March 2021 Newsletter
Read the full newsletter here March 2021 (2)
Decolonizing Climate Emergency: COP 26 Coalition event. April 23rd 2021
Climate change and its impacts are being manipulated as yet another Israeli tool for the eviction and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. However, global environmental activists, who rightly defends indigenous peoples’ struggles elsewhere, are too often silent when it comes to the connections between climate change and the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonisation. An obvious example of this is how the Jewish National Fund (JNF), one of the core drivers of the [settler] colonization of Palestine is not being challenged by the climate justice movement around the world.
Registered as an environmental charity, the JNF was established to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Currently, the JNF is active in the de facto and de jure annexation of Occupied West Bank, which is deemed illegal under International Law.
In this session, the Palestine Cop26 Coalition and Stop the JNF Campaign, UK expose the JNF’s greenwash and shed light on the urgency of supporting Palestinian grassroots struggle as part of the decolonization of climate emergency: Challenging the JNF in multiple countries and keeping it out of any climate emergency response like the COP26. Jamal Juma, the coordinator of Stop the Wall and long-standing Palestinian activists as well as other international anticolonial environmentalists will be speaking in the session. The session will also include film footage of popular struggles against JNF’s colonization within and outside Palestine.
Registration information here
The Sumarin case, update April 5th 2021: Israel’s Supreme Court backs down from making a decision.
Israel’s Supreme Court backed down from evicting the Sumarin family and passed the decision to the representative of the state, the Attorney General, in 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.
Jerusalem protest in support of the Sumarin family April 5th .
On April 5th, the Supreme Court was supposed to hear the Sumarin family’s appeal against the ruling ordering their eviction from their home in Silwan in favour of the Jewish National Fund (the JNF, or KKL).
But, at the beginning of the hearing, the judges announced that they had decided to request the Attorney General to state his position on the matters discussed in the case, and consequently no hearing took place. The Judges gave the Attorney General 60 days to give his opinion. After the state’s opinion is filed, the two sides (the JNF and the Sumarin family) will have a chance to respond, and then a hearing will be scheduled.
Hagit Ofran, of Peace Now, offered this comment on the significance of the Supreme Court’s move: “The Israeli government cannot continue claiming that eviction of families in East Jerusalem is “only” a legal matter between settlers and Palestinians. The government’s fingerprints are all over the Sumarin case. This is a political matter in which governmental apparatus, such as the Custodian of Absentees’ Properties, the Israel Land Authority and the JNF, have been utilized to dispossess Palestinians from their properties in East Jerusalem and to replace them by settlers.”
The 30-year long fight of the Sumarin family to keep their home in East Jerusalem offers a window into the Israeli policy of the Judaization of the whole of historic Palestine, a policy which necessitates ethnic cleansing, and which has as its handservants agents such as the JNF/Himnuta and Elad, the radical settler organisation.
The Sumarin family are not alone in facing the loss of their home: across the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and in the Naqab, Palestinians are facing eviction and the demolitions of their homes on an ever-increasing scale. This family has a high profile, supported by an international coalition, and are exemplars of the Palestinian people, who collectively face illegal and inhumane acts of cruelty, acts which build and sustain the apartheid regime of the state of Israel.
What’s happening to the Sumarin family has attracted international attention and this has proved effective in creating a nervousness in the JNF/KKL. The organisation took fright at the massive support for the Sumarin case and sought to freeze the Sumarin family’s eviction in July last year, anxious about the international ramifications of this blatantly unjust action for its world-wide branches. This nervousness has now affected even the Supreme Court of Israel as yesterday’s highly unusual decision reveals.
Here in the UK, EDM 529 (2020) strongly condemned the JNF for its ongoing efforts to evict the Sumarin, pointed out that this case is just one strand of Israel’s policy of demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing and urged the Charity Commission to remove charitable status from the JNF UK, the British office of the JNF/KKL.
72 MPs supported this EDM and, as we reported, the Israeli Embassy tried to distance the fate of the Sumarin from the state, saying, “The Government of Israel is not a party to the ongoing legal proceedings involving the Sumarin family.”
The excuse was a transparent attempt to deflect responsibility then and is now impossible to sustain, as it is the state which must determine the fate of the family.
See this protest in support of the Sumarin.
TAKE ACTION: JNF’s latest pronouncement flagrantly defies international law and yet the JNF UK remains a charity.
The Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) has announced that it will fund land confiscation in the West Bank, in defiance of international law. Its board of governors voted through the allocation of NIS 38 million to acquire land to expand Jewish-only settlements.
Your MP can ask the Attorney General to ensure their charity status is investigated. Take action here…
See the statement issued by Stop the JNF and read more in this influential article by Gideon Levy, aptly entitled “Jewish national Fund for Apartheid.”
Public statement: JNF decision strips away its mask, reveals its true character and flagrantly defies International Law.
Last month, for the first time in its long history, the Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) openly declared that it will fund land confiscation in the West Bank, in defiance of international law. Its board of governors voted through the allocation of NIS 38 million to take over land, previously confiscated by the Israeli state, to expand Jewish-only settlements yet further. All Israeli settlements, based on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, constitute a war crime under international law. Yet the British arm of KKL-JNF, JNF UK, continues to be a registered charity, enjoying tax exemption to raise funds for its parent organisation.
This decision is not an aberration, or a reversal of existing JNF policy, but a clear indication that the settlement expansion driven by Israel’s far right government and emboldened by the support it received from the Trump administration, is set to continue, more blatantly than previously.
Last year, it was revealed that over a two-year period JNF-KKL secretly acquired West Bank land earmarked for the expansion of illegal settlements, while its subsidiary Himnuta spearheaded fresh attempts to force Palestinians from their homes in annexed East Jerusalem. Himnuta and the right-wing settler group Elad have long cooperated to force Palestinian families to leave East Jerusalem. Their eviction has been condemned by a cross-party group of MPs, in signing EDM 529.
The KKL-JNF decision brings into the open what it has, for decades, been doing behind closed doors, or through a nexus of subsidiaries. In fact, KKL-JNF has been deeply complicit in the ongoing colonisation and settlement of Palestinian land, since its foundation in 1901. As Peace Now confirm, in the past decades KKL-JNF have acquired at least 65,000 dunams (16,000 acres) of land for settlements. The KKL-JNF has acted as a parastatal partner in the consequent forced displacement, occupation and apartheid policies of the state.
Here in Britain, JNF UK supports numerous KKL-JNF projects on both sides of the Green Line and is listed as KKL-JNF’s office in the UK. Much of JNF UK’s activities have been presented either as benign environmental projects or disguised through front organisations.
Once more, we call for the Charity Commission to remove JNF UK’s charity status, as a step towards holding UK businesses and organisations accountable for their complicity in Israeli violations of international law.
Stop the JNF Newsletter February 2021.
This newsletter carries reminders of the next two webinars: Uri Davis (February 20th) and Michael Fischbach (March 6th), as well as reflections on our first Webinar in this series, featuring Salman Abu Sitta, plus a link to the recording in case you missed it. You’ll find a review of Salman’s memoirs, “Mapping My Return” and some thoughts on a homeward journey taken by the late Edward Said, whose film “In Search of Palestine,” records the perennial Palestinian urge to recover lost homes: the film has not faded with the years’ passing and is still available. There’s initial news of the release of documents showing stolen Palestinian property and a reference to the JNF’s declaration of its intention to acquire yet more Palestinian land in the West Bank. Stop the JNF newsletter February 2021
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