BADIL

Education through Grassroots Arts and Culture in Bethlehem's Refugee Camps

 Jurisdictional arguments: The ICJ is Unlikely to Decline to Render an Advisory Opinion

It is highly unlikely that the Court will decline jurisdiction to render the advisory opinion; in fact, it has never refused to render an advisory opinion requested by a UN body. Most recently, the Court has indicated that it has broad competence to issue advisory opinions.(¹) The only precedent for declining an advisory request is the Status of Eastern Carelia case, in which the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ)—the ICJ’s predecessor—found that the consent of the two states directly involved in the dispute was required before it could render the opinion.(²)

Segregated Palestinian Towns and Villages of the West Bank[¹]

 Today, 266,422 Palestinians residing in 77 West Bank localities have been surrounded and isolated by apartheid infrastructure and settlements and are facing displacement.[²] The current crisis in the West Bank is one of the most wide-scale attempts at dispossession in recent years, with the occupation systematically targeting villages located in strategic areas along the 'green line' and near settlements. Palestinian communities are set to be expelled from areas required for settlement expansion, or are marked for inclusion outside de facto borders of the Palestinian ghettos delineated by the path of the Wall.

The village of Bil’in will face-off this summer against two Canadian corporations accused of aiding and abetting the colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Bil’in has charged Green Park International and Green Mount International with illegally constructing residential buildings and other settlement infrastructure on village land, and marketing such structures to the civilian population of the State of Israel in contravention of International and Canadian Law.

 Under the stewardship of Ahmed Issa Abdallah Yassin, the Bil’in Village Council will attempt to hold the multinationals accountable for violations of Palestinian human rights. Perhaps more importantly, the lawsuit will, if obliquely, attack the legality of the Israeli settlement project.

This is the transcript of an interview conducted by al-Majdal with Mr. Khalil Tafakji of the Mapping and Geographic Information Systems Department of the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem. The interview was conducted on 30 December 2008.

al-Majdal: You work at the Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department, what is this organization?

KT: We were founded in 1983 as part of the Arab Studies Society by the  late Faisal Husseini.

Today, Arab Jahalin is the largest group of Palestinian Bedouin in the West Bank, both in terms of the large area of land they inhabit and in terms of population, which numbers around 7,500. The forced displacement of Arab Jahalin began in the Naqab in 1948, and continued throughout the 1970s until the present day, and now threatens the very existence of the community.