As COP 26 approaches, check this link COP 26 flyer for a short summary of information about assembly points, national hubs for finding rallies near you, leaflets, the important People’s Summit events and other key pieces of information.
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
We welcome the overwhelming vote by delegates at the UK Labour Party Annual Conference supporting the call for sanctions against Israel (a key demand of the Palestinian-led BDS campaign), citing reports identifying Israel as a state practising the crime of apartheid, and condemning the ongoing Nakba, attacks on Al Aqsa, forced evictions in East Jerusalem and the deadly assault on Gaza. Importantly, the resolution also recognises the right of Palestinians to return to their homes, a right enshrined in international law.
This vote should be seen in the context of long-term popular suspicion and disapproval of the policies of the State of Israel. The displays of solidarity in May this year are one illustration of the widespread hostility to the crimes of the state of Israel which exists across Britain and all of Europe.
Governments are at variance with their citizens on this issue. As long ago as 2003, the pattern was made clear when an EU foreign affairs spokesman apologised to Israel for the results of an opinion poll the EU itself commissioned and promised Israel that this public opinion would not be allowed to influence EU policy.
We await the Labour leadership’s response to the landmark Conference resolution.
Public opinion must be channelled into collective action, by raising the BDS campaign to yet higher levels and by holding Israel, and its para-statal arms, such as the racist JNF-KKL, the Jewish National Fund, to account under international law.
The KKL-JNF is a key pillar of Israeli apartheid. It is complicit in the historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Despite this, it continues to fundraise openly while holding charitable status in the UK and scores of other countries around the world. Stop the JNF UK calls on civil society bodies to demand this charitable status be stripped immediately, as a step towards holding it accountable for its complicity in the violation of the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights.
This newsletter focuses on Climate Justice in general and -in particular – preparations for COP 26, at which the JNF has observer status. There is a registration link to the Workshop on September 4th at 4pm with keynote Palestinian contributors, one of whom (Manal Shqair) has written our feature Comment piece for this edition. You’ll also see a rebuttal of JNF’s claims that their forestation programme is beneficial to the environment, side-stepping the forests’ and parks’ political aim and damaging effects (e.g. Jerusalem fires as the latest example.) Details of COP 26 and the Plant a Tree relaunch are also included. Read the Late August Newsletter
In November 2020, Scottish PSC submitted a complaint to the Office of Scottish Charities Regulator (OSCR) against the charity KKL (Scotland), on the grounds that “KKL (Scotland) raises funds in Scotland for activities of the KKL-JNF in Israel which are not charitable but are in fact illegal, and further, that the unstated objective of KKL (Scotland) and all organisations in the JNF ‘family’, is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.
Despite delays to their response (due to COVID lockdown) on 30th April 2021, a representative of OSCR provided the following statement:
I can confirm that we have reviewed the information we have regarding the charity, and our assessment is that OSCR have some regulatory matters which we are concerned about and therefore we have initiated contact with the charity trustees to request some further information.
SPSC have had no further communication from OSCR, but OSCR’s representative stated: “we do not provide updates on the detail of our inquiries to those who raise concerns with us, as to do so could prejudice the charity or our work. Due to the complexities of our casework, and the volume of information we need to review our inquiries can sometimes take many months to complete. With this in mind, please be aware that it could be a number of months until you hear from us again unless we have reason to request additional information from you, but I hope I can assure you that our inquiry process is robust and we will pursue all relevant avenues in a proportionate manner.”
The background to this action is a complaint sent by SPSC in 2007 following the registration of KKL (Scotland) as a charity. SPSC pointed out that the organisation’s relationship with KKL (Israel) and the object of its fundraising meant that it was ineligible for charitable status. Subsequent Freedom of Information requests revealed that OSCR had indeed investigated KKL (Scotland) and required the organisation to provide details of its financial operations. Between 2007 and 2010, KKL (Scotland) sent £120,000 towards the construction of a reservoir in Gazit, North Israel. OSCR was therefore satisfied that this fell within KKL (Scotland)’s charitable Objects of ‘water conservation in the State of Israel’ and ‘environmental protection … within the State of Israel … for the benefit of all its residents’.
In 2017, two members of SPSC had the opportunity to visit Gazit and observed that the reservoir in question was used for irrigation of intensive agriculture in Kibbutz Gazit, and inaccessible to the neighbouring Palestinian village of Kafr Misr. This example of water apartheid stretches the definition of water conservation and environmental protection, and certainly the only beneficiaries are the Jewish residents.
Moreover, further research revealed that the land occupied by Kibbutz Gazit on which the reservoir was constructed is part of the Palestinian village of al-Tira. The population of al-Tira was forcibly evicted in 1948 by the Haganah on the orders of the JNF’s Yosef Weitz, and the village destroyed. Subsequently, the land passed to the JNF for the permanent exclusion of al-Tira’s residents and establishment of Kibbutz Gazit. A clear line of culpability could therefore be demonstrated between ethnic cleansing activities of the JNF in Israel and the fundraising activities of the KKL (Scotland).
OSCR should certainly be concerned about ‘regulatory matters’ of KKL (Scotland) and we look forward to the outcome of the contact between the charity’s trustees and the regulator. KKL (Scotland) is revealed to be a branch of the JNF/KKL network whose purpose is ethnic cleansing.
Manal Shqair is campaigns coordinator for Stop the Wall and international outreach coordinator of the Land Defences Coalition, colonized Palestine. Stop the JNF is working with the Palestine COP26 Coalition and its members in solidarity campaigns around COP26 and to support their tree planting initiatives.
In our ever-heating planet, the causes and impacts of climate change are [to a certain extent] known. What has also become evident is that many aspects of the response to the climate crisis are fostering discrimination and exclusion of the historically and systematically marginalized ‘other’. This only entrenches a system of climate apartheid.
As a network of Palestinian grassroots and environmental organizations, the formation of the Palestine COP26 Coalition (PCC) is an expression of our struggle to fulfill a radical dismantling of the apartheid system Israel imposes on us, including climate apartheid.
Established in 2020, the PCC is comprised of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network, which represents the Palestinian chapter of Friends of the Earth International; Stop the Wall Campaign, the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability of Bethlehem University and the Palestinian Farmers Union.
We have come together in one coalition to get the best of our long-standing experiences in the struggle to preserve our environment and presence as a people, identity, history and culture in the face of Israeli onslaught on our existence and ecosystem and convey the systematically silenced Palestinian voices through the spaces enabled by the People’s COP26 Coalition based in Glasgow.
The presence of Palestine in this global bottom-up transformative space is part of our efforts to emphasize that finding solutions to climate change must include and strengthen indigenous environmental stewardship. This is because the environmental destruction we confront in Palestine and globally is deeply rooted in racism, colonialism and sexism.
The destruction of our environment caused by Israeli apartheid practices is a precondition for the colonization of our land and the destruction of our society. Despite this, Israel promotes itself as a pioneer in technological advancement through which it claims to find solutions to the climate crisis, which is a racial supremacist act pursued by colonizing powers to undermine and devalue the knowledges and cultures of the colonized peoples.
Since the occupation of the rest of Palestine in 1967, Israel has uprooted about two million trees to pave the way for the colonization of Palestinian lands to build Jewish-only settlements, apartheid bypass roads and the Apartheid Wall. Israel has caused detrimental environmental destruction not only by uprooting trees and destroying Palestinians’ agricultural lands, but also by planting non-native and ecologically inappropriate trees that do not fit our ecosystem to cover up Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 when Israel was born. The trailblazer in this through which Israel greenwashes its apartheid practices is the Jewish National Fund.
Amidst the war Israel and its institutions have been waging against us and our environment, we never stand still or passive; rather, as we seek to reclaim our colonized land and preserve the tiny bits of it that are still in our hands, we counter Israeli practices to uproot us and our trees from our ancestral lands by planting more trees, especially in areas threatened by Israeli ethnic cleansing like the so-called Area ‘C’.
The cultivation of trees is one alternative among others through which we try to counter Israeli colonization and environmental damage. Tree planting, mainly native trees like olive trees, strengthens the connection which Israel aims to break between Palestinians and their land through subjecting Palestinian farmers to different forms of violence.
We see in the People’s COP26 Coalition a space through which the PCC can share Palestinian anticolonial practices that regenerate the environment with other oppressed groups involved in this space; whom we also aspire to learn from their experiences. This mutual approach of acquiring knowledge that we in the PCC strongly believe in asserts that we should live in the planet based on sharing because no one should be rendered expendable; rather, all life matters and indispensable.
Manal Shqair is campaigns coordinator for Stop the Wall and international outreach coordinator of the Land Defenses Coalition, colonized Palestine.
Stop the JNF is working with the Palestine COP26 Coalition and its members in solidarity campaigns around COP26 and to support their tree planting initiatives.
