Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel produced the video above as part of its campaign to defeat the Prawer Plan.
From Adalah:
The Prawer-Begin Law passed a first reading in the Knesset on 24 June 2013, with a vote of 43 to 40. The law is the legislative arm of the Prawer Plan, which, if fully implemented, will destroy dozens of ‘unrecognized’ Arab Bedouin villages in the Naqab, forcibly displace up to 70,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel, and confiscate over 800,000 dunams of their ancestral Bedouin land.
Despite objections to the plan, the government has refused to seriously consider Arab Bedouin input on the bill, and a post-facto ‘listening process’ led by former minister Benny Begin abjectly failed to integrate the Bedouin’s grievances into the final plan.
On Monday, 15 July, the Knesset announced that the Interior Committee would be charged with preparing the bill for its second and third readings, a move that Adalah’s Knesset lawyer Nadeem Shehadeh called “a troubling development, indicative of the government’s determination to pass the legislation quickly in its current discriminatory form.”
Learn more about the Prawer Plan here.
All you need to know is that the second sentence in this video is already a blatant lie…
I’ve a small quibble with the video, a minor criticism offered with great respect for Adalah’s work and presented only constructively, should others agree, for future work.
I thought it was unfair to put the Bedouin man in the position of having to ‘justify’ his aversion to being moved to the cities. Put on the spot, it seems the interviewer wants something more than because it’s my land, my house, my home, that’s why, so the man invokes ideas of ancestral lands and customs—all valid of course—but he should not have to ‘explain’ it.
The very posing of the question of ‘why’ they don’t want to move to the ghettos Israel has in store for them, is to frame the issue as though a reason were relevant to the issue. What would any of us say if asked why we don’t want to be ethnically cleansed?
Am I over-thinking this?
@- Tom
No, you’re not over-thinking this, it’s part of the core of the matter. Your italics should indeed be enough. I agree.
As from the position of Adalah, their intention is to explain and explain again, for a highly unaware and misinformed international audience. They’re doing a great job, and I can imagine that this might take them too far into the field on some occasions.