Israel’s Supreme Court on Sunday will hear a petition from Arab NGO Adalah against the Israel Lands Authority and the policy of real estate developer Dar Nofarim barring Israeli Arab citizens from purchasing apartments in its housing venture in Afula, a city in the Jezreel Valley in north-central Israel. The high court panel will include Deputy Chief Justice Elyakim Rubinstein and Justices Yoram Danziger and Zvi Zilbertal.
Presenting itself as a human rights group, Adalah’s aim is to increase Arab settlements across Israel. Its most notable area of operation is in pushing to expand Bedouin dwellings in the Negev desert well beyond their actual current domain, in a situation where they are inherently squatters without any ownership rights. The Afula case is even more dangerous, since this is a predominantly Jewish city which is being taken over by Arabs from the nearby Wadi Ara villages. This “crawling annexation” of Afula could turn into the first case in modern Israel’s history when a Jewish city became Arab through ostensibly legal means.
Two months ago, Adalah petitioned the court requesting an order to compel ILA to order the developer to adopt a policy of equality and allow the petitioner to purchase an apartment in its Afula project. Adalah argued that “There’s no doubt that barring the petitioner from the housing development of Kidmat Nofarim in Afula constitutes an infringement on his right to respect, equality and personal autonomy.”
The petition also noted that ILA, which sold the land to the developer, must abide by the principle of equality as part of its management of JNF-owned land. It is also the duty of ILA to closely monitor and evaluate the degree to which the developer abides by its duty to market apartments built on JNF land equally and without discrimination, Adalah argued.
Last December, hundreds of Afula’s Jewish residents demonstrated in front of city hall against the outcome of an ILA bid which sold 45 housing units to Arabs only, suspecting that the bid’s terms had been leaked to the Arabs.
According to NGO Monitor, Adalah’s budget for 2013 was about $1,300,000, with funding coming from Broederlijk Delen (Belgium), Bread for the World-EED (Germany), Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (Switzerland), Oxfam-Novib (Netherlands), Human Rights and International Law Secretariat (joint funding from Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands), Christian Aid (UK), European Union, UNDP, and others.