Jul 9, 2021
The Fundraising Regulator has rejected a set of complaints that was lodged against the JNF UK with the support of 63 Jewish signatories. The complainants had argued that the JNF UK’s activities were incompatible with their professed “charitable purposes” in at least three respects: 1. JNF UK is complicit in the primary goal of the Israeli parent organization, JNF/KKL, to place Palestinian land under exclusive Jewish ownership. 2. JNF UK’s fundraising is grossly misleading in claiming to be ‘greening the desert’ and ‘helping the poorest communities’. 3. The disclaiming by the JNF UK of its support for projects with military content is belied by the publicity material of the military training programmes it funds.
None of these arguments prevailed with the Regulator despite the copious documentation presented to her. To give an idea of the quality of the Regulator’s appraisal of the evidence, two illustrations suffice: despite extensive JNF publicity material vaunting jointly run projects by KKL-JNF(Israel) and the JNF UK and despite the fact that a 2008 agreement between the two has locked them into legally binding collaboration, the Regulator concludes: “We have no reason to doubt, from the information we have seen, that the charity [JNF UK] is independent of JNF/KKL”. It thereby underwrites the long-practised subterfuge of the JNF UK, to distance itself from JNF-KKL land grabs, such as those in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank, which infringe international law and are, therefore, contrary to the professed policy of the British government and the international community.
On the evidence presented to the Regulator that the JNF UK supports Israeli military activities, which, the JNF UK by its protestations implicitly accepted would not be a ”charitable purpose,” the Regulator’s conclusion is still more farcical. Of the numerous pre-army military academies which the JNF UK supports, the Regulator refers to only one, Derech Eretz. But after narrowing it down to this single example, the Regulator has still to address Derech Eretz’s claim that “Graduates of the programme are motivated and well equipped with skills and experiences that will allow them to excel in the military.” Although this statement leaves little for doubt, the Regulator endorses the JNF UK’s assertion that the training programme has “no military content”. It even adopts the JNF UK’s ludicrous explanation, arguing that there is “no evidence that the programme’s purpose was to support the military rather than to support individuals entering military service before and after they left”.
The Fundraising Regulator set up by the government in 2016 and funded by a levy on large charities, is charged with policing the publicity and administration of charities. It works in tandem with the Charity Commission but it is the latter, which has the power to approve and rescind charitable status, that is most revealing of the workings of the regulatory system that oversees the charity sector. Its rationale is straightforward: organizations aligned with British government objectives are permitted to pursue with impunity virtually any “charitable purpose” irrespective of whether it violates international law and, in some instances, domestic laws, such as the 2010 Equalities Act. Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to Israel-promoting charities. The JNF UK is one among many pro-Israel groups that operate as registered charities. Among the others are: UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), set up to gag criticism of Israel; the British Friends of Bar Ilan University (a university based in an illegal colony in the West Bank); Friends of Nefesh B’Nefesh (which supports the settler movement); the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization; the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israeli Soldiers; the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Community Service Trust. The Jewish Charity Guide 2020, lists 56 pro-Israel registered charities and this does not include all of them.
For such “charities,” the regulatory agencies ensure impunity by shielding them from public scrutiny, while meting out a very different treatment to those that contest the British government’s agenda, and particularly if they are linked to Muslim communities.
Full details of the complaint to the Fundraising Regulator and the riposte to it (“Permission to be Racist”) can be seen here
Jul 9, 2021
The JNF is a pillar of Israeli apartheid and a militant component of the Zionist coalition hell bent on the ethnic cleansing of the entire land surface of Palestine. A key part of this project involves building forests to cover scenes of crimes past – massacres and expulsions of Palestinians from their homes and villages – within the greater ethnic cleansing crime-scene that is the State of Israel.
But JNF parks and forests do more than conceal this ethnic cleansing; for additional reasons, many deserve the attention of all those committed to justice, or, at least, who want to avoid being thought to be complicit in the JNF’s crimes.
By calling one park “British Park” the JNF seek to suggest that, somehow, British people endorse the massacre and dispossession of the Palestinians whose land was taken to provide it.
The JNF Coretta Scott King Forest appropriates the anti-racist legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.in the service of Israeli state-driven racism.
The JNF Rev. Bastiaan Ader Forest similarly dishonours the memory of one who made the ultimate sacrifice to fight state-enforced racial segregation in Europe.
The JNF names its parks and forests to send a message to Palestinians as well – that Israel violates them not only with the active support of our governments, which is generally true, but that this is with the agreement of their populations – although the pro-Israel lobby knows this is very far from the truth.
JNF British Park
The policy of naming scores of JNF parks after countries from South Africa to Canada is psychological warfare, a part of the Israeli campaign to crush and disperse the Palestinian people. Stop the JNF campaigns with those whose once-thriving communities were destroyed by Zionist militias that used execution squads and rape to drive out Palestinians, then employed fire and dynamite to burn and destroy homes to prevent them returning.
The JNF-UK (Hon. Patrons Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) funded the development of the British Park upon the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. An insolent sign at the entrance to the park – which remains Palestinian property – reads “British Park, A gift of the Jewish National Fund of Great Britain”. Their hubris reveals the JNF UK’s criminality, that it was previously in receipt of stolen lands of the Palestinian villages of Ajjur and Zakariyya. By their own admission the JNF UK have benefitted from the proceeds of this great crime – how can they gift what they hadn’t received? – and continues to violate the rights of the Palestinian refugees, who still have legal claim under international law to the land on which the British Park stands.
The razing to the ground of a civilian community and the pillage and onward sale of the property constitutes a war crime under international law. War crimes are not subject to the rules of legal limitation. The JNF UK, in common with its counterparts worldwide, is a criminal organization in its own right and as well as being part of the larger international JNF.
JNF Coretta Scott King Forest
In addition to naming their parks after countries, the JNF covers the scenes of some Israeli massacres with anti-racism-themed parks and forests. The organization promotes the Coretta Scott King Forest as a symbol of “commitment to peace and justice” but the forest covers up destroyed Palestinian villages, including Ayn al-Zaytoun, whose inhabitants the JNF helped to kill and expel.
Walid Khalidi in All That Remains refers to a group of thirty-seven young villagers chosen at random; Israeli historian Benny Morris concludes that “these teenagers were probably among a group of seventy people later massacred in a gully between Ayn Al Zaytoun and Safad under orders from Moshe Kelman who, in anticipation of a Red Cross visit to the area, ordered their hands to be untied to conceal the fact that the killing had been done in cold blood”.
In 1976 the JNF also named a forest after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. within the Mount Turan Forest in the Upper Galilee region, near Nazareth, which they claim later grew to include 10,000 trees.
Icons of anti-racist struggle are co-opted in the service of ethnic cleansing, for the JNF’s involvement in such crimes is both historical and ongoing.
JNF Memoria Forest
The JNF’s Memoria Forest also does double duty, covering up an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians while also concealing Israel’s sacrifice of thousands Argentinian Jews tortured and killed by the fascist junta that Israel armed and helped to train. Ben Shemen contains Memoria Forest and sits, like the scores of other JNF parks, on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, in this case including Jimzu, of which Zionist records report on 10 July 1948, “Our forces are clearing the Innaba-Jimzu-Daniyal area and are torching everything that can be burned.”
While the Ayn Al Zaytoun villagers saw their killers erect an “anti-racism” themed park to conceal their destroyed homes and land, the survivors of Jimzu and other villagers saw insult piled on injury: – the Memoria Forest planted over their village is promoted as a symbol of tolerance and anti-fascism, a tribute to those 30,000 Argentines, including 3,000 Jewish citizens of that country, who died at the hands of the Argentine Junta.
The Memoria Forest visitors’ centre, however, conceals not only the history of the Palestinian villages underneath, but the sinister record of Israel’s arming and training of the military officers who carried out the mass killings of 1976-83. At the height of the Junta’s terror, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires reported that there was “no country in the world in which so many Argentine officers were staying simultaneously for the purposes of weapons procurement, training, etc.”
The Israeli Embassy refused Jewish leftists the passports that would have sprung them from the regime’s torture chambers. Torturer Peregrino Fernandez revealed much later that assistance in his work came from the Israeli Embassy’s Herzl Inbar (later Israeli Ambassador to Spain).
Prisoner Jacobo Timerman later wrote: “I will forget my torturers, but I will never forget the Jewish leaders who acquiesced to the torture of Jews”.
JNF forest dedicated to Rev. Bastiaan Jan Ader
The JNF Coretta Scott King Forest dishonours that iconic family name and the JNF nationally themed parks and forests implicate citizens of multiple countries in the crimes of the JNF. The Memoria Forest is not the only JNF park to exploit the memory of those who fought and died to oppose fascism around the world, while concealing Israeli savagery in Palestine and support for extreme-right wing regimes elsewhere.
Rev. Bastiaan Jan Ader was a Dutch resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of WWII who rescued and hid many Jews from the Nazis. In 1944 he was planning an attack to rescue more Jews when he was betrayed, and then tortured and killed by the Gestapo. Israel’s Yad Vashem concluded that Bastiaan and his wife, Johanna, saved the lives of two to three hundred Dutch Jews.
The JNF planted a forest of 1,100 trees with a memorial stone in memory of Rev. Ader. The forest was built over the ruins of the Palestinian village of Bayt Natiff, which the Israelis reduced to rubble to prevent the return of the villagers whom Jewish militias had expelled in October 1948. Many villagers ended up in Bethlehem, in Aida Refugee Camp.
In 2016, Rev. Ader’s son, Erik, learned of the JNF’s role in the ethnic cleansing and, therefore, how the legacy of his father’s fight against the Nazi occupation regime had been incorporated into the service of Israel’s programme of ethnic cleansing: “I can’t ask my father what he thinks about his name being associated with this injustice, but knowing what he stood for, it’s not hard to guess”.
What you can do
If you oppose the JNF’s efforts to implicate citizens of your country in its crimes, if you honour the record of Dr. King in fighting against racism, if you are repulsed by Israel’s alliance with a fascistic regime and then mourning the victims it allowed to be slaughtered by that same regime, if you are inspired by the heroism of Rev. Bastiaan Ader in protecting Jews under Nazi occupation and the consistency of his son in opposing Israeli ethnic cleansing – you should support the efforts of Stop the JNF and be part of the movement to expose them for what they are: the “charity for apartheid”, in Gideon Levy’s words.
For more information or with any queries, contact:
Mick Napier, scotland@stopthejnf.org, WhatsApp/Signal +44 795 800 2591
Jun 8, 2021
We reported a formal complaint by 63 Jewish people to the Fundraising Regulator some time ago: you can see the details here. We are now in possession of the decision of the regulatory body. This finds that the JNF UK has no case to answer, despite abundant evidence of serious omissions and misrepresentations of its actions on its website. This decision represents, in our view, another instance of the British establishment failing to scrutinise the JNF and effectively shielding it.
Here is the Fundraising Regulator Decision.
Please also read the important riposte, Permission to be Racist, which exposes the real extent of the JNF UK’s misrepresentation of itself and its actions.
May 3, 2021
This newsletter advertises Ilan Pappe’s webinar, the last one in this series, in which we will hear about the role of the JNF in the Nakba – the first wave of the ongoing catastrophe for Palestinians in 1948. This is a topic of critical importance, especially given the ever-strengthening acceptance of the fact that Israel is guilty of the crimes of Apartheid and Persecution: the Nakba was a seminal event in the construction of Israeli Apartheid, and the JNF played (and still plays) a crucial role in this crime against humanity.
Also included: links to the Human Rights Watch Report on Israel’s crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, an update on the Sumarin family of East Jerusalem, a piece on JNF UK’s support for pre-military academies and how to catch up on past webinars. See the newsletter here: May Newsletter 2
Apr 29, 2021
Earlier this year (2021) we reported that Israel’s Supreme Court backed down from evicting the Sumarin family and passed the decision to the representative of the state, the Attorney General. This is a move which clearly indicates where the responsibility lies for demolition of Palestinian homes throughout the Occupied Territories: with the Israeli apartheid regime itself and its willing agents, JNF and Elad.
All Members of the UK Parliament were informed about the Supreme Court case in advance and were asked to make fresh representations to Dominic Raab, Foreign Secretary. Sheffield MPs responded collectively here. The link which opens up gives you access to the letter and also takes you to an earlier message sent by the same group to Dominic Raab.
We welcome the move and urge all MPs to speak up for the family and against the mass expulsions in East Jerusalem: please ask your MP to speak up.
Apr 28, 2021
On Tuesday 27th April, the New York based Human Rights Watch declared that Israel’s rule over the Palestinians constitutes the crime of apartheid, a crime of the highest order. The criminality applies both at the collective level (to the state of Israel) and to named individuals within that state for their role in the crime.
Significantly, the report acknowledges the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) central role in Israel’s system of apartheid.
The report notes how “semi-governmental bodies like the JNF, Jewish Agency, and WZO that serve the Jewish community and no other constituency” ensure Palestinians are excluded from land in Israel.
Moreover, the report analyses the JNF’s contemporary role in advancing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
The JNF is a racist organisation, which is complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, both during the Nakba of 1948, and with the land seizures and house demolitions that have continued relentlessly.
The JNF established the British Park on three destroyed and ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. It is active in the destruction of Palestinians villages like Umm al Hiran, replaced by an exclusively Jewish village, and Al Araqib, destroyed 185 times to make way for a JNF ‘forest’.
Despite this, the JNF’s UK branch is a registered charity.
Defining Israel as a state practising apartheid brings responsibilities for the international community to end their complicity. This includes the removal of the JNF UK’s charitable status.
Find out more about the role of the JNF by coming to the meeting with Illan Pappe on Saturday 8th May.
