Activities

• Publishes an online “Discriminatory Laws Database” that claims to collect “text, analyses, and legal action for present and proposed discriminatory laws in Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories].” This deceptive list does not distinguish between laws and legislative proposals and refers to Zionism pejoratively. Furthermore, laws regarding the historic Jewish connection to Israel are labeled as discriminatory, including the use of symbols and the Hebrew calendar.
• Adalah was involved in creating a “platform” released by the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) that supports ‪BDS and calls Israel “an apartheid state committing genocide.” The document originally listed Nadia Ben-Youssef, then Director of Adalah’s Justice Project, as a co-author. MBL subsequently removed Youssef’s name, instead listing Adalah as an “organization currently working on policy.” (See Appendix for screenshots of the original and edited document.)
• In February 2022, Adalah signed a statement defending a report published by Amnesty International accusing Israel of apartheid. According to the statement, “The debate around the crime of apartheid of which Israel is accused, and its geographical scope, is not only legitimate, but absolutely necessary. We wholeheartedly reject the idea that Amnesty International’s report is baseless, singles out Israel or displays antisemitic animus.”
• In October 2021, Adalah condemned the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to Adalah, “The Israeli decision to designate six human rights and civil society organizations as terrorist organizations is an unprecedented attack on human rights defenders who are exposing and resisting the Israeli occupation and its apartheid policies…Adalah is determined to resist these decisions by all legal means available.”
  • In October 2022, Adalah was a signatory on a statement affirming that “We will continue to cooperate with our Palestinian partner organizations to defend Palestinian rights” and called on the international community to “Continu[e] to support and fund these organizations, and engage with financial institutions to ensure the transfer of funds to the six organizations.”
• In July 2021, after the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, Adalah published a press release labelling “the Israeli regime, as a colonial one, with distinct characteristics of apartheid” (emphasis added).  In February 2022, during the periodic review of Israel for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) at the UN Human Rights Committee, Adalah published a submission that “The Jewish Nation-State Law, this law – which has distinct characteristics of apartheid –guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens” (emphasis added).
• In December 2020, Adalah, alongside a number of Israeli, Palestinian, and international organizations, issued a declaration headlined “Israel must provide necessary vaccines to Palestinian health care systems.” The NGOs falsely claim that Israel has “legal obligations” to “ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control,” while altogether ignoring 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 October 2020,  Director of Adalah’s Land and Planning Rights Unit Suhad Bishara wrote an article for +972 Magazine about the “colonial heritage of Israel’s police,” alleging that “Like South Africa and the United States, Israel’s police were explicitly designed to enforce racial supremacy with violence and impunity.”
• In August 2019, Abdel Razeq Farraj was invited by Adalah to participate in its “Summer Camp” and meet with Arab-Israeli youth. The event was held in collaboration with Addameer, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “affiliate.”
  • Farraj, Union of Agricultural Works Committee’s Finance and Administration Director, was arrested on October 23, 2019 and indicted on 4 counts in Israeli military court. His alleged crimes include holding a position in an illegal and aiding an attempt to cause death in connection to an August 2019 bombing. Farraj spent six years, from 1985-1991, in “an Israeli prison after being convicted of affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”
• On July 21 2018, the website Arab48 published an interview with Adalah’s General Director Hassan Jabareen on the “Jewish Nation State Law” (a translation of excerpts by Adalah appeared on Palestine Square). In the interview Jabareen said, “As Adalah wrote in its position paper, the law clearly shows how the Israeli regime is a colonial system of apartheid, in violation of the Apartheid Convention, which considers apartheid a crime against humanity” (emphasis added). In addition, he said that “We must state before the international community that the Israeli regime within and outside of the Green Line is a colonial system that is so obviously in contravention of international law that a serious question mark hangs over its very legitimacy. A deficient democratic regime is still a legitimate regime, while a colonial regime, under international law, lacks legitimacy” (emphasis added).
• In August 2017, Adalah launched a project titled “Freedom, Bound” drawing comparisons between the “shared struggle for collective liberation” of the “Ferguson Uprising and the resurgence of Black-Palestinian solidarity.” Part of the project was for “Advocates and activists in Israel/Palestine and the US [to] use and exchange strategies of resistance to transform the systems of oppression that have been designed to exclude, marginalize, and even criminalize the presence and existence of both Palestinians and Black Americans.”
• In June 2017, Muna Haddad, an attorney for Adalah, participated in the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) forum to “mark fifty years of Israeli occupation” which featured antisemitic rhetoric, calls for BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), and demonization campaigns against Israel’s existence.
  • Other speakers included Wesam Ahmad (Al-Haq), Dalit Baum (American Friends Service Committee), Hagai El-Ad (B’Tselem), Omar Shakir (Human Rights Watch), Mustafa Barghouthi (Palestinian National Initiative), Jessica Nevo (Coalition of Women for Peace/Zochrot), Rebecca Vilkomerson (Jewish Voice for Peace), and Tania Hary (Gisha).
• In April 2002, following Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, Adalah filed a petition falsely alleging that the Israeli army “was collecting dead bodies on the outskirts of the Jenin refugee camp, apparently with the intention of burying them in mass, anonymous or numbered graves.” While the claims were later found to be baseless, the allegations continue to be exploited by anti-Israel organizations in an effort to demonize the state of Israel.

Adalah and the ICC

• In December 2022, Adalah was a signatory on a joint letter to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court stating that “We are all committed to assisting your office in advancing the ongoing investigation of the Situation in Palestine.”
• In October 2022, Adalah published a press release welcoming the findings of the permanent UN Commission of Inquiry against Israel and writing that “We hope that the report will be adopted by the UN General Assembly and that it will lead to a swift response by the International Court of Justice and by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.”
• In May 2021 during the 2021 Gaza conflict, Adalah published a press release stating that “The recent killing of Palestinian civilians – including 30 children – in their homes in Gaza, has now been added to the list of war crimes that must be investigated by the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu has insisted…that he most certainly must be one of the ICC’s primary suspects.”
• In December 2019, Adalah applauded the decision of ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to launch an investigation against Israel stating that “the ICC prosecutor has made the right decision given the facts. No other decision could have been possible. We welcome her position, and we believe that the ICC has full jurisdiction to decide on the concerned criminal cases.”
  • Hassan Jabareen stated, “It is ironic to see the Attorney General of Israel use the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories as an argument against Palestine’s rights of sovereignty and a shield against the Court’s jurisdiction,” and called for “all States Parties and relevant stakeholders to cooperate with and support the Court.”
• In October 2019, Adalah participated in the “40^th International for Human Rights FIDH general conference” in Taiwan. Bensouda also participated in the conference and was photographed with representatives of Adalah.

Allegations of “war crimes”

• In May 2021, Adalah “welcome[d]” the decision of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council to open an “ongoing commission of inquiry (COI) that will examine, in-depth, the human rights violations committed by the State of Israel against Palestinianson both sides of the Green Line. The mass killing of a civilian population in Gaza” (emphasis added). Adalah further added that “Palestinian citizens of Israel have no choice but to appeal to the nations of the world to obligate Israel to provide them with protection, to put an end to and to investigate the war crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza.”
• In August 2017, Adalah, alongside Al Mezan and Visualizing Palestine, created a series of images that claimed to highlight “war crimes committed during the 2014 attack on Gaza and Israeli impunity for these violations of international law.” The visuals allege that Israel conducted an “indiscriminate bombing campaign” and “brutal ground invasion.”
• On July 29, 2015, Adalah’s then USA Representative Nadia Ben Youssef spoke at a Congressional briefing to “examine Israel’s misuse of U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza and call on lawmakers to hold Israel accountable for its violations of U.S. and international law.” Ben Youssef accused Israel of “indiscriminate war crimes,” and “systemic impunity” for Israeli soldiers in the Israeli legal system.
  • This event was sponsored by the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (formerly known as US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation), American Friends Service Committee, American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Middle East Children’s Alliance.
• Adalah was among the NGOs that provided the basis for the UN Committee of Inquiry (the Schabas/Davis Commission) into the events of the 2014 Gaza War. This COI repeated unverifiable and unreliable NGO claims regarding alleged Israeli “war crimes.”
• During the 2014 Gaza War, Adalah submitted a July 22 joint written statement to the UNHRC, “condemn[ing] Israel’s unlawful targeting of civilians,” which may “constitute grave violations of international humanitarian law and international criminal law and may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The statement calls on the UNHRC to “[c]ondemn the deliberate, systematic and widespread targeting of Palestinian civilians” and “[e]stablish an independent, international commission of inquiry with the mandate to identify and investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law committed within the context of Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip.”
• Adalah officials, in conjunction with radical Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, wrote and edited large portions of a May 2009 pseudo-academic study that refers to “a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.” The report delegitimizes Israeli self-defense measures as “inhumane act[s] of apartheid…perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another.”

Anti-Israeli Legal Activities

• Adalah Director Hassan Jabareen and several colleagues played an active role in the NGO Forum of the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) held in Durban in 2001, which was organized in an effort to promote the demonization and delegitimization of Israel, and served as the foundation for the boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
• In May 2016, the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) held its periodic review of Israel. During this session, numerous NGOs, including Adalah, presented unverified testimony and invented new standards of torture to further their political goal of demonizing and marginalizing Israel.
• Adalah director Hassan Jabareen spoke at a May 2013 conference titled “Law and Politics: Options and Strategies of International Law for the Palestinian People” with a stated aim “to examine alternative legal frameworks which are more appropriate for the analysis of Israel’s oppressive regime.” Other speakers included anti-Israel ideologues Richard Falk and John Dugard.
• According to a press statement from Adalah, a July 2012 European Parliament “call on Israel to withdraw the government-approved Prawer Plan [regarding Israel’s policy in the Negev]” was “the result of months of intensive advocacy by Adalah and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN) in Brussels, including a briefing by Adalah Attorney Suhad Bishara before the EP’s Working Group on the Middle East in June 2012 in Strasbourg.”
• Participated in a May 2009 NGO “town hall meeting” in Geneva that helped shape the course of the UN’s Goldstone Mission. Adalah was subsequently cited 38 times in the Goldstone report.
• In its lobbying in support of the Goldstone report and its recommendations, Adalah issued a 2009 press release urging governments to “re-evaluate their relationship with Israel.”
• Submitted a legal opinion to a Spanish court in support of Palestinian Center for Human Rights’’s 2008 lawfare case against Israeli officials.
• Drafted a 2007 “Democratic Constitution,” which calls for replacing the Jewish foundation of the state with a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework. Jewish immigration would be permitted for “humanitarian reasons.”

Bedouin

• One of the most politically active NGOs in opposing Israeli policy regarding the Bedouin in the Negev.
• Adalah was the leading NGO in the campaign for Umm Al-Hiran, a Bedouin village that was the scene of violence to prevent demolitions approved by the Israeli High Court of Justice.
  • In 2016, Adalah requested $30,000 for a project titled “Adalah’s Emergency Project to #Save_UmalHiran.” In the grant proposal, Adalah requested funding for one month in order “to litigate, advocate, campaign and mobilize the public so that no home is demolished and no Umm al‐Hiran resident is evicted.”
  • In the proposal, Adalah defines the Bedouins as “Palestinians,” warns of an imminent “Nakba,” and describes Israel as a “racist” state.
  • Adalah concludes its grant proposal by stating that “Although our fundraising campaign will run for 1 month, our efforts in the courts and on the ground will continue until we ensure that all homes in Umm al‐Hiran remain standing, and that all residents remain on the land!” (emphasis in original)
• On May 30, 2013 Adalah and the Negev Coexistence Forum (NCF) published a one-sided and factually inaccurate position paper (funded by the EU), reviewing the “Prawer-Begin Bill and the Forced Displacement of the Bedouin” and accusing Israel of “forcible displacement,” “dispossession,” and attempting to implement “the complete and final severance of the Bedouin’s historical ties to their land.”

Adalah Justice Project

• In 2014, Adalah created the “Adalah Justice Project” (AJP), based in Boston, with the goal of transforming “American perception, policy and practice in Palestine/Israel into a human rights approach that guarantees historical justice and equality for all.”
• AJP is fiscally sponsored by the Tides Center. In 2018-2023, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund authorized a $410,000 grant to AJP via the Tides Center.
• AJP former Director Nadia Ben Youssef is also a contributor to Columbia University’s anti-Israel project, the “Nakba Files,” one of Adalah’s early US-based activities: Since 2013, Adalah and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University have jointly run an online platform that refers to Israel’s establishment as a “catastrophe,” criticizes Israel’s policy towards the country’s Negev Bedouin population, and “explores and thinks through the Nakba as an event, a structure, and a process through a critical lens on the law.” Similarly, it describes Israel as colonialist and promotes a “Palestinian right of return.”
• In January 2023, AJP was a signatory on a letter to the American Bar Association stating that “the clear objective behind the promotion of the IHRA definition is the suppression of non-violent protest, activism, and criticism of Israel and/or Zionism…in practice the IHRA definition has been used consistently (and nearly exclusively) not to fight antisemitism, but rather to defend Israel and harm Palestinians – at the cost of undermining and dangerously chilling fundamental rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and protest, and academic freedom.”
  • The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly 30 countries and counting, represents the international consensus definition of antisemitism, as well as how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. An example of the latter includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• In January 2023, AJP was a joint signatory on a call to Congress to “take immediate policy action towards accountability: Stop arming Israel’s massacres against the Palestinian people by ending U.S. military funding to Israel.”
• In 2021, AJP launched the “Gaza is Palestine” campaign aimed at halting US military assistance to Israel. According to the campaign, “The inseparable bond between Israeli apartheid and the U.S. war machine that powers it has never been more vulnerable and it will take all of us — and every tool at our disposal — to dismantle it. “
• In September 2021, AJP lobbied against American security assistance to Israel, including the Iron Dome, tweeting, “If today’s vote to give apartheid Israel another $1 billion enrages you, channel that anger by boycotting and divesting from every company that makes this racist system possible.”
• In May 2021, Adalah Justice Project demanded that the United States impose an arms embargo on Israel and halt military assistance stating that “The latest arms deal for Israel is a direct commercial sale of bombs made by Boeing, the same bombs that are killing us in Gaza. ##BlockTheBombsto Israel & then #SanctionIsraeliApartheid.”
• In June 2020, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, the Adalah Justice Project linked “white supremacy” and “Zionism,” accusing them of being “underpinned by anti-Blackness.” According to Adalah Justice Project, “we recognize the connections between the Palestinian and Black struggles…All our knowledge, critique, and resistance to Israeli state violence can help us grab at the root of structural racism in the United States to weed it out permanently.”
  • In June 2020, Adalah Justice Project also signed a letter to congress calling to “divest from militarism and policing, from the US to Palestine.” According to the letter, “Just as we join in the demand for our tax dollars to be divested from brutal police violence and a repressive military response to protesters asserting that #BlackLivesMatter, we call for an end to U.S.-funded violence abroad.”
  • In December 2019, Adalah Justice Project and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) launched a project titled “Justice for All” that “aims to end U.S. military funding to Israel and uphold progressive policies rooted in historical justice.” According to Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of USCPR, “The Movement for Black Lives’ principle of invest-divest frames the overarching demand – that we must demand our government divest from Israel’s human rights abuses against the Palestinian people and instead invest those resources in community needs at home, so everyone can live with safety, dignity, and justice.”
• In December 2019, Adalah Justice Project and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) launched a “2020 vision platform” calling on the United States to “immediately end all military funding to Israel and other forms of military, economic, and diplomatic support until Israel upholds the rights of the Palestinian people and our vision of justice.”
  • According to the project’s website, “Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people is driven by Zionism, a political ideology that called for the building of a Jewish state in Palestine. To build this state, armed Zionist groups initiated their settler colonial project in our homeland and destroyed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, massacred our people, and drove us from our land.”
  • The project further demands for the “fulfillment of the right of all Palestinians to return to their homeland.”
• On May 15, 2018, AJP and other Palestinian and American NGOs sent a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “Investigate Israel’s Use of Lethal Force in Gaza.” The letter accused Israel of using American weapons against Palestinian demonstrators and called to “halt any further assistance to all Israeli military units involved in these shootings.”
• In November 2017, Nadia Ben-Youssef spoke at a conference titled “Balfour’s Legacy: Confronting the Consequences” discussing the “legacy of the colonial declaration.” At the event, Ben-Youssef explained that “Adalah, 3 years ago said, ‘Go to the US, map the movement, see where we should intervene. What does it look like to build a mass movement for Palestinian rights, and to shift American discourse, and ultimately policy’” (emphasis added).
• In September 2018, Ben-Youssef was a reviewer of Jewish Voice for Peace and Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA) report, “Deadly exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of American Law Enforcement Trainings in Israel” which aimed to delegitimize the Israeli-American partnership for training thousands of law enforcement officials from across the USA in Israel. The report describes the Israel’s security regime as “designed to subjugate Palestinians and relies on systematic racial differentiation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews – that constitutes apartheid.”
• At a November 2017 Cambridge University gathering, Ben-Youssef articulated Adalah’s approach to the BDS campaign stating that “Adalah as a Palestinian organization based in Israel – because of this law has a prohibition on it with regard to the call for BDS. The law says that if you call for boycott- it had creating a new civil wrong, you can be sued in court if you call for a boycott of Israel. So Adalah has pivoted its argument about BDS, for the right to boycott… Adalah support the right to boycott…we believe in the pillars of the BDS movement” (emphasis added).
• On October 21, 2017, Ben-Youssef spoke at an anti-Israel event at Minnesota University titled “Parallel liberation Struggles: Lessons in Resistance.” The event’s purpose was to “commemorate the 100-year Palestinian resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project and to explore the similarities in violence used against Palestinians, African Americans, and Native Americans and their methods of resistance.”
• On June 8, 2017, Nadia Ben-Youssef spoke at a hearing in Congress on “how persistent human rights violations, systematic impunity, discrimination and a hyper-militarized environment affect the lives of the Palestinian children growing up under a military occupation with no end in sight.” The event was sponsored by Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as part of their “No Way to Treat a Child” campaign.
  • At the event, Ben-Youssef claimed that “since the Israeli legal system—as the state—was founded on Jewish supremacy, the lives of Palestinians are not valued.” She falsely claimed that “There’s no right to equality in Israel—it’s not enshrined in law because [Israel] cannot protect equality and protect [Jewish] privilege.” Ben-Youssef added, “Nakba. Remember that name, say that name. It means catastrophe in Arabic, and it refers to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.”