Civil Rights & Wrongs In Israel's Negev: with ACRI's Libby Lenkinski And Rawia Abu-Rabia

 Lunch & Learn

And intimate lunchtime event with a speaker. Bring your own lunch. Cosponsored with Rabbis for Human Rights - North America

Date: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 At 01:00 PM

RSVP: mail@meretzusa.org or 212-242-4500

Background:
A new Israeli government plan for the Negev Bedouin will make a bad situation much worse, and inflame the conflict between Israeli Arabs and Jews.

The Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel are among the indigenous Palestinian Arabs who remained on their lands in the Negev after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The Bedouin, who number 200,000 and comprise 30% of the population in the Negev, have lived on their ancestral lands for hundreds of years practicing a traditional lifestyle based on agriculture and the raising of livestock. They are seeking recognition of their land ownership rights, claiming less than 5% of the total land of the Negev, as well as the right to pursue and preserve their unique culture.

But the Bedouin have historically been denied these rights and nearly 70,000 live in 35 "unrecognized villages" which pre-date the establishment of the State of Israel, where they are denied basic services including water, electricity, medical care and education. As a result, the Arab Bedouin community has the worst health and socio-economic outcomes in the country. Bedouin women are particularly disadvantaged by the lack of government services, and in the unrecognized villages 80% of women are illiterate and 90% are unemployed.

The Israeli government has been actively pursuing a policy of expulsion and home demolitions in the unrecognized villages with the goal of concentrating the Arab Bedouin into reservation-like urban townships - the poorest in Israel - in order to make their land available for new Jewish settlements, individual Jewish farms or JNF-sponsored forests.

Now the Netanyahu government is planning to turn this policy into law, endorsing a plan - the Praver Plan - that will forcibly displace 40,000 Bedouin from their villages and dispossess them of their land.

The Speakers:
Rawia Abu-Rabia is a member of the Israeli Bar Association and a practicing lawyer at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in charge of the Bedouin rights project. An active member in the international legal community, she is a former director of Yadid Bedouin community center and has focused her work on gender studies, ethnic minorities and human rights. She has worked in the Office of the Attorney General in Beer-Sheva, Israel, as a lecturer for the Ministry of Justice on the issue of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and with Human Rights Watch developing a strategy for dealing with land and housing rights violations in Israel's unrecognized Bedouin villages. Abu-Rabia is the recipient of numerous awards for her contributions to international law, peace activism, and the public interest. She earned her bachelor of Social Work degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2003 and her LL.B. from Ono College of Israel in 2006. Distinguished as a New Israel Fund U.S-Israel Civil Liberties Law Fellow at the American University Washington College of Law, Abu-Rabia gained her LL.M. there in 2008. She is a Palestinian Bedouin and a citizen of Israel.

Libby Lenkinski Friedlander is the Director of International Relations at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). Her professional background is in non-profit consulting, having worked with major human rights and social change organizations in Israel. Libby's recent projects include outreach and public relations work on the award-winning documentary "Budrus." Prior to joining ACRI, she served as the Director of International Outreach for Yesh Din and managed a project bringing Israeli human rights activists to the US for advocacy efforts through The Carter Center. Libby has published articles in Haaretz Newspaper, +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language blog Haokets. An Israeli, American, Canadian hybrid, Libby holds a Bachelor's degree in Neuro-Science, English Literature, and Jewish Studies from McGill University in Montreal, and a Master's degree in Child Development and Education from Bank Street College in New York City. In her previous life in New York, Libby taught kindergarten at the Calhoun School and practiced yoga with Master Teacher Jason Brown.

Sponsored by the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel: A Project of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change and Partners for Progressive Israel.

Bring your own lunch. Dessert and drinks will be provided.