BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights

BADIL — the word means alternative — was established in 1998 in Bethlehem and is registered with the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, owned by a general assembly and administered by nine elected board members. It has held special consultative status with the United Nations since 2006. Its self-description contains the sentence that defines its method: its vision, mission, programmes and relationships “are defined by our Palestinian identity and the principles of international humanitarian and human rights law.” It works on the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons, and it does so, as it says, without restricting itself to a particular period of time or a specific geographic location — which is the analytical claim that displacement in 1948, in 1967, in the West Bank today and in Gaza today is one continuous process.

The organisation’s most consequential publication is its recurring survey of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide, which produces the standing global figures that other researchers cite. Around it sit position papers — on forcible transfer in the West Bank as a mechanism rather than an incident, on the Israeli apartheid spatial regime of fragmentation and enclavement, on evacuation orders in Gaza and Lebanon as cover for population transfer, and on the Palestine solidarity movement in Europe. Several are published in English, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese, which is unusual and deliberate: BADIL writes for movements as well as for lawyers. The work is organised into specialised units covering legal and international advocacy, research and documentation, and community mobilisation.

For researchers the two most useful doors are the Publications index and the Public Library. Annual reports are posted continuously from 1999 onward, which makes the organisation’s own institutional record unusually transparent, and the press release archive functions as a dated log of Palestinian refugee-rights positions across a quarter-century. BADIL also produces film — a recent short documentary, The Five-Hour Journey, records movement through checkpoints, roadblocks, iron gates and enforced detours in the West Bank.

Practical note: BADIL’s site is served from both badil.org and www.badil.org, and some internal paths resolve on one host and not the other — /about works without the www prefix, while /en/ prefixed paths return a not-found page. If a link fails, strip or add the prefix before assuming the document has been withdrawn.

Sources

• About BADIL — BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
• BADIL — home, press releases and publications index