Empowering Arab Lawyers, Empowering Arab Neighborhoods

October 24, 2006

The residents of Israel's mixed cities of Jaffa, Ramle and Lod now have 15 specially trained lawyers who can help them advance their legal and civil rights. The lawyers completed a 20-hour training course, Law, Education and Social Change, initiated by the Mixed Cities and the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee for Arab Education this month.

"It has always been a major focus of the Mixed Cities project to draw on our communities' strengths," said Buthayna Dabit, Director of this SHATIL project, which empowers Arab residents to participate effectively in planning and building processes that affect their neighborhoods. The project, now in its fourth year, has inspired and generated broad-ranging civil society initiatives – the latest of which is the lawyers' training course.

"Together with the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee for Arab Education, we decided to plan a course that would train local lawyers to deal with issues of discrimination in the allocation of resources for land, building and education – issues that residents face on a daily basis," Dabit said. "The course provided the lawyers with the professional tools to act on behalf of residents, advancing their rights and needs in and out of court."

Nidal Abed El-Gafer, former NIF Law Fellow and now the legal advisor to Mixed Cities, was instrumental in the planning and implementation of the course, recruiting candidates from among some hundred Arab lawyers from Jaffa, Ramle and Lod. Lecturers included: Dr. Yusuf Jabarin from Haifa University's Law Faculty; Dr. Dana Alexander and lawyer Auni Bana from ACRI (The Association for Civil Rights in Israel); Dr. Durgham Saif from Karameh - Law and Human Rights Association; Dr. Thabet Abu-Ras of Ben Gurion University of the Negev; Prof. Ali Haider of Sikkuy - The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel; and Nabi Abu Saleh, Chair of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee for Arab Education.

Several of the lawyers belonged to the Mixed Cities' Housing Forums, which SHATIL has organized improve housing, services and infrastructure in the Arab neighborhoods. Other lawyers had little previous involvement in representing residents' interests. The training course was a logical step and natural outgrowth of the project's increasing support of residents' use of legal petitions to rectify injustices.

One successful petition brought about an injunction that halted the construction of a discriminatory separation wall between an Arab Lod neighborhood and a Jewish moshav, and another resulted in the provision of garbage collection services to that same neighborhood (Pardes Snir). So far, these and other such cases have been brought by Mixed Cities neighborhood activists with the support of NIF-supported law and human rights organizations, such as ACRI, Adam Teva V'Din - The Israel Union for Environmental Defense and Karameh. Mixed Cities looks forward to seeing local lawyers – the graduates of its Law, Education and Social Change training course – taking their place in the courts and corridors of the judicial system in the fight for the rights of their fellow citizens, the deprived and discriminated-against Arab residents of Israel's mixed cities.