely alleges an Israeli “transfer policy.”
  • Issues frequent reports to “shed the light on the Israeli violations taking place in the occupied Palestinian territory against lands and properties along with a map depicting the location of the affected areas.
  • POICA rhetoric includes accusations of “apartheid,” “genocide,” ‘ethnic cleansing,” “land grabs,” and “collective punishment.”

BDS Activities

  • In September 2022, ARIJ was a signatory on a letter to the European Union to “review its decision to revive the Association Council Meeting, stop the recently signed gas deal and review its bilateral cooperation programmes.” According to the call, “Instead of allowing Israel to entrench its colonial enterprise and apartheid regime, rewarding it with further economic cooperation and trade of harmful military equipment and technologies, the EU and its Member States have an obligation, and interest, to hold Israel accountable and put an end to impunity.”
  • In August 2021, ARIJ signed a letter to the States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty calling to “put an end to Israel’s notorious use of arms and military equipment…by immediately imposing a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel.” According to the letter, “This systematic brutality, perpetrated throughout the past seven decades of Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, pro-longed illegal belligerent occupation, persecution, and closure, is only possible because of the complicity of some governments and corporations around the world.”
  • In September 2020, ARIJ called for the UN General Assembly to “Launch international investigations into Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole, as well as associated State and individual criminal responsibility,” to “Ban arms trade and military-security cooperation with Israel,” and “Prohibit all trade with illegal Israeli settlements and ensure that companies refrain from and terminate business activities with Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.”
  • In July 2020, in response to the “Report of the Special Rapporteur addressing Israel’s Collective Punishment Policy,” ARIJ called on “Third States to adopt effective measures to put an end to Israel’s illegal and inhumane policies of collective punishment, including sanctions and countermeasures, to bring the illegal situation to an end” (emphasis added).
  • In 2018-2019, ARIJ lobbied in support of the discriminatory UN database of businesses operating across the 1949 Armistice line, aimed at bolstering BDS campaigns against Israel.
  • In October 2016, as a member of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON), ARIJ was a signatory on a call to restaurant chefs to “Take Apartheid off the Menu” and cancel their participation in the Tel Aviv “Round Tables Tour” as Tel Aviv is “the center of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid and deeply complicit in whitewashing Israeli violations of Human Rights and International Law.”
  • On September 1, 2016, signed a letter to the Italian Association of Farmers asking them to “rethink their sponsorship and participation” in the Israeli Watec Conference due to its role in “water apartheid.” The letter repeated the false allegation of Israeli water discrimination against Palestinians and ignored evidence that Israel provides Palestinians in the West Bank with more water than required under the Oslo framework and that poor management by the PA of infrastructure, waste, and theft of up to 50 percent of supplies in some Palestinian areas.
  • Together with Al-MezanPalestinian NGO NetworkBadil, and PCDCR, ARIJ signed on a “Joint Call to Action: July 2014 – Month against the Apartheid Wall,” stating: “….it is time for a ‘legal intifada’, an intensified popular struggle and more boycotts, divestment and sanctions. It is time for accountability…. to overcome Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation. We ask you to expand and deepen the global BDS movement for justice…”
  • In January 2013, ARIJ was a signatory on a statement urging Rome’s water company ACEA to stop cooperation with Mekorot.

“Apartheid” rhetoric

  • ARIJ promotes artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid designed to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel. (Read NGO Monitor’s Policy Paper “False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State”)
  • Accuses Israel of building “apartheid roads” that have “consolidated and strengthened the presence of Israeli colonies across the West Bank, ensuring superior access for settlers at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.”
  • Participates in discriminatory campaigns such as “Love in the Time of Apartheid Campaign: The Palestinian Campaign for Repealing Israel’s Racist Law Denying Family Reunification.”
  • In May 2022, ARIJ was a signatory to a flagrantly antisemitic report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council’s permanent Commission of Inquiry against Israel. The submission presented a blatantly false historical account that denied Israel’s right to exist, categorized Israel’s very existence as illegal, and labeled Zionism as a form of racism, demanding that the Commission “Recognise and Address Zionist Settler Colonialism and Apartheid as the Root Causes of Israel’s Ongoing Violations.”
  • On October 2020, ARIJ will meet with the Joint Advocacy Initiative’s (East Jerusalem YMCA and YWCA) Olive Picking Program for a “presentation on the Apartheid Wall and land expropriation by Israeli authorities.”
  • In October 2017, ARIJ was a signatory on a “World Day of Action: A World Without Walls” stating that the “Apartheid Wall” built by Israel is an “integral part of its policy to confiscate over 60% of the West Bank and imprison the Palestinian people on not more than 13% of their historical homeland.” The statement called to “Demand an immediate end to the walls that expel, exclude, oppress, discriminate and exploit… [and] Resist and defund those that profit from the walls.
  • In 2014, ARIJ accused the “Israeli water regime in the West Bank” as being a “system of apartheid that severely discriminates against Palestinians.”
  • Cooperated with the radical Alternative Information Center in May 2013 for an event regarding “the Apartheid Wall Israel in the Cremisan Valley near Beit Jalla, a town adjacent to Bethlehem.”

Partners

  • Works with the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy to establish a “systematic quantification of the annual costs imposed by the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian economy” in the field of water and environment management.
  • Member of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Coalition (PGAAWC), which focuses on “stopping and dismantling the Apartheid Wall and resisting Israeli occupation and colonization.”
  • Member of International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)Mennonite Palestine Israel Network, and Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network- Friends of Earth Palestine (PENGON).
  • Member of the “Displacement Work Group,” an initiative of Badil and OCHA to “monitor human rights violations (evictions, home demolitions, land confiscations) resulting in the displacement of people from their lands and communities,” along with: Addameer, Al-Haq, Al-Mezan, AIC, Badil, BIMKOM, B’Tselem, CARE Intnl., DCI – Palestine section, Diakonia, EAPPI, Ir Amim, ICAHD, Maan Development Ctr, Oxfam UK, Oxfam Solidarite – Belgium, PA Govt. Spokesperson, PCHR, RHR, Society of St. Yves, Save the Children UK, Shatil, UNFPA, Stop the Wall, ACRI, UNFPA, WCLAC, World Vision, and Yesh Din.
  • Member of the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), which refused to sign the anti-terror clause that is a condition of US government funding, stating “that its members would not sign funding agreements that included the ATC [Anti-Terror Certificate]: this is now a condition for membership under PNGO byelaws [sic]” (emphasis added).
    • In January 2020, PNGO vehemently opposed a new clause in European Union grant contracts with Palestinian NGOs that prohibits grantees from working with and funding organizations and individuals designated on the EU’s terror lists.  According to media reports, PNGO claimed that Palestinian terrorist organizations are “political parties.”
    • In June 2017, PNGO condemned Norway for pulling funding from a youth center named after Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who in 1978 murdered 37 civilians, including 12 children. PNGO referred to Mughrabi as a “Palestinian Woman Freedom Fighter,” stating that “PNGO believes this is another form of foreign domination and oppression calling Palestinian resistance a terrorist resistance against Israeli occupation…PNGO stands strong against conditional funding, especially when it threatens Palestinian right to resist foreign domination, exploitation, oppression and occupation” and that “there is a difference between freedom fighters and terrorists” (emphasis added).
    • In April 2017, PNGO called on the international community not to “use aid to undermine legitimate Palestinian resistance.” According to PNGO, “We reject all de-legitimization or criminalization of lawful Palestinian resistance, whether in form of allegations of terrorism, anti-semitism or otherwise… We call on all governments and aid providers to respect our right to lawful resistance, support Palestinian human rights defenders, and ensure equal, impartial and transparent access to funding for all.”
  • Member of the Habitat International Coalition (HIC).
    • On August 29, 2017, Joseph Schechla, HIC coordinator of the Housing and Land Rights Network, wrote an article on the “Anatomy of ISIL in the Middle East,” discussing how “the ISIL phenomenon ironically has its roots in deep anomalies and double standards of the interstate system itself. This is only symbolically reflected in the contemporary acronym of ISIL, which corresponds with the abbreviation for the so-called “Islamic state” (IS) joined to the binomial code for the State of Israel (IL). This coincidence of acronyms completes the analogy of the respective Jihadist and Zionist movements and their common attributes at the expense of indigenous Middle East peoples. Just as one follows the other in time, the participants in the former-named (IS) may be counting on the same seamless impunity long enjoyed by its latter-cited predecessor (IL).”
    • On March 27, 2017, HIC published the International Federation of Human Rights’ (FIDH) report titled “French Banks’ Dangerous Liaisons with the Israeli Settlement Enterprise,” that called on the French government to force French banks and insurance companies to “disengage without delay from any financial link with Israeli banks.” The report also lobbied for “a legislative proposal prohibiting enterprises from all sectors to invest in the settlements.”

2015-2019 Funding to ARIJ (amounts in $US)

Funder20192018201720162015
European Commission1,485,6731,705,7411,116,195952,880480,658
Sweden151,358126,444101,311
UNDP301,240
DanChurchAid95,06896,276149,666117,993
Oxfam Novib94,19096,633101,927
Switzerland103,466
Oxfam International199,014148,77637,590104,488
United Methodist Church100,00045,672
Mennonite Central Committee90,36074,965
Caritas Switzerland228,243
CARE International382,627555,501643,994
Catholic Relief Services194,81713,000
WASH - UAWC47,138

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