Feb 9, 2022
February 2022: In the Amnesty International Report “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians”, published on 1st February 2022, the KKL-JNF – the Jewish National Fund as we know it – is mentioned by name on many occasions. At other times the report uses expressions like “Jewish national organisations” or “semi-governmental land institutions” of which the KKL-JNF is the major element.
Below are the parts of the report, quoted verbatim and with the specific page number in the report itself, that refer to it and to the operations it is directly involved in.
- In 1901, the WZO established the JNF/KKL specifically to acquire land in Palestine for “the purpose of settling Jews on such lands and properties.” (p129)
- Before 1948, the JNF/KKL acquired a little over 800,000 dunams in Palestine. Following the establishment of Israel, the JNF/KKL continued to act as a custodian and trustee of “Jewish national land”. (Later) The JNF/KKL also played a crucial role as a company registered in Israel that performed certain state functions on the basis of the Jewish National Fund Law of 1953. The law grants the JNF/KKL a special status in designing Israel’s land policies in general and entitles it to tax breaks and financial benefits, while retaining semi-governmental functions. Its remit includes the purchase and acquisition of lands and assets in areas in Israel or “in any area subject to the jurisdiction of the Government of Israel” for the purpose of settling Jews on them, and the reclamation and development of land in Israel. After the purchase of 2 million dunams (the “two million deal”) from the state in 1949 and 1950, the JNF/KKL became the largest agricultural landowner in Israel, serving Jews only, as per its charter. In addition, the JNF/KKL purchased some 360 properties in the West Bank and claims to be able to prove ownership for approximately 170 of them. Most of these purchase deals were completed by Himnuta, a subsidiary of JNF/KKL. (p129)
- The land regime established soon after Israel’s creation, which was never dismantled, remains a crucial aspect of the system of oppression and domination against Palestinians. It consisted of legislation, reinterpretation of existing British and Ottoman laws, governmental and semi-governmental land institutions, and a supportive judiciary that enabled the acquisition of Palestinian land and its discriminatory reallocation across all territories under its control. (p22)
- Between 1948 and the early 1950s, Israel instituted a series of emergency regulations and laws to seize the land and property belonging to the Palestinian population and to formally transfer the ownership of this land to the State of Israel, and from the state to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), known in Hebrew as Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (KKL), municipal councils, Jewish localities and Jewish individuals and companies. Three main pieces of legislation made up the core of the Israeli land regime and played a major role in this process: 1) the Absentees’ Property Law (Transfer of Property Law) of 1950; 2) the Land Acquisition Law of 1953; and 3) the British Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance of 1943. The laws and their subsequent amendments, which remain in force, were instrumental in expropriating and acquiring Palestinian land and property, leading over the years to their exclusive ownership by the Israeli state and Jewish national institutions. (p114)
- From the late 1950s, Israel used the ordinance to expropriate massive areas of privately owned Palestinian land and transfer it for the building and development of Jewish cities, towns and settlements by allocating it to the JNF/KKL. (p122)
- In parallel, the Israeli government enabled Jewish localities and settlements to use the expropriated lands. In Israel and East Jerusalem, it transferred from the state to Jewish national organizations and institutions, many of which serve Jews only, while the legal title of the land remained in the state’s name. In the rest of the OPT, the Israeli government adopted policies that allowed the allocation of state land almost exclusively to Israeli state institutions and organizations, state and private companies, for the benefit of Jewish Israeli
(p126)
- Jewish national bodies generally do not lease land to non-Jews and do not accept them in the housing projects and/or communities they establish on state lands that have been developed specifically for new Jewish immigrants. About 13% of state land in Israel, or over 2.5 million dunams, is owned and administered solely through the Jewish National Fund for exclusive use by Jews. (p130)
- The Negev/Naqab is a prime example of how Israel’s discriminatory planning and building policies are designed to maximize land and resources for Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinian land and housing Instead of zoning Palestinian Bedouin villages in the Negev/Naqab as residential areas, since the1970s, the Israeli authorities have zoned the villages and the lands around them for military, industrial or public use. Over the years, Israel has recognized 11 of these villages but 35 remain “unrecognized” with residents considered to engage in “illegal squatting” and unable to apply for a building permit to legalize their established or new homes as the lands are not designated as residential. The buildings of whole communities have been repeatedly demolished as a result. By contrast, Israeli courts have retroactively approved Jewish communities built without outline plans and building permits in the same area. The lack of official status also means that the Israeli authorities do not provide these villages any essential infra structure or services such as healthcare or education, and residents have no representation in the different local
governmental bodies as they cannot register for or participate in municipal elections. (p116)
- Israel’s control of water resources and water-related infrastructure in the OPT results in striking inequalities between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. The Israeli authorities restrict Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank through military orders, which prevent them from building any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army. They are unable to drill new wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, and are denied access to the Jordan River and freshwater springs. Israel even controls the collection
of rainwater in most of the West Bank, and the Israeli army often destroys rainwater-harvesting cisterns owned by Palestinian communities. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, the coastal aquifer has been depleted by Israeli over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration, resulting in more than 95% of its water being unfit for human consumption. (p28)
- As pointed out in 1957 by Yosef Weitz, a pivotal JNF/KKL official who became the first director of the Israel Land Administration: “The aim of work until now has been to secure state ownership of its lands. The aim now is Yihud ha-Galil [Judaization of the Galilee] …(p126)
- As a result, individuals living in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) who wished to register previously unregistered land had to do it privately under a procedure known as “first registration”. However, the large amount of evidence required to prove both possession and continuous cultivation of land, the high costs involved and the length of the procedure meant that it was inaccessible for most Palestinians. The procedure therefore mostly benefited Israeli settlers and companies who wanted to register the ownership of land that they had bought, or claimed to have bought, in the West Bank. Amongst such companies are subsidiaries of the JNF/KKL whose presence and activities were facilitated through Israeli military orders and amendments to Jordanian laws. (p127)
- Since East Jerusalem’s annexation in 1967, the entire Israeli land regime has been utilized in East Jerusalem for the expropriation of Palestinian land and its conversion mainly to state land. Israeli authorities have also enacted additional legal tools that affect Palestinian land and housing rights in East Jerusalem. (p22)
- The Israel Land Authority, a state body that succeeded the Israel Land Administration in 2009, administers state land in Israel and its Council determines how the land is managed and allocated. The Council is made up of 14 members including the minister of housing as chair, seven representatives of government ministries and six representatives of the JNF/ KKL, making it a national institution that explicitly privileges Jews. (P129)
- About 13% of state land in Israel, or over 2.5 million dunams, is owned and administered solely through the JNF/KKL for use by Jews. (p24)
- In 1981 for example, 81.15% of farmland was located on state land owned by both the Israeli state and the JNF/KKL. Of this, only 0.17% was allocated to Palestinian farmers. (p179)
- Land and property grabs by settler organizations have taken place with the assistance of state institutions, including the Custodian General, the JNF/KKL and the judiciary. (p23)
- A JNF/KKL report shows the strong connection between the JNF/KKL and Elad in transferring properties to Elad and facilitating its Jewish settlement enterprise in Silwan. (p137)
- The plan to build the Jewish community of Hiran is supported by the JNF/KKL and key NGOs, including the OR Movement. (p225)
Feb 7, 2022
February 2022: As one of the principal fundraising arms of the Zionist movement, the Jewish National Fund has led a chameleon-like existence, adapting to political developments to sustain its credibility as a benign force above the political fray. The JNF has played a key role in establishing an apartheid state by acquiring land for state building on the principle of privileging one ethnicity, Jews.
Pre-World War 2, Zionism’s appeal to Jewish communities drew on the imperialist imaginary that European colonisation could take modernity to “backward” parts of the world. It claimed for Jews the mission to take on the “white man’s burden” in Palestine. Since the 1970s, with outright colonisation largely discredited, the JNF switched to claiming to protect and nurture the natural environment. Behind this much trumpeted claim, lies a long and sordid history of complicity in ethnic cleansing.
Settler colonialism has a particularly bloody record. The countless massacres and even genocide that European settlers carried out were excused on the political right as part of the Darwinian struggle of races and, on the social democratic left, as the price of progress to a more developed economy.
Zionist ideologues such as Yosef Weitz, who had a formative influence on the JNF, was additionally inspired by the Prussian state’s model of colonisation, which it carried out in the late 19th century to populate its eastern borders with Germans with aim of pushing out Polish peasants from that region. The JNF transferred this model to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement’s settlement programme. Once the British took control of Palestine, at the end of the first World War, the JNF was able to proceed under imperial protection. Yet, the JNFs land purchases until 1947, yielded only about 7 percent of Palestine’s agricultural land. It was the Palestinians’ ethnic cleansing of 1947-1949 and then of 1967, that proved to be the main mechanism for seizing their land and placing it under Israeli control. To disguise such barefaced colonial conquest, in a period of decolonization, required subterfuge and obfuscation. The JNF was on hand for this task.
It had been set up specifically for the goal of acquiring land to settle Jewish immigrants in Palestine. Land that came into JNF ownership was to be in perpetuity and exclusively for the benefit of Jews. It was this ethnic exclusivism inscribed in the JNF’s charter, that proved useful even after the Israeli state was established. Israel had gained control of Palestinian land mainly through military force, but in order to win international acceptance in its independence declaration it professed a commitment to democratic rights to all people under its rule and to abide by international laws. This stood in contradiction, however, with the Zionist objective of building a Jewish state, which could only be realised by discriminating against Palestinians. The state tasked the JNF, therefore, with redistributing Palestinian land to Israel’s Jewish citizens while paying lip service to the democratic principles it professed to uphold. The deceit was useful not only for Israel but also for its Western allies. The “only democracy in the Middle East” tag was eminently more defensible than the reality of it being an imperial outpost.
For all the pretence of being a-political and charitable, there can be little doubt that the JNF is an extension of the Israeli state and instrumental in consolidating its apartheid. It administers 13 percent of the land over which Israel claims ownership and it also nominates 50 per cent of the board members of the Israeli Land Authority, which controls a further 80 percent of the land within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
The Israeli state’s subterfuge in outsourcing activities that may provoke international criticism continues in the JNF current practice. Thus JNF-KKL (the Israeli JNF) has tried to distance itself from illegal land and property grabs that it funds in East Jerusalem and the West Bank by operating through a proxy company called Himanuta. It has been also revealed to secretly fund Elad, a settler organisation that is seizing Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem on the pretext of recovering land for reconstructing the ‘City of David,’ which no self-respecting archaeologists credit as ever having existed there, if at all. The JNF’s UK branch, whenever challenged over funding projects that violate international laws and/or charity regulations, claim to operate completely independently of the JNF-KKL, notwithstanding a legally binding collaboration between them since 2008 and countless on-line funding appeals vaunting their close collaborative relationship.
JNF funded projects are closely aligned with the Israeli state’s plan to break up the last remaining, significant concentrations of Palestinians, which are in the Galilee, East Jerusalem and the Naqab (Negev). The JNF’s pretence to be a charitable organisation is belied by its history and current practice. Palestinians resisting eviction in East Jerusalem and the Naqab are calling out the JNF’s role in their ethnic cleansing. At last Amnesty International, too, has called out its role in Israel’s apartheid. This chameleon has run out of colours to disguise itself.
Feb 4, 2022
It has long been apparent that the JNF is a pillar of Israeli Apartheid. These 2 short factsheets illustrate the development of the JNF’s role over time (Timeline) and, in the second factsheet, we note some observations and quotations; these further support the proposition that the JNF has significantly contributed to Israel’s system of cruel and inhuman apartheid.
Stop the JNF Apartheid Timeline
Stop the JNF Apartheid observations and Insights
Jan 18, 2022
January 2022:
The Charity Commission has announced that it will examine whether “regulatory action is required” in respect of the Jewish National Fund UK following Islamophobic statements by its longstanding head, Samuel Hayek. This coincides with the revelation that the Honorary Treasurer of the JNF UK, Gary Mond, had expressed support for Islamophobic statements in his social media postings. In the past, the Charity Commission has summarily dismissed calls to investigate the JNF’s funding for projects that, in clear violation of international law and the professed policy of successive British governments, have promoted the expansion of Jewish settlements and their armed vigilantes.
It is not Hayek’s and Mond’s repugnant views that make the JNF racist. Racism is integral to the JNF. It exists to promote the Israeli state’s policy of building Jewish ethnic supremacy in Israel and the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinians. As the Charity Commission turns its attention to the racism of JNF officials, Bedouin villagers in the Negev are resisting their dispossession by the JNF’s forest planting which its fundraising publicity, in this country, claims to be for environmental improvement. On 15th January, the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, reported: “Police disperse hundreds of protesters with stun grenades and tear gas, as Israel’s Negev erupts in protest over Jewish National Fund’s tree-planting on land used for agriculture by local Bedouin.” As an editorial of the same newspaper (13th January) stated: “Only the naive can believe that planting the trees near the Bedouin villages Mulada and Sawa area was meant to celebrate Tu Bishvat (Jewish Arbor Day) or to improve the ecological fabric of the Negev.” The JNF, through a front organisation called Himnuta, is also pressing to expel Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem. These land confiscations which will cause further bloodshed stem from Israel’s policy of concentrating the Palestinian population into ever smaller urban ghettos.
In an announcement last year, the JNF stated its intentions openly to acquire land across the Green Line, dispensing with the services of proxy agents and signalling an escalation of land confiscation from Palestinians.
The Charity Commission is a British government agency that approves the JNF UK’s fundraising as a charitable activity. However, the Commission far from ensuring that the JNF complies with charity laws and regulations has assisted the JNF to circumvent them. The Commission’s 2005 report on the JNF following its “review visit”, noted: “We recommended that the trustees review the JNFCT [JNF Charitable Trust] website and all other information they publish. They should try to ensure that such information refrains from indicating a moral/political support for the state of Israel, but rather explains the focus of the charitable activities currently being funded by the Trust”. The Commission did not demand that the JNF cease to fund projects that support the Israeli state but merely that it should describe them differently because “such language has arguably given ammunition to those wanting to question the legitimacy of the charity’s work”.
In 2018, that legitimacy was challenged by Kholoud Al Ajarma, a Palestinian woman. She was from a family that had lived in one of the seven villages that, in 1948, Zionist forces ethnically cleansed and were subsequently planted over by the JNF UK sponsored British Park to prevent the villagers’ return. The Commission was able to protect the JNF from scrutiny by successfully arguing at a First Tier Tribunal hearing that Ms Al Ajarma had no legal standing to challenge the Commission’s original decision to dismiss her case, which had called for the deregistration of the JNF UK as a charity. In a subsequent correspondence with a person querying the JNF’s charitable pretention, the Commission wrote: “In simple terms, the test for charitable status is a test of what an organisation was set up to do, not what it does in practice”. For a regulatory body that supposedly exists to monitor what charities do in practice, such an argument is risible. It is also untenable even on its own terms. The JNF is doing precisely what it was set up do and, by any standard definition of the term, it is not charitable. It promotes taking over Palestinian land to make it available exclusively for Jewish settlement. This is now widely acknowledged to be instrumental in the Palestinians’ ethnic cleansing.
Given the Commission’s track record, the outcome of its current inquiry into the JNF leadership’s racism can be safely predicted. It will recommend to the organisation how to revamp its tarnished image. What the Commission will not do is expose to the British public the JNF’s role in entrenching Israel’s system of apartheid. Like Humpty Dumpty, the JNF has had a fall. The Charity Commission can be counted on to help put it together again but it will be still racist.
Nov 17, 2021
This newsletter marks the beginning of a new strand of the long-established campaign to Stop the JNF. With our Palestinian partners, we are calling on people in the UK to join us in exposing and rejecting the JNF. The focal point for this call to action is the British Park, developed by the JNF UK in the 1950’s over the ethnically cleansed lands of 7 Palestinian villages. Having tried to hide the crimes of the Nakba in this way and seeking to prevent the Return of Palestinians to their homes, the JNF UK then “gifted” this park to Israel. Join the launch event on November 28th and read more British Park Newsletter
