The JNF, Apartheid and Settler Colonialism. (Spring 2024)

Mar 27, 2024

(First published in Al Majdal, Issue 61 – 2024)

In campaigns and conversations in the UK, one fact becomes obvious: not everyone grasps the centrality of para-statal agents of Zionism in general, and of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in particular. In the world outside Palestine, we do, indeed, need to get to know the JNF and its role in establishing Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, issues which have been fully documented by Palestinian grassroots campaigners and human rights organisations for many years.

Western progressives are belatedly catching up with the Palestinian analysis. In 2022, Amnesty International denounced Israel as practising the crimes against humanity of Apartheid and Persecution against the Palestinian people.  Amnesty named the JNF in its meticulous documentation of Israeli offences from the river to the sea. Even before Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and many Palestinian human rights organizations had accused Israel of Apartheid. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) stated in December 2019 that the JNF and other para-statal bodies in Israel carry out material discrimination against non-Jewish persons.

The charge sheet against the JNF is long, yet it has branch offices across the globe, of which many have charitable status. Here in the UK, the JNF derives tax benefits from citizens, many of whom do not know what their money funds. A glance at some of the high-profile British patrons of the JNF offers one reason for this seeming impunity: the likes of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown still act as patrons of the charity and illustrate the influence of the JNF – and Israel’s apologists – on senior figures within the establishment.

The primary bodies overseeing UK charities are the Charities Commission, [1] Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR),[2] and the Fundraising Regulator.[3] These bodies could potentially be used to question the charitable status of KKL (Scotland) and JNF UK. However, the UK’s regulatory system tends to protect organizations aligned with the state’s interests.

Several cases against the JNF have been mounted in the UK, through the regulatory channels. The first complaint to the Charities Commission was made by Stop the JNF as long ago as 2013.[4] Another case was submitted in 2018.[5] Both cases argued cogently against the JNF having charitable status, citing its supremacist ideology, its violations of international law and human rights, offering different case studies in each instance to illustrate JNF’s overtly Zionist political purposes, and, consequently, its failure to meet the standards required of charities. Both of these were rejected. The second, went to the first Tier Tribunal level where an appeal was lodged against the original decision.[6] The Tribunals rejected the appeal.

A complaint to the Fundraising Regulator (LINK) gave detailed examples of the ways in which the JNF UK violates the Fundraising Regulator’s Code.[7] These included the JNF’s website posting misleading information which would not enable a fair-minded person to make a balanced judgement and, by contrast, the deliberate omission of key elements of JNF UK projects which could not be deemed charitable e.g links with the occupation forces and settlement projects in the West Bank. The Fundraising Regulator conducted a superficial investigation and produced a report that took scant notice of the empirical evidence on the JNF’s activities.

In a sense, the regulatory narrative is profoundly depressing, but it is by looking at the JNF’s history that we begin to see how we have reached this position. In 1884, Prof Herman Shapira proposed a “body that would redeem the land of Israel from foreigners in order to turn it into a national acquisition that would not be for sale but would rather be for leasehold only”. In 1901 the JNF came into being, its “primary objective” being to acquire land “for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands” and establishing Jewish exclusivity, in perpetuity, on those lands.

In 1940 this drive to “redeem” Palestine from “foreigners”, (aka its indigenous Palestinian population) found more chilling expression in Yosef Weitz, a JNF leader of the time: “There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them… not one village must be left… for this goal funds will be found.” To this day, the JNF worldwide still channels funds to Israel which continues to drive Palestinians out of their homes and off their lands.

The pattern was set for the JNF by its leaders in those early years before the establishment of the state of Israel. Before the Nakba, JNF leaders promoted the doctrine of ethnic cleansing, via the Transfer Committee, influencing Ben Gurion’s Consulate in particular, and Zionist ideology in general. On the military level, the Village Files,[8] drafted by the JNF, offered detailed descriptions of Palestinian villages which aided the Zionist militias as they swept through Palestine from 1947-49, evicting 750,000 people and destroying their villages

Britain played a major role in the development of this trajectory. From the Balfour Declaration, through the Mandate, Britain’s establishment (with a few honourable exceptions) encouraged Zionism. It is worth recalling that approximately 200 Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias while Britain was the nominal power in Palestine between 1947 and the end of the Mandate in 1948. Not only that, but Britain also actively supported those militias by means of training and armaments. When Palestinians rebelled, it was British forces who repressed the uprising and set a template for Israel to build on: punitive home demolitions, extrajudicial assassinations, night raids, detention without trial. Britain even sent the notorious Black and Tans to Palestine, fresh from their brutal acts of repression in Ireland, to add to Palestinian suffering.  

After the Nakba, the JNF played a role in thwarting the UN Resolution 194  by taking swathes of Palestinian land and developing Forests and Parks. 46 of the 68 JNF Forests and Parks lie across stolen Palestinian land. In some cases, trees of European origin have been planted in them, both to prevent the return of those who historically owned and worked the land and to create a Europeanised landscape, more familiar to Jewish newcomers from eastern Europe.

The Forests and Parks are political constructs,[9] the purpose of which is to defy Palestinian return. These forests and parks also comprise acts of “memoricide”, erasing from collective Israeli memory the truth of Palestinian life and the horrors of the Nakba. In many acts of cynical deception, the JNF has tried to build a reputation as an environmental organisation on these Forests and Parks.

Himnuta, a shadowy proxy of the JNF, operates discreetly to acquire Palestinian properties in East Jerusalem and the West Bank through Israel’s discriminatory legal system. Recently, the JNF has become increasingly bold in its defiance of international law, openly declaring its intention to acquire land in the occupied territory”.[10]

In this audacious move, the JNF has shed its disguise and revealed its actions to the world, yet the global response has fallen short. Particularly concerning is the lack of substantial governmental consequences in Britain, highlighting the country’s complicity in the matter.

Today, public awareness in the West, on Israeli Apartheid, is incrementally growing and the Amnesty International report is likely to further increase that. However, grasping settler colonialism as a political framework takes the debate beyond Apartheid.

Emphasizing the intertwined concepts of apartheid and settler colonialism reveals the underlying logic in the Palestinian situation. Unlike traditional colonial models, settler colonialism, akin to the USA and Australia, seeks the erasure of indigenous populations in favour of settlers. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese contends[11] that achieving Palestinian self-determination necessitates dismantling Israel’s settler-colonial occupation and apartheid practices. This perspective extends beyond the apartheid analysis and highlights the nature of the state. While apartheid carries legal leverage, focusing on settler colonialism provides a deeper understanding of Zionism’s objectives.

The settler colonial framing is the key to understanding the JNF. The JNF’s historic contributions to the ongoing Nakba, are obvious applications of the settler colonists’ eliminatory impulse, from its crudest manifestation in the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land to the destruction of their villages, and then the obliteration of the historical evidence under forests, nature reserves and parks. But elimination also takes more subtle forms and the JNF embraces these too.  One illustration is the seemingly apolitical act of cartography, the map-maker’s work of ascribing  names to places, which can become a tool for achieving national goals.

The JNF’s naming of Parks and Forests acts to obliterate one bond (to the Arabic past) and create another (a bond of complicity between Zionism and the wider world). Thus, British Park seeks to flaunt the UK’s complicity with the JNF and ethnic cleansing, secure in the knowledge that the UK establishment stands with Israel, bringing to the surface the historic complicity of this country outlined earlier. The Coretta Scott King Forest attaches an anti-racist nuance to a place which witnessed the notorious Ayn al Zaytoun massacre.

In the words of Seamus Heaney, “Right names were the first foundation / For telling truth”: the JNF’s naming practices, which obliterate the Palestinian truth, build instead a web of deceit.

In conclusion, the JNF’s ideology and contribution to the development and sustenance of the state of Israel rightly draws to it the opprobrium of being an agent both of the settler colonial logic of elimination and of apartheid, in all their manifestations, from brutal and ongoing ethnic cleansing to the erasure of the truth in easily missed acts of re-naming.

A Genocide Foretold. (Spring 2024)

Mar 27, 2024

If Israel’s justification for its murderous assault on Gaza is to be believed, its aim is to eliminate Hamas.  However, the number of civilians deaths, through bombings and starvation, and the comprehensive destruction of Gaza as a liveable space tells a different story, as do the relentless military and settler attacks throughout the West Bank, where Hamas is not a significant force.  Israel’s long-term agenda is to destroy the Palestinians’ connection to the land by removing the land from the people and, should the opportunity arise, the people from the land.  

Pre-1948 Zionist settlement activity, relied mainly on the Jewish National Fund (JNF) purchasing land from its Arab owners and evicting Palestinian tenant farmers to make way for Jewish settlers. Where the eviction met with resistance, the JNF called on the British-run police force to enforce the tenants’ removal. Once in JNF ownership, the land could not be resold or leased to Palestinians.  Such piecemeal ethnic cleansing over nearly four decades secured, by the end of 1947, only about 7 per cent of Palestine’s total land surface.  It required widescale use of terror and destruction of Palestinian villages, in what is now known as the Naqba, to establish the territorial and population base for a Jewish state.   

Israel’s conception through ethnic cleansing was widely applauded in the West as arising both causally and as a moral imperative, from the long history of Jewish people seeking sanctuary, first from antisemitic pogroms in the Russian empire, then from persecution in Nazi dominated Europe and, after the war, from a resurgence of antisemitism in parts of eastern Europe. For their part, the liberal democracies restricted entry to Jewish refugees, preferring them to be diverted to Palestine. These factors are undeniable, but they do not account for the process which turned Jews seeking sanctuary into settlers with the aim of replacing, rather than living alongside, Palestine’s indigenous people. 

It was the Zionist movement that, under British rule, transformed Jewish immigrants into a colonising force by integrating them into institutions formed to develop a separate Jewish economy and, eventually, on that basis, a state.  Accordingly, in addition to the JNF taking over land, the kibbutzim formed exclusively Jewish agricultural collectives and the Histadrut (the Jewish Federation of Labour), excluded Palestinian workers from the enterprises that it owned and, as far as it could, also from those privately owned by Jews.  

The 1930 Royal Commission’s report, noted: “The policy of the Jewish Labour Federation is successful in impeding the employment of Arabs in Jewish colonies and in Jewish enterprises of every kind.”  In addition, funding from Zionist organisations abroad provided Jewish settlers with subsidized housing, welfare support and much better funded schools than was provided for Palestinian children by the British-run Palestine government.   

It was the Zionist movement’s drive to build a Jewish state, not compassion, that led it, in the aftermath of World War 2, to recruit Jews from the Displaced Persons Camps.  Zionist leaders had been inclined to be dismissive of the galut Jews considering them, much like antisemites, as sickly and weak.  But to prepare their armed forces to establish the Jewish state, they turned to recruit from the camps the young and relatively fit.  This is how it came about that from those who had survived the gas chambers, the concentration camps and the ethnic cleansing in Europe, the personnel were enrolled to carry out, only a few years later, the massacre and expulsion of Palestinians.

In December 1948, when the Naqba was still unfolding, the United Nations Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Geocide. Member states, in their deliberation, had in  mind the Nazi’s extermination policies.  The Convention defined genocide as, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.  It emphasised the deliberate physical destruction of a group but, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish legal scholar who had fled from Nazism to the US in 1941 and was the Convention’s principal architect, proposed that genocide should also encompass the destruction of the culture and communal life of the targeted group. The victorious imperial states successfully manoeuvred, however, to restrict the scope of what should be deemed genocidal and in subsequent years succeeded in narrowing its interpretation to the physical destruction of ethnic groups.  This would exempt from the category of genocide mass civilian deaths that are inflicted in self-defence and not in the deliberate targeting of an ethnic, religious or national group. The US saw in this formulation a way to differentiate its bombing and mass killing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from those perpetrated by the Nazis.  The self-defence argument has come to be routinely used by Israel to justify its murderous assaults on the civilians of Gaza.

Something of Lemkin’s original intention has remained, nevertheless, even in the narrowed down version in which genocide came to be interpreted in international law.  The systematic targeting for destruction of national or ethnic groups had not been captured previously under war crimes because it refers to mass killings that exceed the pursuit of a military objective.  Studies of Lemkin’s work over the last couple of decades have pointed out that while his focus was on the atrocities carried out under Nazi rule, his perspective drew on the anti-colonial movement’s critique of imperial conquests and, particularly, of their elimination of indigenous societies through colonisation.  He acknowledged in his research notes that this had occurred, for example, in Ireland, through the eviction of Catholic landholders and in the Americas, by European colonisers’ environmental destruction, resource pillaging and the seizing of the indigenous people’s land.  Highlighting the connection between genocide and settler colonialism, Lemkin wrote in his work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: “Genocide has two phases; one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”  He noted that Nazi Germany had colonised land in western Poland and expelled Polish villagers to replace them with ethnic Germans.   

In public memorialisation of Nazism, its imperialist dimension and specifically its so-called General Plan for the East, which aimed to ‘Germanize’ Poland and Ukraine are ignored and genocide largely functions as a synonym for the Holocaust.  For example, in Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration, alongside the Holocaust, half a dozen other genocides receive token acknowledgment but none that might question the Western liberal democracies’ own record of conquest and colonization.  Unsurprisingly, the prospect that Israel is to be judged under the Genocide Convention by the ICJ, on a charge initiated by South Africa, outraged the editor of the Washington Post (26^th Jan. 2024): “This is a gross misreading of genocide; indeed, it is a perversion of the term. It would be appalling applied against any state, but it is especially offensive wielded against Israel — a country that was forged in the ashes of the worst genocide in human history…”.   The writer of a blog linked to The Times of Israel (17^th  Jan 2024) vented his anger with the Lemkin Institute for the temerity of accusing Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza: “Is it even conceivable that an institute named after Raphael Lemkin would accuse Israel of committing genocide?”

Lemkin’s interest in the link between settler colonialism and genocide has been revived mainly by Australia-based scholars responding to the civil rights campaigning of the country’s indigenous people and this, in turn, has impacted on the study of Zionism.  But the human rights lobby and the liberal  commentariat shows a marked reluctance to consider Israel as a form of settler colonialism.   The reports of Amnesty International (2022), Human Rights Watch (2021) and B’Tselem (2021) marshal overwhelming evidence to demonstrate that the Israeli state’s racist practices across historic Palestine constitute a system of apartheid but, in their combined total of nearly 500 pages, the terms settler colonialism or colonisation are not used once.  

The word apartheid describes the discriminatory practices of Israel’s political rule but the antagonism that this system seeks to manage arises from an economy in which capital investment and labour are organised to further a Jewish demographic and economic dominance. Israeli settler colonialism rests internally on a coalition of political forces whose commitment to racial exclusivism is mobilised through both material and imaginary gains at the expense of the Palestinians; for external support, it depends on the US and its allies equipping it as a military force that can overcome Palestinian resistance and counter, more widely, any challenges to Western power in the Middle East.        

The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, confided in his diary, in 1895: “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us.  We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment to it in our own [sic] country… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”  With the impunity accorded to Israel by its Western backers, discretion and circumspection have been long discarded: the Palestinians face pogroms and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and mass killing in Gaza.  Israel’s genocide, foretold by Herzl and inherent to all settler colonial projects, is there for all to see.   

Israel’s Settler Government Seeks to Quietly Take Over East Jerusalem as War Rages in Gaza

Mar 27, 2024

Haaretz Editorial Feb 12, 2024

Two days after the Hamas attack, the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee approved a plan for a new Jewish neighbourhood, Kidmat Tzion, adjacent to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Ras al Amud. The proposal’s security annex includes directives for a perimeter fence, patrol routes, armoured vehicles and security cameras with facial recognition.

It has now become evident that it was just the start. Since the October 7 attack, the government has done everything it can to advance the development of Jewish neighbourhoods in the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem. To do that, it has taken measures never seen since the city was reunited in 1967.

Nir Hasson has revealed that the government is advancing plans for another neighbourhood, the fourth, this one called Nofei Rachel. The Justice Ministry, headed by Yariv Levin, is the key figure in this undertaking.

Since 1967, there was supposed to have been a clear division of East Jerusalem: The government, mainly the Construction and Housing Ministry, built on the unoccupied hills around Palestinian neighbourhoods. That was how Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramot and many others were developed.

At the same time, settler organizations, first and foremost Elad and Ateret Cohanim – with the support of the state but independently – sponsored mostly small settlements in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods. This is how a Jewish presence was established in the City of David, the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah.

In recent years, and especially in recent months, that division is no longer being honoured. The government operates through several arms, the main one being the Justice Ministry’s Administrator General, which manages Jewish-owned property from before 1947, and the ministry’s Land Registry and Settlement of Rights. These two bodies have been working hand in hand with private companies operated by settlement activists to establish big neighbourhoods, each with hundreds of residential units in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods.

To date, there are four of them: Givat Shaked in Beit Safafa, Kidmat Tzion in Ras al Amud, an as-yet-unnamed neighbourhood in Umm Lisun and Nofei Rachel in Umm Tuba.

These settlements are further proof that the current government of Israel puts narrow and short-term politics over the long-term interests of the general public.

In order to please settler organizations and their inflammatory “Jerusalem is ours alone” rhetoric, the government is sacrificing the quality of life of all Jerusalem residents, the remaining political credit the State of Israel has around the world and the chance of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.