Oct 14, 2022
The accounts below remind us that the campaign to oppose the JNF has been pursued with great vigour and imagination in Scotland for many years. Notable victories have been won in the face of heavy legal threats and the Scottish campaigners have shown the rest of us what can be achieved. A Scottish member of the Stop the JNF group explains.
Every JNF Scotland public event without exception was contested between 2001 and 2014, after which the JNF ended pre-publicity for their events. Large protests greeted each glitzy fundraiser, with the Israeli Ambassador and guest speakers at the Glasgow Hilton in 2001 (Bill Clinton), 2002 (Shaul Mofaz), 2004 (Ruby Wax), 2006 (Colin Powell), 2008 (Goldie Hawn).
In relation to publicity for the 2004 protests specifically, the JNF’s expensive London lawyers threatened Scottish PSC with legal action for damages but hastily retreated when we invited them to meet in court. We invited them there to debate before a judge or jury whether the JNF are a racist organisation and a criminal conspiracy.
The JNF’s bullying letter demanded SPSC stop calling the JNF racists and that we cease, apologise and pay substantial damages. Failure to respond “positively” would trigger legal action against us at “12 noon on 25 March 2004…for damages, costs” and a court order forcing us to stop calling the JNF racist. It was an empty threat.
We crafted the response to the JNF’s lawyers that aggravated our offence such that our only defence in court would have been that we spoke the truth. Unless we could prove the truth of what we had written – that the JNF is a racist organisation involved in ethnic cleansing – our response would have been a judicial suicide note.
This is what we said:
PRESS STATEMENT BY SCOTTISH PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign deplores the decision of the entertainer Ruby Wax to appear at a Jewish National Fund dinner in Glasgow this coming Sunday. We have called on all individuals and groups opposed to discrimination on ethnic grounds to join us in protest at this event.
As a result of some of our publicity for this protest, the SPSC has been threatened with legal action by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). A letter to our campaign from solicitors acting for the JNF is attached. They have demanded a full retraction and apology, as well as substantial damages and legal costs. None of this will be forthcoming. In addition, the SPSC web site was temporarily disabled this week as a result of a complaint from the JNF to our service providers.
The content to which the JNF objected included the following quotes:
“Ruby Wax to support ethnic cleansing in Glasgow”
“the Jewish National Fund (JNF) raises funds for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”
“The JNF is a quasi-official organisation of the Israeli state that exists to raise funds for the acquisition and development of land for Jewish settlement. As such, it provides one of the main mechanisms through which Israel’s system of ethnic segregation and discrimination is enforced.”
This final paragraph is a restatement of the findings of the 1998 report of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. Paragraph 237 notes “grave concern that the status Law of 1952 authorizes the World Zionist organization/Jewish Agency and its subsidiaries, including the Jewish National Fund, to control most of the land in Israel, since these institutions are chartered to benefit Jews exclusively…The Committee takes the view that large-scale and systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and property by the State and the transfer of that property to these agencies constitute an institutionalized form of discrimination”. (Our emphasis).
As the report implies, the JNF has been a major beneficiary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli state. Following the removal of the inhabitants, the state “privatised” their lands by a transfer of ownership to the JNF and related bodies. Such lands may not under the JNF charter, be returned or even sold or leased to their original owners. Millions of Palestinians languish in refugee camps as a result.
The Historical background to the JNF’s activities
According to Israeli historians, Josef Weitz, the head of the JNF lands division during the 1948 war, was directly involved in the forced removal of Palestinians. The following quote will suffice to indicate his thinking: “There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries … all of them; not one village, not one tribe, should be left.”
The JNF has frequently broken international law by dispossessing peasant cultivators from their customary lands. Most of the lands acquired by the JNF since 1948 are lands which belonged to the refugees forced to flee during the Nakba or lands expropriated by the government subsequently from Arab citizens. Once acquired by the JNF, land becomes an inalienable part of the Jewish national heritage – that is, it may not be sold or leased to non-Jews.
The JNF has the right of first refusal when any public lands not owned by it outright are sold or transferred. The JNF has exclusive responsibility for land development. Non-Jews, regardless of their citizenship status, are not eligible for JNF services. This means they cannot lease or sublease JNF-owned lands and generally cannot even work as hired labourers on these lands.
The JNF supports the Israeli occupation and helps to finance the illegal settlements in the territories of the West Bank. Since 1978 most JNF activities have been involved in acquiring and developing land for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The organisation has collaborated with the Israeli authorities in expropriating Palestinian lands, razing cultivated fields and bulldozing orchards, and, in addition, denying equal access to water sources.
No Hiding Place
Over the three years 2012 to 2014, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign led vigorous all-day protests against JNF midsummer fundraisers at Cowans Law shooting range in a remote part of Ayrshire. The JNF had retreated to this isolated spot after annual demonstrations at Bonnyton Golf Course led to them being unwelcome there. The protests at Cowans Law led to that venue also ending its relationship with the JNF. The 2014 event prompted a failed attempt to defeat the protests by seeking a criminal conviction for assault against one organiser that ended in humiliating defeat, a reprimand from the sheriff that the prosecution should never have been launched since it was clear from broadcast footage that no crime had been committed.
The Great Deceivers
The impression one would gain from JNF publicity is of a benevolent charity whose main activity seems to be planting trees. The reality is very different. The SPSC calls upon the Charities Commission to investigate the charitable status of the JNF and to verify that it meets the requirements of the commission.
The SPSC is a small organisation with limited resources which opposes all forms of racial or ethnic discrimination. We reject all attempts by the JNF to silence the voices calling for justice.
To end with a memorable quotation from the SPSC response to the demand for damages that JNF lawyers made: “Hell will freeze over before we part with one penny to your Fund, which would only go towards the further violation of the human rights of Palestinians.”
Oct 14, 2022
The following is derived from a contribution made by Eurig Scandrett of Stop the JNF to a round-table discussion on “The Environmental Consequences of Settler Colonialism” in September 2022.
Environmental violation as ethnic cleansing has been a modus operandi for Zionist colonisers since well before the establishment of the state of Israel. Central to this process is the Jewish National Fund, which Ilan Pappe describes as “the principal Zionist tool for the colonisation of Palestine”, and which describes itself as “Israel’s largest green organisation”.
The JNF was established by the World Zionist Congress in 1901 with the objective of acquiring Palestinian land for Jewish colonisation. In 1948 when the Zionist militia expelled Palestinians from their homes they handed large areas of Palestinian land to the JNF. In order to prevent Palestinians from returning, the JNF planted trees over their villages and agricultural land, which also had the purpose of ‘judaizing the environment’ – transforming the landscape from looking ‘Arabic’ to looking North-East European, which is where most of the early Zionist pioneers came from. The JNF continues to deploy ethnic cleansing for settler colonisation under the cover of environmentalism and, very pertinently for us, operates as an environmental charity in Scotland and the UK.
Settler colonisation is a distinct form of colonisation with environmental implications. While classical colonialism exploits the natural resources, the labour and the markets of colonised territories for the benefit of a colonising state, settler colonialism has no interest in indigenous labour, requiring only the natural resources of the colonised people. Settlers have no long-term need for the indigenous labour or their markets, and so expel or annihilate the indigenous population, including through the environmental destruction of their land. Settler colonial states include today’s USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, which have in common the seizure of natural resources and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population.
Amongst many people, water apartheid is probably not the best-known environmental injustice practised through the Palestinian occupation. As a result of the Oslo ‘peace process’ accords, the Palestinian Water Authority has no authority to approve water infrastructure in the West Bank without the approval of the Israeli occupiers. Meanwhile, water infrastructure for the illegal settlements is provided by the state of Israel. As a result, on average, Israelis have access to 600 litres of water per person per day (those in the illegal settlements even more) whereas West Bank Palestinians have less than the minimum WHO requirement of 100 litres. In Gaza water access is even more dangerous. The aquifer that serves the Gaza strip is over-extracted, and the river that would replenish it dammed by Israel, so that sea water seeps into the aquifer. Moreover, the materials required for desalination on any scale, and for sewage treatment, are prevented from crossing the Israeli military blockade.
So, between them, the state of Israel and the parastatal JNF work in tandem to make life ever harder for the Palestinians as part of the effort to drive them out.
Oct 14, 2022
“Look at the land around you and carve it onto your memory. You must change it, so that it does not resemble what was here before you. You must leave your mark on it. The mountains, the hills, the forests and the meadows – they must all bear your name and reflect the light of your face… You must mercilessly destroy anything in the landscape which is not directly related to you… Tell everyone that you were here first. They will believe you. Tell them there was nothing before you – no mountain, forest, hill meadow. Say this with complete objectivity.” Amos Kenan, “The First”.
This quotation could be read as a précis of the Zionist methodology with regards to one of its central goals: acquiring and Judaising the land of Palestine. The logic of elimination characterises Zionism’s approach to achieving this goal, most egregiously evidenced in the attempted physical erasure of Palestinian villages, cities, culture and agriculture, with concomitant brutality towards, and massacres of, the people of the land.
But also we see this core aim of Zionism in the determined attempts to stamp an alien identity on Palestine, reshaping the very landscape, renaming the age-old villages and blotting out – by any means possible – those reminders of an Arabic past which resist eradication. And amplified as loudly as possible is the narrative, an essential component of settler colonialism. “Tell them”, and tell them again, this was a barren, empty space before you came. Say it with sufficient braggadocio and “they” will believe you…. you might even convince yourself.
The first Zionist congress in Basel in 1897 established the goal of creating what Hertzl called a “home” for Jewish people and, in addition, underscored the importance of creating a bond between Jewish people and the land they had acquired, land inconveniently called “Palestine”. The very fact that “strengthening and fostering Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness” had to be articulated as a core objective speaks to the fragility of the link between the immigrant Jews and the Palestinian land they “acquired”.
Of course, not all of Palestine was demolished in 1948, 1967 or during the ongoing destruction to this day of what remains. It is impossible to eradicate all the evidence of Israel’s brutal foundation. Yet this is part of Zionism’s enterprise and the JNF is a key agent of this attempted erasure, which operates at a visible, physical level, but has a psychological component too.
As Zionism reaches its 125th anniversary and the JNF its 122nd birthday, the attempts seem more and more desperate. Israeli citizens are urged to enjoy JNF parks and forests, follow trails, connecting with the land, but to do so they must block out the evidence of previous inhabitants who cultivated those “abandoned” groves, and built those derelict olive presses. It requires an act of psychological closure and denial of human curiosity to overlook such obvious signifiers of previous habitation.
Instead of an honest interaction with the land, Israeli citizens are presented with a distorted historical perspective: Palestinian villages are metamorphosed in JNF mythology into sites of Biblical significance – eradicating thousands of years of human endeavour. How can a history so telescoped to skim over recent times, over centuries of Arabic life, cultivation and culture, and latching onto a Biblical mythology, be sustaining and true?
The JNF are not alone in this venture of stamping Zionism on the land at all costs. The Israeli Government’s Naming Committee (which involves the JNF), the Parks Authority and the Survey of Israel are all busy trying to re-map the land of Palestine. This venture involves probing Arabic names to see if any Jewish link can be found and “revived”: if not, “translate” the Arabic into a Hebrew-sounding equivalent. Arabic street names in cities were changed to suit the national narrative: Independence Street, In-gathering of Exiles Street, Return of Zion Street, all in Haifa. (See here for more details.)
From an environmental perspective, the same erasure has been at work. Those forests of the JNF, planted over Nakba villages, scream out their alien nature. The indigenous olive meanwhile has suffered an onslaught devastating to the local economy and violating the harmony of the land and its native flora and fauna. Hundreds of thousands of these trees have been uprooted, cut down, or set on fire, all because they are such a potent symbol of Palestinian connectedness to the land, such a source of sustenance and income to the families who tended them across the generations.
Thus, the beautiful Palestinian “architecture without architects” of the villages and cities, the land’s age-old nature and relationship with those who cultivated and tended it, is constantly being disrupted and destroyed by Zionism. And to what end? To serve the Zionist aim of building a national identity and crafting a collective memory, rooted in a falsified narrative about the history of the land – “forging” a bond with it in the pejorative sense of the word, the artificiality of which bond is patently obvious.
No such labour-intensive efforts and desperate violence is needed for the land’s indigenous curators. Ask any Palestinian child above a certain age where they are from, they will probably say where they currently live and almost immediately give you the name of their original village. Bonds like that cannot be falsified or broken.
Zionism is swimming against a very strong tide of real memory, real belonging, real identity with land and place of origin.
Oct 14, 2022
October 2022: The JNF UK is pretty good at pushing out glossy, slick publicity. This JNF UK video needs to be watched to the end (it’s only 3 minutes long) to see the breathtakingly arrogant way they try to make us, living in the UK, complicit with their ambitions. Look at the final frames where a map of Palestine, from the river to the sea, is covered with the names of UK towns and cities, next to the caption “JNF UK is 100% Israel.”
But click here to see a Stop the JNF counterblast.
A recent similarly misleading advert can be seen here, suggesting that JNF is only about helping the needy, specifically those in the impoverished “south”. Of course, the JNF means Israeli Jewish people, not the indigenous Palestinians. Ironically, the name of the JNF campaign includes the words “Building Hope”. It should say “Destroying Palestinian lives.”
This article from +972 offers a response to this set of misleading boasts. It shows the weaponisation by the JNF of tree-planting, and exposes the close links between the JNF, the Israeli state and the military when it comes to ethnic cleansing – uprooting Palestinians and planting trees.
The Fundraising Regulatory body, which should ensure that charities do not mislead the public in their materials, has turned a blind eye to copious evidence of the JNF doing just that: pulling the wool over the eyes of the public. See here for details
Sep 12, 2022
September 2022: Parliamentary Members’ Interests record the disgraceful fact that Liz Truss has accepted £10k from Gary Mond as a donation to her election campaign. Given Mond’s Islamophobic pronouncements, he ought to be persona non grata, even within Tory circles.
Gary Mond is the Treasurer of JNF UK. His comments are not borderline racist, but fully blown hate-speech: As reported in the Jewish Chronicle, Mond posted a message saying “We just have to hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that all civilisation … is at war with these evil bastards (sic) , and I have to say it, at war with Islam.”
Truss – or at least her advisers – must have known about this yet felt no twinge of conscience when she took £10k from him – no comment needed from us.
Mond was not alone in the JNF UK for being exposed as an Islamophobe. Samuel Hayek, the JNF UK Chairman, was also revealed as sharing Mond’s position. “Our problem in the West is that we do not understand Islam. In Islam there is not a term for ‘peace.’ “
Members of the Board of Deputies called for Hayek’s resignation following his observations. Representatives of Reform, Liberal, United and Masorti communities, plus the Union of Jewish Students said they would advise their organisations to have nothing to do with JNF UK while Hayek is in post.
So, in response to severe criticisms within what were his own circles, Mond has resigned from the Board of Deputies (or was he pushed out?) and waltzed off to establish a new organisation (The National Jewish Assembly) because the Board of Deputies is too “left-leaning” in his view and the silent majority are not being heard !
How did JNF UK as an organisation react to the Chair and Treasurer being so exposed and denounced? Silence….silence so profound that the Board of Deputies passed a censure motion against the JNF UK because it had not been “explicit in condemnation” of such racist remarks.
And what of the Charity Commission? Having launched investigations into JNF UK Trustees, Hayek and Mond, back in February, we seem to have no resolution yet to their enquiries into the very top level of the charity.
But the crucial point is this: Hayek and Mond are not just “rotten apples” in an otherwise sound barrel. The JNF, from its inception in 1901 to today is a racist organisation, from top to bottom, dedicated to removing Palestinians from their land and converting Palestine into a Zionist state.
Apr 20, 2022
In 2005, the Charity Commission visited the JNF UK and held a “Review” of the operation of the charity. It makes for interesting reading, especially the sections where very clear advice was given to the JNF UK which is still not being followed today. See here. JNF review visit 2005[7169] (1)
