In a widely condemned move, the Israeli government has banned the group I founded. This is how it enforces impunity for its illegal policies of occupation.

Editors’ Note

On October 16, we spoke to Raja Shehadeh about his work as a writer and as a lawyer and founder, in 1979, of Al-Haq, which soon became the leading Palestinian human rights monitoring group.

“My Ramallah world, with its proximity to the hills, was being transformed inexorably in a manner that mystified and frightened me,” he said. “The changes taking place through the Israeli army’s takeover of the land using various spurious legal ploys and replacing the names of the various land features, towns, and villages with Hebrew names, as well as the changes in the narrative that accompanied the process, were all preceded by the alterations that were taking place in the local laws.

“My legal project was to chronicle these changes and warn against their consequences. This I pursued with the hope of raising awareness in order to exert pressure to halt Israel’s colonization of our land.”

That four decades-long project of legal accountability was foreclosed last week when, on October 22, the Israeli government declared Al-Haq and five other NGOs “terrorist organizations,” effectively outlawing them. Shehadeh wrote the following response for us.