Oct 30, 2020
Dear Member of the Board
I am writing to you as a director of the Charity Commission. There is a major scandal brewing concerning the Charity Commission and I assume that you know little or nothing about it, or you would have acted. The Board of the Charity Commission has the duty of protecting its reputation and integrity. All UK charities in the UK are obliged to be for the public good. The Jewish National Fund Charitable Trust is racist, complicit in ethnic cleansing and is allied with those evicting the Sumarin family from their home in illegally occupied East Jerusalem. It is not for the public good. The Charity Commission has been failing in its statutory duty of oversight.
Briefly – other materials are availablei.
1. The Jewish National Fund CT is not independent of the Jewish National Fund in Israel (KKL) The agreements between the JNFCT and the KKLii were known to the Charity Commission, but they were hidden from the public. (The Charity Commission even refused to say whether they had a copy.) The Jewish National Fund CT does not even own its own name. It uses it on lease from the KKL. See below or https://youtu.be/VgILRxYyYgU In the agreement between the JNFCT and the JNF/KKL, they agree to work together to find suitable projects for the JNFCT to fund. All the monies raised in the UK by the JNFCT for Israel pass through the accounts of the KKL.In the agreement between the JNFCT and the JNF/KKL, they agree to work together to find suitable projects for the JNFCT to fund. All the monies raised in the UK by the JNFCT for Israel pass through the accounts of the KKL.
2. The JNF in Israel (KKL) is openly racist and has stated as much in an Israeli court. “The JNF is not and cannot be loyal to the entire Israeli public. The JNF’s loyalty is reserved for the Jewish people alone – for whom it was established and for whom it acts. […] The JNF will argue that it bears no duty to allocate its land to non-Jews. To the extent the matter concerns JNF land, it will lead not only to interference with and disruption of the order of the JNF’s activities and tasks, but will negate entirely its unique function as the owner of the eternal property of the Jewish People.”iii The Racism of the JNF/KKL should preclude any links with a British Charity.
3. The JNF UK created the British Park on the ruins of the village of Ajjur (and others). When the owners of the land raised the issue with the Charity Commission, their solicitor said “It may be that Ms Al Ajarma and her family have legal rights that have been breached by the actions of the Jewish National Fund” but they had no right to question the status of the JNFCT.
4. The JNFCT openly stated in 2014 that it spent £114,000 on the Gaza war effort. When the Charity Commission was asked about this it has refused to comment. It also refused to say how many other charities have supported foreign wars.
5. The Jewish National Fund (KKL) is working through its wholy owned subsidiary, Himanuta, with ELAD to evict the Sumarin family from their home in East Jerusalem. ELAD is the settler movement funded by Roman Abramovich to the tune of $100million which featured in the BBC film.iv
This issue will not go away. The issue is drifting into the court of public opinion and into parliament.v
I ask you to draw this issue to the other members of the board, and remove the JNFCT from the list of charities.
Yours Stop the JNF Campaign
ihttp://www.sheffieldpsc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/KKL-JNF-Report-March-2020-converted-1-1-1.pdf
iihttp://www.sheffieldpsc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/JNF-Agreement-between-JNF-and-KKL-Heads-of-Term.pdf
iiihttps://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/newsletter/eng/jul09/Position_Paper_on_Land_Reform_Bill_july_2009.pdf
ivhttps://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-54237970
vhttps://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/57037/eviction-of-palestinian-family-from-east-jerusalem
Oct 12, 2020
REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR HERE:
Since occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has imposed policies to drive Palestinians from the city, including through home demolition, eviction and forced displacement. Amal Sumarin, and her extended family face eviction from the home they have lived in for decades in Silwan, East Jerusalem. The eviction is being pursued in the Israeli courts by Himanuta, a subsidiary of the Jewish National Fund. JNF UK has charity status in this country.
The attempted eviction of the family has caused international outcry, including in the UK, with a cross-party group of 71 MPs endorsing Early Day Motion 529 condemning the eviction, and urging the UK government to uphold human rights and international law.
Amal Sumarin will be joined by Israeli human rights activist Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Torat Tzedek, Dr Yousef Jabareen, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) for the Joint List, and Richard Burgon, Labour Party MP for Leeds East. The speakers will describe why the Sumarin family case is of importance across all of occupied East Jerusalem and internationally and will set the actions of the JNF in a political and historical context.
Jul 22, 2020
The following article appeared first in the Electronic Intifada, July 20th 2020
The Bedouin village of al-Araqib has been repeatedly destroyed to make way for a Jewish National Fund forest.
Image courtesy of Oren Ziv ActiveStills
The Jewish National Fund promotes itself as the “oldest green organization in the world.” By running social and environmental projects, the JNF has diverted attention away from how it has played a central role in the Zionist colonization of Palestine and, by extension, the dispossession of Palestinians.
Almost 120 years after its inception, the JNF remains firmly committed to Zionism, the ideology underpinning Israel’s apartheid system.
And a trawl through JNF documentation reveals that it enables Israeli violence on a massive scale.
Unnoticed by the Western media, the organization – headquartered in Jerusalem – is hoping to implement an ambitious blueprint known as “Israel 2040.” It aims to settle 1.5 million Israelis in the Negev and Galilee regions over the coming two decades.
The stated reason behind that objective is a desire to make Israel “a more stable and demographically, economically and socially balanced country.”
Judging by the JNF’s activities until now that language appears to be code for subjugating Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are often called a “demographic threat” by Zionists.
The JNF has sought to displace Palestinians so that many parts of their historic homeland are reserved exclusively for Jews. Palestinian Bedouins living in al-Araqib, a village in the Negev, have seen their homes destroyed repeatedly by the Israeli authorities on the pretext of developing a JNF forest.
Capital of weapons industry
The Israel 2040 plan is to be implemented in conjunction with the Israeli military, which is reportedly moving the bases of its “technological units” into southern Israel.
Under the plan, the Negev would become the “capital” of Israel’s weapons industry, Daniel Atar, the JNF’s chair, has said.
Unit 8200 – comprised of people aged between 18 and 21 – is the best known division in the Israeli military dedicated to technological innovation. Atar stated in May that the JNF has been engaged in “educational collaboration” with Unit 8200 graduates for the past three years.
Atar has depicted the “collaboration” as benign.
Part of it has involved setting up technology-focused youth centers in peripheral regions. Fostering innovation is “the true realization of Zionism today,” Atar said in 2017.
Yet the work of Unit 8200 is far from benign.
In 2014, a group of Unit 8200 veterans issued a letter stating their refusal to join operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The letter revealed that Unit 8200 personnel had been instructed to retain any damaging details of Palestinians’ lives that they came across.
That included information on sexual orientation, financial problems or family illnesses that could be “used to extort/blackmail the person and turn them into a collaborator.”
Unit 8200 graduates have gone on to establish numerous cyber warfare firms, the most notorious of which is NSO Group. That firm’s software has been used to spy on the mobile phone communications of journalists and activists around the world.
Philanthropic?
Based in London, the JNF UK poses as independent of the Jewish National Fund in Jerusalem.
While it may enjoy operational autonomy, the JNF UK nonetheless supports many Jewish National Fund projects. Among them are the construction of an after-school center for teenagers in Kiryat Malachi, a town in the Negev.
This center has been described as a “house for excellence” by the JNF. Activities in the “houses for excellence” network are being developed in cooperation with Unit 8200 graduates.
The JNF UK’s website says that it supports Zionism as a “philanthropic activity.”
It appears to have a curious understanding of the term “philanthropic.” Accounts for the JNF UK show that it provides financial backing to recruitment drives for Israel’s army – the army which imposes a brutal occupation on Gaza and the West Bank.
Among the beneficiaries of JNF UK funds is Ein Prat, a group which arranges training courses for North Americans who join the Israeli military.
Ein Prat has boasted of how “over 35 percent of our graduates” gain officer positions in Israel’s army.
Derech Eretz is another group that has received funding from JNF UK. According to the group’s website, it runs programs for young Israelis “from the lower strata of society” so that they can be better integrated into the military.
One of the group’s founders, Avi Cohen, commanded a tank platoon when Israel undertook a large-scale attack against the West Bank in 2002. Almost 500 Palestinians were killed in that offensive.
JNF UK has also given money to Otzem, a school that provides training to boys before they enter Israel’s army.
Otzem was originally formed by Israeli settlers in Gaza during the 1990s. It moved to the Negev after Israel’s government withdrew the settlers from Gaza, while keeping it under military occupation, in 2005.
The school’s founder Rafi Peretz went on to become the chief rabbi in the Israeli army. Today, he heads the far-right Jewish Home party and holds the Jerusalem affairs portfolio in the Israeli government.
Otzem’s ethos is encapsulated in one of its brochures. Above a photograph of young men clutching machine guns, the brochure promises a “uniquely Israeli experience.”
Violence is indeed an integral part of the “Israeli experience.” That, however, is not a message you are likely to find in the JNF UK’s publications.
Instead, the JNF UK professes a commitment to alleviating poverty and helping people with disabilities. The organization has long enjoyed charitable status and donations to it are tax deductible.
The funding which the JNF UK offers to projects aimed at benefiting the Israeli army makes its status scandalous. It is a charity which supports war crimes.
Greg Dropkin is a researcher based in the English city of Liverpool.
David Sheen contributed translation.
Jul 22, 2020
The Jewish National Fund, established more than 100 years ago, is perhaps the most venerable of the international Zionist organisations. Its recent honorary patrons have included prime ministers, and it advises UN forums on forestry and conservation issues.
It is also recognised as a charity in dozens of western states. Generations of Jewish families, and others, have contributed to its fundraising programmes, learning as children to drop saved pennies into its trademark blue boxes to help plant a tree.
And yet its work over many decades has been driven by one main goal: to evict Palestinians from their homeland.
The JNF is a thriving relic of Europe’s colonial past, even if today it wears the garb of an environmental charity. As recent events show, ethnic cleansing is still what it excels at.
The organisation’s mission began before the state of Israel was even born. Under British protection, the JNF bought up tracts of fertile land in what was then historic Palestine. It typically used force to dispossess Palestinian sharecroppers whose families had worked the land for centuries.
But the JNF’s expulsion activities did not end in 1948, when Israel was established through a bloody war on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland – an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Israel hurriedly demolished more than 500 cleansed Palestinian villages, and the JNF was entrusted with the job of preventing some 750,000 refugees from returning. It did so by planting forests over both the ruined homes, making it impossible to rebuild them, and village lands to stop them being farmed.
These plantations were how the JNF earned its international reputation. Its forestry operations were lauded for stopping soil erosion, reclaiming land and now tackling the climate crisis.
But even this expertise was undeserved. Environmentalists say the dark canopies of trees it has planted in arid regions such as the Negev, in Israel’s south, absorb heat unlike the unforested, light-coloured soil. Short of water, the slow-growing trees capture little carbon. Native species of brush and animals, meanwhile, have been harmed.
These pine forests – the JNF has planted some 250 million trees – have also turned into a major fire hazard. Most years hundreds of fires break out after summer droughts exacerbated by climate change.
Early on, the vulnerability of the JNF’s saplings was used as a pretext to outlaw the herding of native black goats. Recently the goats, which clear undergrowth, had to be reintroduced to prevent the fires. But the goats’ slaughter had already served its purpose, forcing Bedouin Palestinians to abandon their pastoral way of life.
Despite surviving the Nakba, thousands of Bedouin in the Negev were covertly expelled to Egypt or the West Bank in Israel’s early years.
It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the JNF’s troubling role in these evictions was of only historical interest. The charity, Israel’s largest private land owner, is actively expelling Palestinians to this day.
In recent weeks, solidarity activists have been desperately trying to prevent the eviction of a Palestinian family, the Sumarins, from their home in occupied East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers.
Last month the Sumarins lost a 30-year legal battle waged by the JNF, which was secretly sold their home in the late 1980s by the Israeli state.
The family’s property was seized under a draconian 1950 law declaring Palestinian refugees of the Nakba “absent” so that they could not reclaim their land inside the new state of Israel.
The courts have decreed that the law can be applied in occupied Jerusalem too, in violation of international law. In the Sumarins’ case, it appears not to matter that the family was never actually “absent”. The JNF is permitted to evict the 18 family members next month. To add insult to injury, they will have to pay damages to the JNF.
A former US board member, Seth Morrison, resigned in protest in 2011 at the JNF’s role in such evictions, accusing it of working with extreme settler groups. Last year the JNF ousted a family in similar circumstances near Bethlehem. Days later settlers moved on to the land.
Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights group focusing on Jerusalem, warned that these cases create a dangerous legal precedent if Israel carries out its promise to annex West Bank territory. It could rapidly expand the number of Palestinians classified as “absentees”.
But the JNF never lost its love of the humble tree as the most effective – and veiled – tool of ethnic cleansing. And it is once again using forests as a weapon against the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian, survivors of the Nakba.
Earlier this year it unveiled its “Relocation Israel 2040” project. The plan is intended to “bring about an in-depth demographic change of an entire country” – what was once sinisterly called “Judaisation”. The aim is to attract 1.5 million Jews to Israel, especially to the Negev, over the next 20 years.
As in Israel’s first years, forests will be vital to success. The JNF is preparing to plant trees on an area of 40 sq km belonging to Bedouin communities that survived earlier expulsions. Under the cover of environmentalism, many thousands of Bedouin could be deemed “trespassers”.
The Bedouin have been in legal dispute with the Israeli state for decades over ownership of their lands. This month in an interview with the Jerusalem Post newspaper, Daniel Atar, the JNF’s global head, urged Jews once again to drop money into its boxes. He warned that Jews could be dissuaded from coming to the Negev by its reputation for “agricultural crimes” – coded reference to Bedouin who have tried to hold on to their pastoral way of life.
Trees promise both to turn the semi-arid region greener and to clear “unsightly” Bedouin off their ancestral lands. Using the JNF’s original colonial language of “making the desert bloom”, Mr Atar said his organisation would make “the wilderness flourish”.
The Bedouin understand the fate likely to befall them. In a protest last month they carried banners: “No expulsions, no displacement.”
After all, Palestinians have suffered forced displacement at the JNF’s hands for more than a century, while watching it win plaudits from around the world for its work in improving the “environment”.
Jul 17, 2020
STOP THE JNF welcomes Na’amod’s initiative – read their message below:
From Na’amod: British Jews Against Occupation:
July 2020: We have just paid visits to JNF UK and the The Board of Deputies of British Jews with some messages from British Jews:
*Neutrality on annexation is complicity.
*Our Tzedakah must not be used for greenwashing the occupation.
*Condemn the eviction of Palestinians, including the Sumarin family.
*We need #ActionsNotWords
*Stopping annexation is a moment Ending occupation is the movement – Join us today: bit.ly/join-naamod
Jul 14, 2020
On Tuesday 30th June, an Israeli court ruled that the ownership of the Sumarin family home in Silwan, East Jerusalem, was legally transferred to Israeli state under the discredited Absentees’ Property Law, and that the eviction notice against the family was therefore valid. Further, the court ruled that if the family did not leave the property by August 16th then force could be used to dispossess them.
This ruling clears the way for the eviction of the family.
Eight years ago, Seth Morrison, former Director of JNF USA wrote:
“I have learned that the action on the Sumarin home is not an isolated case. JNF has gained ownership of other Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and, in many instances, then transferred these properties through its subsidiaries to Elad, a settler organization whose purpose is to “Judaize” East Jerusalem.
In my eyes, the expulsion of the Sumarin family is a violation of human rights. But it is also part of the systematic transfer of Palestinian property to ideological settlers who wish to put facts on the ground that hinder a lasting peace agreement.”
Seth Morrison reaffirmed his condemnation of the JNF this month.
The eviction of a family that owned the land before Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, is illegal under international law, a grave violation of the Sumarin family’s human rights, and part of Israel’s project to alter the demographics of East Jerusalem by driving Palestinians out, while giving financial and political support to illegal Jewish-only settlements.
The international community must act. From 16th August 2020, the Israeli authorities can forcefully evict the family.
We call on human rights activists to:
- Write to your MP and ask them to sign Early Day Motion 529.
- Get your trade union branch, political party branch, or community group to endorse the campaign.
- Put up messages of support for the Sumarin family on social media under the #JNFDontEvict #SumarinsMustStay
- Organise a local protest on 15th August
We also draw your attention to the request by the Sumarin Coalition to contribute to the costs of mounting an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court ($40,000). The family also face a massive fine and may have to pay for their own eviction.
