This article focuses on the "internally displaced" and the "unrecognized villages" in the context of the activism by Palestinian citizens of Israel in the last decades. Despite indifference, isolation, and various local and regional obstacles, they have recently achieved international legal recognition of their rights, even amid ongoing dispossession and transfer.

Joseph Schechla is Middle East/North Africa coordinator of the Housing and Land Rights Committee of Habitat International Coalition, formed as the nongovernmental counterpart to the UN Commission on Human Settlements in 1976, linking more than 450 community-based groups and social movements around the world advocating the human right to housing.