Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID)

Activities

• Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID) leads tours to Arab villages as a way to “refut[e] the Zionist narrative about our history and the tragedy that has befallen our people.”
  • One such tour, to the Arab village of Al-Bassa, is “an eloquent example of what the Zionist movement has done to our people from destruction and uprooting, and not claims of historical lies.”
• ADRID arranges seminars and lectures and maintains holy sites in destroyed villages in order to “raise political awareness of the Nakba and the refugee issue.”
• Since 1998, ADRID has organized an annual March of Return to demonstrate that “the right of return is the backbone of our Palestinian cause.” According to ADRID, it hosts the marches at a “time when Israel continues its criminal schemes to seize land, to wipe our villages off the map, to try to obliterate our national identity, to distort our collective memory, and to impose its false narrative.”
• ADRID runs a project with Kayan called “My Return” that aims to “raise the awareness of women in all aspects of the Nakba, displacement and the policy of ethnic cleansing practiced by the Zionist organizations and the Israeli army and are still practiced by successive governments against our Palestinian people” (emphasis added).
• In June 2018, following the American embassy being moved to Jerusalem, ADRID published a statement referring to Gaza as a “large prison assisted by the United States.” The statement further called for “glory and immortality to the martyrs” killed during the great march of return, ignoring the violent nature of the protests, which included Molotov cocktails, arson, and attempts to breach the border fence with Israel. The statement also ignored that many of the “martyrs” were members of terror organizations.
• In June 2018, Rana Awaisa, ADRID’s head of projects and tours, spoke at Tel Aviv University about the Israel’s alleged “looting of Palestinian archives and property as attempts to suppress and erase Palestinian memory.”
• In November 2017, ADRID accused Israel of being the “last bastion of racism in the world following the fall of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and racist South Africa…there is no future for racist Israel” (emphasis added). ADRID also alleged that Israel attempted to “preserve the enormous material gains it has taken from the Palestinians and wants to preserve the racist ghetto based on the principle of Jewish purity” (emphasis added).
• In September 2017, ADRID produced short films for a symposium organized by Zochrot titled “The Right and Meaning of Return” that discussed “Strategies for dealing with the Zionist intent to relegate the right of return to oblivion, deny, or revoke it.”
• In August 2016, South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) hosted ADRID, along with Zochrot, Badil, and Adalah, to discuss “Israeli settler colonialism” and address “the historical and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from the destruction of Lubya to current land evictions in the Naqab desert, the role that the JNF plays and other particular features of the Israeli settler colonial land regime.”
• In 2015, ADRID implemented a cooperative project called Oudna (“Our Return”) together with  Zochrot, Baladna, and the Arab Association for Human Rights to “support youth to imagine the concept of returning to their ancestral towns and villages which were destroyed during the Nakba.”
• In September 2013, ADRID participated in Zochrot’s conference titled, “From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of Palestinian Refugee.” The panel, titled, “Returning to al-Lajun / al-Lajun Group for the Vision of return” aimed to “visualize Return to the displaced villages through workshops with youth groups made up of internally displaced young people. These workshops include learning sessions on the Palestinian Nakba, refugees, and life in Palestine before the displacement.”
• Signatory to the 2005 “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS,” which calls for an end to Israel’s “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” and promotes the right of “Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.”
• ADRID’S manifesto of November 19, 1999 contains language that is considered to be anti-Semitic, casting blame for the Palestinian refugee situation on “Zionist conspiracies” and claiming that the establishment of the State of Israel was “gained with the support of international Zionist and imperialist forces.”