Adan Alhjooj tells the story of Sa’wa, a Naqab (Negev Desert) Bedouin village in southern Israel. Last week, Adan, along with people of all ages from her Naqab Bedouin community, protested against a resurgent Jewish National Fund (JNF) forestation campaign on Sa’wa’s land.
Videos and photos of Israeli police violently suppressing Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab have been flooding social media, as the campaign to #savethenaqab gained momentum amidst growing Israeli efforts to forcibly expel Palestinians from their lands.
As Israelis were evacuated from Jewish-only communities in the Galilee due to fires this month, Hatim Kanaaneh reflects, “Are you aware that within recent memory your own residential locales had Palestinian names and were inhabited by humans, some of whom with features not really different from your own and who were before their expulsion actually part of the best educated nation in the Middle East? They lived right where you live now but without all those fire-hazardous pines.”
A federal judge has dismissed a Jewish National Fund lawsuit that targeted the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights for alleged terror connections over its support for BDS.
The Jewish National Fund is a linchpin of the system that enforces superior rights for Jews over Palestinians, whether inside Israel or in the occupied territory. A recent JNF decision to start publicly funding projects in the West Bank just makes that role more clear. Now the question becomes — will its international supporters stand by the organization?
The Jewish National Fund has been “redeeming” Palestinian land by giving it to Jews for 100 years, but liberal Zionists are alarmed by a new plan to buy up Palestinian land in the West Bank to bolster illegal Jewish settlements.
Despite criticism from liberal Zionists, the Jewish National Fund is moving ahead on a plan to buy Palestinian lands in the West Bank for Jewish settlement expansion. The JNF says it has been acquiring Palestinian land for Jews for decades so what’s the problem?
Avraham Duvdevani has spent his long career supporting illegal Israeli settlements and promoting Palestinian dispossession. In his new role as global chairperson of the Jewish National Fund, he will be doing much the same.
Liz Rose reflects on Rosh Hashanah: “We made the desert bloom,” my mother said when I was ten years old. “How did we do this,” I asked, “from the other side of the world?” My mother pointed to the blue JNF box full of loose change. “That’s how.” And then I felt a selflessness in me, learning to give to others who required help, like Israel, who I believed–because my mother believed–needed money to help make the empty forest grow.