The world took little notice last month when over 100 Bedouin, a third of them minors, were arrested in the Negev/Naqab desert in Southern Israel. They were protesting the Jewish National Fund’s planting trees on 300 dunams as part of a 5,000 dunam (1,236 acre) afforestation project on land where 300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live and farm.
Because the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund evokes images of the iconic blue box and such figures as Albert Einstein planting trees, too little attention has been placed on the role they have played, and continue to play, in Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Take the home of the Bakri family in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron for example.
In 2001, during the thick of the Second Intifada, while Israeli restrictions were keeping Palestinian residents away from their homes, Jewish settlers entered the Bakri family’s house near the Al Ibrahimi mosque in the center of the city. First, the settlers claimed that they had leased the house from its owners. Then, when that was rebuffed, they said that they had purchased the house from one of the Bakri family members. This was proved false and the settlers were indicted for forging that paperwork. Finally, the settlers attempted to claim that land was previously owned by a pre-1948 Jewish trust they were representing.
In 2019, having squatted illegally in the house for 18 years, Israel’s court finally ordered the settlers to evacuate the property and pay the Bakri family NIS 600,000 (around $187,000 USD). However, one of the settlers argued that the ground floor of the building, where he had taken up residence, had been purchased in 2018 by the KKL-JNF, through its subsidiary Himanuta. He was granted a stay, secured by a 108,000 shekel (around $34,000) deposit paid by the KKL-JNF.
The KKL-JNF (commonly and henceforth referred to just as the JNF) was founded in 1901 at the fifth Zionist Congress to establish a national fund to purchase land for Jewish settlement in then-Ottoman ruled historic Palestine.
According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, in 1940, Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department, suggested a national project of meticulously compiling the topography, roads, land, and water sources and a profile of the entire Palestinian population by age, political affiliations, and hostility to the Zionist project. Known as the Village Files, these documents became a crucial tool for Jewish militias, who in 1948 burned villages, carried out massacres, and drove between 750,000 and one million Palestinians from their homes and villages, making them refugees.
Following the events of 1948, the JNF planted pine trees on the ruins of the destroyed Palestinian villages to prevent the expelled Palestinians from returning.
Following Israel’s 1967 capture and occupation of the West Bank, the JNF expanded its activities.
The Sumarin family lived in their Silwan neighborhood East Jerusalem home since the 1950s until, without their knowledge, using Israel’s controversial Absentees’ Property Law, their property was classified as “abandoned” and JNF was appointed the property’s custodian. In 1991, an eviction lawsuit was filed against them by the JNF’s subsidiary Himanuta. A complex legal battle ensued until July 2020 when the court ordered all 18 members of the family to vacate their home and pay the JNF 20,000 shekels (about $5,800).
Later that year, the Israeli organization Peace Now filed a lawsuit demonstrating that the eviction case against the Sumarin family had been funded and managed by the right-wing settler Elad organization under the JNF’s name. In return for financing and managing the eviction proceedings, Elad would receive the property from the JNF after the Palestinian family was removed.
Dr. James Zogby, in the Palestinians: the Invisible Victims, lays out how the JNF, from its very inception, was designed as an exclusivist organization, its charter stating that a lessee of JNF land “is asked to assure the JNF that only Jewish labor will be employed on this land.” A recent report on the JNF by Maya Rosen and A Daniel Roth, reveals the deeply intertwined — as of 2007, the JNF owned 13% of the total land in Israel — and mutually beneficial relationship between the JNF and the Israeli state allowing the JNF to carry out blatant discriminatory and internationally provocative actions (such as the purchase of West Bank land) in place of the state.
Up until now, peace activists have focused their attention on halting settlement expansion in the West Bank and expulsions in East Jerusalem. It appears that is not enough. To reach the goal of a just and durable peace in Israel/Palestine, it will be imperative to dismantle the JNF, a provocative agent in the dispossession of Palestinians.
https://www.972mag.com/video-jnf-palestinians-israel/
WATCH: The dark past and present of the Jewish National Fund…A new video challenges the myths of the JNF, an organization that has played a central role in dispossessing Palestinians from its inception until today.
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For the record from a Canadian friend:
https://bulletin-archives.caut.ca/bulletin/articles/2008/03/jnf-award-incompatible-with-diversity-tolerance
CAUT Bulletin Archives 1996-2016March 2008
JNF Award Incompatible with Diversity & Tolerance”Universities must not endorse organizations that act contrary to the institution’s mission, say University of Ontario professors Michael Lynk, David Heap, Rebecca Coulter & Randa Farah. [Photo: Richard Gilmore] By Michael Lynk, Rebecca Coulter, David Heap & Randa FarahEXCERPT:
“The University of Western Ontario announced in December that university president Paul Davenport would be the 2008 honoree at the Jewish National Fund’s Negev dinner. This is not an isolated case. At least two other Canadian university presidents — at McGill & McMaster — have accepted similar ‘honors’ from the JNF in recent years. But is the JNF an organization which universities should publicly endorse?
“Let us state at the outset that we are all supportive of a campus, a community & a world that is tolerant, embraces diversity & advances justice & social equity. Many organizations do so, and are worthy of support & endorsement. The JNF is not one of them. It promotes exclusion, dispossession & institutionalized discrimination, a point which has been made by the United Nations & by human rights organizations representing Palestinian Arabs in Israel & the occupied territories. Even the attorney general of Israel has expressed the view that the JNF’s discriminatory land practices would not stand up to a legal challenge in court.
“Four points need to be made. First, the JNF holds 13 per cent of the land in Israel, and it is reserved by law for exclusive benefit & use by Jews worldwide. Palestinians, who formed a majority in Mandatory Palestine before the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict & today constitute 20 per cent of Israel’s population, are forbidden by the JNF covenant from leasing these lands. (cont’d).
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“As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe observes, the JNF also acts as the ‘custodian’ responsible for guarding the ‘Jewishness’ of other lands in Israel that it doesn’t own. It does this by playing an influential role in the directorship of the Israel Lands Authority, a state body that manages another 80 per cent of the lands in Israel. Together, these two interlocking institutions control almost all of the land in Israel, which — with a few short-lease exceptions — is not available to Palestinian citizens of the country.
“Much of the land originally belonged to externally displaced Palestinians who were expelled or fled under threat in 1948 and had their properties expropriated by Israel. Other property holdings owned by Palestinian refugees inside Israel (classified by the Jewish state as ‘present absentees’), who left their homes, even if for a short time during the conflict and subsequently, were confiscated under the Absentees Property Law of 1950.
“A series of legislative measures allows the JNF and the ILA to act as agents for a disguised state policy of dispossession. In the words of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, ‘this discriminatory policy contributes to the institutionalization of racially-segregated towns and villages throughout the state.’
“These discriminatory practices — reserving in law almost all of the nation’s lands for the Jewish majority, to the detriment of the dispossessed Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel — are contrary to the values of a modern liberal and democratic state. In 2000, the Supreme Court of Israel issued a ruling (the Qa’dan case) that challenged the JNF’s exclusionary policies and practices.”
Great piece, Ariel. Although the phrase public-private partnership did not come up I see the same dangerous pattern of murky dealings between governments and private interests. We see a lot of this in neoliberal times, at the expense of the interests of the majority of people. In this case, the Palestinians being displaced by sleight of hand.
Summary Review of #Israel‘s Discriminatory Laws & Policies, & Their On-going Negative Impact on Non-Jews Living Under Israeli Control: https://www.alhaq.org/cached_uploads/download/2022/02/17/joint-submission-to-hrc-on-iccpr-1-1645107641.pdf