Jul 11, 2023
A review of The History and Politics of the Bedouin (Routledge, London, 2018) Seraj Assi
In January of this year, the JNF resumed their afforestation projects, working in the Naqab around several Bedouin villages, “unrecognised” by the Israeli state and, hence, deprived of all infrastructure and services.
The current ethnic cleansing (2023) faced by Bedouin communities in the Naqab (Negev) in which the JNF UK, as well as its Israeli parent body the JNF-KKL, are major actors has brought only modest international attention to a historically marginalised and widely ignored section of the Palestinian people. Assi’s 2018 study provides some background to how the British and the Zionists sought to dominate and, in the process, to differentiate the Bedouin from the other sections of the population over which they ruled. As Assi concedes, his focus is on the politics of the rulers rather than of the Bedouin: “a grand tale woven of master narratives and founding fathers, an empire-wide discourse in which the Bedouin voice is only vaguely heard”. As a consequence, the story of how the Bedouin have resisted the colonisers is absent. Nevertheless, Assi provides important insights into the Zionist colonial mindset.
In 1961, Ben-Gurion, one of the founding figures of the Israeli state and its first prime minister, wrote the following in “Call for Desert Communities and Science”: “The small State of Israel cannot long tolerate within its bounds a desert which takes up half its territory. If the State does not put an end to the desert, the desert is liable to put an end to the State.”
Ben Gurion retired to a kibbutz in the Naqab to inspire further Zionist settlement there and the Israeli political elite has continued to devise grand schemes to transform the Naqab
into a high-tech Silicon Valley-type development area that would form its future industrial-military complex. Although little progress has been made in terms of developing the technical infrastructure and the 2013 Prawer-Begin Bill to forcibly remove 35 unrecognised Bedouin villages, evicting thereby up to 70,000 Arab citizens of Israel, was dropped in the face of protests, the efforts to ethnically cleanse the Bedouin continue.
Assi shows that much of current Zionist planning to dispose of the Bedouin builds on racist notions that can be traced to British colonial officials and the early Zionist settlers. They ascribed to the Bedouin a lack of attachment to the land and a primitiveness that placed them on the outside of history, in a kind of eternal backwardness. Assi defines this ideological construction as “nomadism”. Before the Zionist movement’s ideology crystallised into the classic settler colonial mould, there were some Zionists who, out of biblically-informed nostalgia, were fascinated with and sought to mimic the Bedouin.
In contrast, British officials tended to see the Bedouin as a “martial race,” which, as elsewhere in the Empire, deemed them to be suitable for recruitment as foot soldiers in the imperial army. John Glubb, the officer who headed the Arab League, nominally for King Abdullah of Transjordan but in substance in the interests of the British state, is cited by Assi as lauding the Bedouin as “excellent military material [who] have not as yet been infected by the European virus of nationalism”. However, some British officials favoured prioritising the economic development of the Naqab and, by contrast, they considered the Bedouin to be an obstacle to modernity who should make way for Jewish settlers.
The Labour Zionist leadership in Palestine that, by the early 1930s, came to lead the Jewish settler community (the Yishuv), had much the same view. It promoted ownership rights to the land by racializing Jews as the modernisers and nation builders in contrast to the Bedouin who were of “pure Arab blood” from Arabia who, having invaded Palestine, laid waste to its agriculture: “a race of foreign conquerors responsible for destroying the fertile granary of Roman Palestine’.”
Labour Zionists found other grounds for delegitimizing the Palestinian peasantry’s claim to Palestine. The fellahin, they argued, descended from the ancient Hebrews but had become of mixed race, generally Levantine, a process which Zionist leaders rejected for Jews out of the fear that it would represent a degeneration, a corruption of their European culture. It is one of the many internal contradictions of Zionism, that it simultaneously lays claim to Palestine on the grounds of both Jewish indigeneity and as a means of importing a superior European culture, in much the same way as colonisers did in Africa and the Americas. The Zionists’ identification of the Bedouin with nomadism and with a foreign invasion of Palestine was meant to portray them as the very antithesis of the Jewish settlers – pioneering people who would be cultivating the land and nation building.
In 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote to his son: “If not allotted to the Jewish state, the Negev will remain barren … the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper.” The ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin that followed in the Nakba led their population to fall from 53,000 to 12,500, though it’s a reflection of their resistance and resourcefulness that it now stands at around 240,000. The Zionist remedy for the backwardness they attributed to the Bedouin was not to try to integrate them into some form of economic development or to force them into settled agriculture, as some British colonial officials had contemplated, but to remove them altogether.
In recent times, Israel’s land grab under the masquerade of the Jewish National Fund’s various environmental projects or on the pretext of security needs, has accelerated the destruction of Bedouin villages – bulldozing the village of Al Araqib, on 7th June 2022, for the 204th time since 2000 and the eighth time that year – in order to force their inhabitants into urban slums. It is precisely the Bedouins’ attachment to their land, a quality Zionists have persistently claimed they lack, that makes them into a target for Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing. The defiance of the Bedouin villages in the face of Israeli efforts to erase them refutes the notion that their inhabitants are inherently nomadic. In reality, Bedouin are persecuted not for defying the modern world but for defying Israeli colonisation.
In January 2022, when KKL-JNF efforts at afforestation focused on the Bedouin lands near the village of Sa’wa, Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Rights in Israel, reported that the JNF-KKL plantings sparked widespread protests, to which the Israeli police responded by “using rubber bullets, rubber-coated steel bullets and drones that dropped tear gas grenades” and that they had “subjected protestors to mass arrest and detention”. The afforestation that was relaunched this year (2023) is also certain to meet Bedouin resistance and will doubtless be met again by brutal Israeli military repression, which no amount of greenwashing can separate from acts of colonial conquest. The current chair of the Israeli section of JNF-KKL, is cited by Adalah as declaring: “holding onto and protecting the land along with settlements and planting trees were the core values of JNF-KKL, from the early days of the Zionist movement, and we are proud to be leading these fields today as well”.
As Assi concludes: “A fundamental feature of settler colonialism, in its Zionist and Israeli version, lies in its ethnic character. Thus, land settlement and the ownership of property are not just economic spheres but contested spaces to be conquered, nationalised and Judaized”.
Feb 8, 2023
It seems the case to some observers that the Israeli state has increasing recourse to naked violence in seizing Palestinian land either via settlers with the support of the Israeli military or utilising the military itself through declaring areas as required for its Firing Zones or for what are called “security reasons.” To what extent is this overt and unashamed violence a new development?
We’ve grown used to the claims of the JNF that it’s taking over of Palestinian land is to regenerate the land by planting trees or building reservoirs in desert areas. The JNF was for many decades the public face of Zionist colonisation, but it was never the whole story as an article by Professor Zachary Lockman of New York University written as long ago as 2012 makes clear. He argued that the apparently more ‘pacific’ nature of Labour Zionism and the JNF – seizing land and control of the labour market by economic means – was essentially just the result of a tactical decision, forced on it in the period when the Zionists did not control state power in ways they did later. Once they had that control, the violence implicit in the essential project could be unleashed (though they still had to consider international pressures.)
Today, there remains for the Zionist state, notwithstanding that it now has a monopoly of state violence, the problem of maintaining control over the land mass that they covet. For this they want the Jewish population to spread out more widely and break up Palestinian population concentrations. (See Allegra and Maggor, Political Geography 2022.)
As alluded to above, one method of doing this – and an area of JNF activity over the years – is the confiscation of Palestinian land for national parks, forests, and so on at the same time as the army has “needed” firing ranges where Palestinians happen to be living or raising their animals, but the other major method it seems, is by housing development or what the two academics call “metropolitanization”. While the JNF’s land seizures continue to be presented in Israeli propaganda as limited to agricultural and environmental development, some of the land under its control and its environmental projects are used for the Israeli state’s housing development schemes on Palestinian land. JNF publicity boasts of creating “open public spaces and gardens for urbanites to improve their quality of life and well-being.”
A major form of Jewish colonisation of the West Bank, in terms of population transfer, has been by the expansion of settlements serving as suburbs mainly for Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. This is a bonanza for private developers in neoliberal Israel but also draws a wide section of the Israeli population into supporting further colonisation by making available cheaper housing to them (subsidised by the state).
So, it’s not just a few Zionist fanatics who are driving this process – claiming ownership of certain archaeological sites or asserting fundamentalist readings of their holy texts as justification for throwing Palestinians out of their homes or attacking Palestinian farmers, chasing off their animals and destroying their crops. Different social groups are being coaxed into acting as state operatives, consciously or unconsciously, in the new housing developments.
What this has meant is that kindly-disposed, liberal Israelis, who are apparently merely seeking a family home that they can afford, have been given a vested interest in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the state apparatus, whether in post-48 Israel or the West Bank.
Might this be another reason why each Israeli government is more right-wing than the last and the armed forces of the state are increasingly brutal in a whole range of circumstances where Palestinians are concerned?
Feb 8, 2023
An initiative of Stop the JNF (Britain), Middle East Children’s Alliance (USA) and Stop the Wall (Palestine), Plant a Tree was re-launched after lockdown as a campaign that encourages international supporters, both individuals and organisations, to donate funds to enable Palestinian farmers to buy and plant trees in the occupied West Bank.
There are many projects encouraging tree planting in Palestine – so why is Stop the JNF involved in another?
Tree planting in Palestine is political. In the hands of the Palestinians it is an act of resistance to the occupation of the West Bank and the settler colonisation of Palestine. Trees, whether vines, olives, almonds or any other indigenous woody perennials that are cultivated for their produce, enable Palestinians to have a permanent occupation of their land in defiance of the Zionist colonisers’ acts of eviction and ethnic cleansing. That is why trees are targeted by settlers and subject to vandalism – uprooted, burned, poisoned and damaged as part of the persecution of Palestinians. And Palestinians re-plant, cultivate and reclaim their land as resistance. Plant a Tree helps support this material form of Palestinian resistance.
Tree planting in Palestine is also political when carried out by the Jewish National Fund.
Throughout its history, the JNF has planted trees in Palestine as part of its project of ethnic cleansing, to erect barriers, ‘Judaise’ the landscape, displace Palestinian communities, prevent refugees returning, erase depopulated villages and generally greenwash the crimes of colonisation. These trees have often been alien species and ecologically damaging. Moreover, the JNF has used tree planting as a propaganda tool to promote Zionist ideology amongst international Jewish communities who are encouraged to donate to the colonial enterprise, and through the duplicitous naming of their Parks and Forests: British Park; Coretta Scott King Forest; Canada Park; Ambassadors’ Forest.
- By supporting Palestinians planting and cultivating indigenous trees, Stop the JNF is exposing the JNF propaganda as greenwash for ethnic cleansing.
- Internationally, Plant a Tree provides the opportunity to support Palestinian resistance materially and politically.
- It is attractive to solidarity activists as well as to environmentalists, gardeners, horticulturalists and farmers.
- It provides an alternative to the JNF for concerned Jewish citizens and an opportunity for people of good will everywhere to stand in solidarity with Palestinian grassroots resistance.
Oct 22, 2021
OCTOBER 16, 2021 DICK PITT
The UK recognises the Israeli administered vaccinations. It does not recognise the vaccinations carried out by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, so key Palestinian environmentalists are effectively denied participation on COP 26.
Human Rights Watch showed that Israel operates Apartheid in the area that it controls. One of the discriminatory policies was with the Covid vaccinations. All adults in Israel were offered a jab and all the 600,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank were offered a jab but not the Palestinians.
This is in defiance of the Fourth Geneva rule that states that an occupying power must look after the health of the occupied population.
Instead of condemning this blatant discrimination commentators like the BBC congratulated Israel for its prompt vaccination program.
The UK recognises the Israeli administered vaccinations. It does not recognise the vaccinations carried out by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The result is that Palestinians will not be able to come to Cop 26.
However, organisations like the racist Jewish National Fund which has a record of complicity in Israeli Apartheid are able to attend.
The UK authorities favour the oppressor rather than the oppressed
Aug 31, 2021
The Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network- Friends of Earth Palestine (PENGON-FoE Palestine) is a coordinating body among different Palestinian NGOs working in the field of the environment. It aims to serve Palestinian environmental issues by coordinating endeavours between the member organizations. The idea of establishing a network of Palestinian environmental organizations took root when a number of NGOs felt the urgent need to protect our environment and face the violations perpetrated on it.
PENGON leads environmental advocacy campaigns, working with people at the grassroots to make their voices heard and help them build their capacity to pursue their environmental rights, fighting together in the cause of environmental and social justice.
PENGON members conduct projects on various issues such as for environmental justice and against violations of rights, pursuing the equitable management of natural resources and sustainable development, advocating and lobbying for environmental research and gender equality.
One of the main campaigns organized by PENGON is the Climate Justice campaign that contributes to the strengthening of claims for justice in Palestine based on the vision of human rights, sovereignty, the fair and gender-just control over resources and full access to the decision-making processes. Our campaigns highlight the linkages between environmental issues and dimensions of equality, human rights, gender and sustainability. In addition, these issues promote debate and discussion on environmental sustainability and justice.
Although climate change is affecting the whole region, it seems that Palestine is more vulnerable than others due to the Israeli occupation and its colonial system of oppression and discrimination; Israel imposes on Palestinians a complex system of violations of human and environmental rights, built on a model of the subjugation of the people, land and natural resources of the indigenous people.
The Israeli occupation is the biggest non-environmental threat facing the Palestinians; it ignores the rights of sovereignty for Palestinians over their own natural resources; it controls and steals Palestinian water resources; it puts a whole series of restrictions on the development and adaptation of the Palestinian territories: all these steps undermine the resilience of Palestinians in the face of climate change.
At the same time, Israel portrays itself as the eco-friendly country par excellence, – pioneer in agricultural techniques such as drip-irrigation, in dairy farming, desert ecology, water management and solar energy – while practising environmental colonialism and eco-apartheid. It operates through different institutions that support Israeli state polices, including the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which proclaims itself to be a transnational environmental NGO, planting 250 million trees, building more than 210 reservoirs and dams, developing more than 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1000 parks and providing the infrastructure for more than 1000 communities throughout Israel.
Throughout, the JNF – helping to exile hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, their homes bulldozed to make way for Jewish settlement – bought large tracts of land from absentee landowners, evicted local Arab tenant farmers, uprooted the natural vegetation of olive, carob and pistachio trees and planted throughout the land, in place of indigenous arboreta, vast swaths of European Pinera (conifers) and eucalyptus trees.
Forests, parks and recreational facilities were strategically placed atop the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages, so that the fast-growing pines would erase the history of Palestinian existence and prevent refugees from ever returning to their homes. In addition, pine forests were planted to guard and expand settlements built on stolen land and, after 1967, to seize and divide Palestinian territory within East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
In Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we see how environmental devastation coincides with ethnic cleansing and how the former is used to deepen the latter.
The quest for climate justice in Palestine lies at the heart of the struggle to defend the land and the rights of the Palestinian people.
Apr 16, 2021
Climate change and its impacts are being manipulated as yet another Israeli tool for the eviction and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. However, global environmental activists, who rightly defends indigenous peoples’ struggles elsewhere, are too often silent when it comes to the connections between climate change and the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonisation. An obvious example of this is how the Jewish National Fund (JNF), one of the core drivers of the [settler] colonization of Palestine is not being challenged by the climate justice movement around the world.
Registered as an environmental charity, the JNF was established to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Currently, the JNF is active in the de facto and de jure annexation of Occupied West Bank, which is deemed illegal under International Law.
In this session, the Palestine Cop26 Coalition and Stop the JNF Campaign, UK expose the JNF’s greenwash and shed light on the urgency of supporting Palestinian grassroots struggle as part of the decolonization of climate emergency: Challenging the JNF in multiple countries and keeping it out of any climate emergency response like the COP26. Jamal Juma, the coordinator of Stop the Wall and long-standing Palestinian activists as well as other international anticolonial environmentalists will be speaking in the session. The session will also include film footage of popular struggles against JNF’s colonization within and outside Palestine.
Registration information here
