Baladna Arab Youth Association

Activities

• Promotes a 1948 agenda and a Palestinian “right of return,” which, if implemented, would effectually mean the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Refers to the establishment of the state of Israel as a “Nakba” [“catastrophe”].
• Organizes an ongoing campaign encouraging youth to refuse to serve in the Israeli army or do national service, claiming that the “Israeli government’s attempt to integrate young Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel into civic/national/military service and the Community Police is a threat to our identity and therefore the existence of our Arab Palestinian culture.”
• Since 2015, Baladna has partnered with 7amleh and the Arab Cultural Association in a campaign discouraging Arab citizens of Israel from volunteering to serve in the IDF. 
• In May 2023, Baladna held a mourning event for the death of Khader Adnan, a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad member arrested in February 2023 and indicted for membership in a terror group, supporting a terrorist organization, and incitement. According to Baladna, “Eternity in the memory of our purified and refined, our living miracle, and our valiant Sheikh. Kudos to the fighting class that will remain led by Khader Adnan.”
  • Khader Adnan died following his 86-day-long hunger strike and refusal to receive medical treatment from the Israeli Prisons Service
• In February 2023, Baladna was a signatory on a statement “welcom[ing] the historic announcement by the Barcelona City Council to suspend all institutional relations with apartheid Israel.” The statement called for “arms embargo against apartheid Israel, stopping trade with Israel’s illegal colonial settlements, and ending projects and agreements that sustain the illegal situation, including the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the EU-Israel Association Council, international agreements for gas pipes through the Gaza coast, and the Euro-Asia Interconnector project receiving electricity from Israel’s colonial settlement enterprise.”
• In February 2023, Baladna developed the card game “Jalma,” in which “the players must play prisoners suspected of throwing stones, whose goal is to obtain the ‘Somod cards’ in order to escape from the prison to security prisoners.”
• In September 2022, Baladna, alongside PalVision and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), organized a summer camp to learn about “fragmentation, the apartheid wall, and the ongoing isolation policies.”
• In 2015, Baladna implemented a cooperative project called Oudna (“Our Return”) together with Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), Zochrot, 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.”
• Together with Badil, Baladna organized a program “Raising the Voice of Palestinians Youth,” through which training was conducted to teach about “forced displacement as a crime and its relation to international colonization, forced displacement and its effects, and the Palestinians refugees in international law.”
• During 2014-2015, Baladna implemented an EU funded-program (see above for more information regarding EU funding) entitled “Naqab Youth for Human Rights” in which “Palestinian Bedouin youth documents ‘abuses of rights’ and ‘human rights violations’ in the Naqab” which allegedly occur on a “daily basis.”
• Co-signed a July 23, 2014 written statement to the UN Human Rights Council on the “Gross Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Violations and Suspicions of War Crimes in Gaza,” accusing Israel of “widespread and systematic destruction,” “terrorizing the population,” “unlawful[y] targeting of civilians, civilian objects, and civilian property” and “grave violations of international humanitarian law and international criminal law.”
• Co-signed an August 5, 2014 open letter to UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, accusing him of “reckless endorsement of Israeli version of facts, blaming Hamas for violating the cease-fire” and “always advocate[ing] unlawfully the Israel right to self-defense” (emphasis added).  The letter further accuses Israel of “war crimes,” “ongoing violations of international humanitarian law” and acting with “impunity.”
• Published an August 4, 2014 report titled “Palestinian Youth Voices Suppressed during Gaza War,” accusing Israel of “structural racism,” “collective punishment” and “discriminat[ing] and marginaliz[ing” the Palestinian population.

2018-2021 Funding to Baladna (amounts in NIS)

Amounts based on NGO annual financial reports