Press Release:
NGO Monitor condemns Adalah for apartheid/BDS event
European and NIF funders must intervene, re-evaluate their support
JERUSALEM – In advance of an “Israel Apartheid Week” event where an Adalah official will discuss “The policy of Apartheid in Israel: The new racist laws,” Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor condemned Adalah for employing the false canards of apartheid and racism as part of its ongoing campaign to delegitimize Israel.
Suhad Bishara, Director of Adalah’s Land and Planning Rights Unit, is scheduled to speak on Tuesday, February 14 at event organized by a Swiss group named “BDS Geneva.”
“The use of the false ‘apartheid’ analogy and misleading ‘racism’ terminology is totally unacceptable and is the antithesis of human rights,” said Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “Adalah’s funders, including the EU, European governments, and foundations, should repudiate Adalah’s use of immoral and inflammatory rhetoric.”
In a letter to New Israel Fund (NIF) CEO Daniel Sokatch, NGO Monitor alerted NIF, one of Adalah’s major funders ($475,950 authorized in 2010), to the event.
NGO Monitor notes that Adalah’s submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which is meeting in Geneva next week to discuss Israel, demonizes Israel for laws and policies that allegedly “permit and even actively promote racial discrimination.”
“This is not Adalah’s first use of hateful and dangerous apartheid language,” commented Prof. Steinberg. “Officials from the NGO also wrote and edited large portions of a May 2009 pseudo-academic study that delegitimizes Israeli counter-terror 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.'”
Adalah also wrote a “Democratic Constitution” in 2007, which calls for replacing the Jewish state with a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework and for a redefinition of the “symbols of the state,” and would restrict Jewish immigration solely for “humanitarian reasons.” In September 2011, Adalah Director Hassan Jabareen wrote in Ha’aretz that he and his organization stand behind these documents.