Something that made me feel great today: a report from Israel that activists have plastered the sides of the Jewish National Fund building, the organization that for over a century has bought up land for Jews, with photographs of JNF’s work: the recent destruction of the Bedouin village of Al-Arakib. Here is the original Hebrew report, with photos of the Al-Arakib pictures on the side of the JNF building in Tel Aviv. Here is the report from Haaretz:
The photos were posted "to protest the JNF’s complicity in the crime of pushing the Arab and Bedouin residents of the Negev from their lands," according to a statement.
As part of the effort to "Judaize" the Negev, the government leased much of the unrecognized village’s lands to the JNF, for forestation purposes, said the activists.
(Thanks to Lia Tarachansky for passing this along. As most people who come to this site know, I’m ethnocentric. I grew up in a Jewish world, in a very tribal culture; and though I’ve become more worldly, I love my tribe, and Zionism is the unhealed wound, the triumph of unbridled ethnocentrism. As the signs on the building show, there’s not just a political crisis in Israel, but a war on in the soul of Judaism, and there are many, many Jews on my side. And yes, I know, the only way to win this struggle is to join hands with many many non-Jews.)
P.S. On the Never again front, France and other European countries are turning on the Roma, fellow victims of the Jews during the Holocaust, seeking to expel them and destroy their camps. Read Ethel Brooks, a US Romany writer, in the Guardian.
