Mar 25, 2022
Last week, a group of activists gathered outside the London headquarters of the Charity Commission to hand in a petition signed by 4000+ people, calling on the Commission to strip JNF UK of its charity status. They were joined for the hand-in by Tommy Sheppard MP.
The petition was circulated after the Commission opened a regulatory investigation into JNF UK because of the racist and Islamophobic remarks made by a number of members of their board.
The petition demanded that the Charity Commission’s investigation doesn’t end with these comments – because the foundations and ongoing activities of the organisation are rooted in anti-Palestinian racism.
While handing the petition in, statements were read out from several Palestinians, both in their homeland and in exile, speaking to the reality of the JNF’s role in ethnic cleansing, and the maintenance of Israel’s system of apartheid. They spoke of the JNF’s afforestation of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages and of the JNF’s contemporary role in dispossessing Palestinians in the Naqab and in Jerusalem.
The statements also spoke of the inspiring resistance to the JNF and Israel’s colonial project across Palestine. We will continue to stand in solidarity with Palestinians struggling for liberation, and demand that the JNF UK is stripped of its charitable status.
Feb 11, 2022
This newsletter is a response to Amnesty International’s report on Israel’s crime against humanity of Apartheid. We recognise that behind Amnesty’s work stand other major reports: Falk and Tilley, B’tselem and Human Rights Watch. And, of course, all these organisations are amplifying what individual Palestinians and Palestinian organisations have been saying for decades: Israel is a criminal state, guilty of Apartheid and Persecution, from the river to the sea. Read the newsletter here February Newsletter (2)
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
