The residents are members of the Al-Hawashleh tribe and have lived on their ancestral land for generations [Getty]
Israel’s Supreme Court will hear a critical motion on Thursday challenging the forced displacement of the Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah in the Naqab (Negev), where over 500 Palestinian citizens of Israel face eviction to make way for the expansion of the Jewish city of Dimona.
The motion, filed by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – argues that the eviction of Ras Jrabah’s residents amounts to racial segregation and violates both Israeli constitutional principles and international human rights law.
The residents are members of the Al-Hawashleh tribe and have lived on their ancestral land for generations.
The hearing follows a Be’er Sheva District Court decision from June 2024 that upheld eviction lawsuits filed by Israeli authorities against Ras Jrabah’s residents.
While the court acknowledged that the residents had lived there for decades with the state’s knowledge, it nonetheless approved their removal, greenlighting state plans to expand Dimona over Ras Jrabah’s land.
“The eviction aims to uproot the Bedouin residents, who have lived there for decades, to create a residential area for other citizens – Jewish or otherwise. This decision implicitly assumes that the applicants, because of their identity, cannot be part of Dimona,” Adalah said in its legal motion.
The residents of Ras Jrabah have expressed willingness to be integrated into Dimona, which now forms the centre of their lives, but Israeli planning authorities and the Israel Land Authority (ILA) have refused to consider any option other than relocation to Qasr Al-Sirr, a town designated for Bedouins only.
Adalah, alongside Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, has submitted alternative proposals demonstrating how Ras Jrabah could be incorporated into Dimona without obstructing the city’s controversial planned expansion.
Despite this, the authorities insist on removing the community.
Critics say the refusal to engage with alternatives exposes the discriminatory agenda underlying the displacement effort – an agenda that mirrors broader patterns of appropriation of Palestinian land and forced displacement carried out by the Israeli state under the guise of urban development.
The legal challenge, brought on behalf of the entire Ras Jrabah community, seeks to overturn the court’s approval of the evictions and halt the state’s plan to erase a longstanding Palestinian presence to expand a city built atop their ancestral land.
Adalah warned that the forced removal of Ras Jrabah’s residents violates international prohibitions on segregation and forced displacement, especially of indigenous communities.
The group has previously warned that the decision was “part of a system of Jewish supremacy that was constitutionally enshrined in the Jewish Nation-State Law, which prioritises ‘Jewish settlement’ as a value that all state bodies are mandated to promote”.Â
The Jewish Nation-State Law, which was passed in 2018, enshrined the Jewish identity of Israel into its constitution, removing Arabic as an official language and emphasising the necessity of developing Jewish settlements.
The case comes as Israel is led by the most far-right government in its history, with ministers openly calling for the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians from their land, while aggressively expanding illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank and advancing policies of land appropriation and displacement.
At the same time, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is waging an indiscriminate war on the Gaza Strip, which has killed at least 61,700 people – most of them women and children – in a campaign widely described by legal experts as genocide.
