From Stealing Land to Funding Vigilantes: Charity JNF style

Mar 25, 2022

The Jewish National Fund carefully cultivates the image of a benign organisation that acts as a steward of the land and a protector of the environment. In reality, it’s a landholding company that acquired most of its properties through force. The entire history of the JNF is bound up with the objective of the Zionist movement to drive the Palestinians off their land in order to replace them with Jewish settlers.

In Palestine, in the early 19^th century and between the two world wars, under British rule, this was carried out mainly by buying up land from absentee landlords.  Yet even these early land purchases were rarely the simple exchanging of money for land.  The Palestinian tenants were evicted with whatever physical force was required and the settlers who acquired the land either relied on the Ottoman and, later, the British authorities to enforce their purchase, or they took matters into their own hands. Recalling the development of Rosh Pina, an early Jewish settlement in Eastern Galilee, a Zionist activist, Yitzhak Epstein, wrote in 1907: “…if we do not wish to deceive ourselves, we can certainly admit that we have thrown poor people out of their derelict homes and taken away their livelihood. …To this day the lament rings in my ears, the weeping Arab women on the day their families left the village of Ja’uni, which is Rosh Pina, to go and settle in the Hauran, which lies beyond the Jordan River to the east.” 

Ygael Gluckstein (later known in the UK as Tony Cliff), recalled how, in 1944, four kibbutzim got together “to oust the Arabs from the villages which were on land the Jewish National Fund had bought from Arab landlords.  They therefore formed a long phalanx at the foot of the hill, picked up stones as they climbed up and threw them at the Arabs on the other side…  They fled in fear and the Zionists took over the whole hill.”   The colonisation and accompanying violence in Mandate Palestine was generally on a small scale, though it often secured strategically significant land. Yet prior to the Nakba, the Zionist movement had gained control of only 7 per cent of Palestine’s agricultural land.  It was the 1948 Nakba, that enabled the Zionist movement to take over most of Palestine.  The ownership and management of the conquered land was passed to the JNF and to the Israel Land Authority, of which half the board members are to this day JNF nominees. 

Once Israel was established, Israel turned to preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their land, in a “war on returnees”. Of the Palestinians who remained, many were removed by Israel on the grounds of “security needs” or development plans. Since 1967, similar pretexts have been used in the West Bank, to facilitate Jewish settlement expansion.

A recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs points to a year-by-year escalation in Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. In “the first 10 months of 2021”, its officials reported late last year, “there have been 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinians (302 against property and 108 against individuals). Four Palestinians were killed by settlers this year. In 2020, there was a total of 358 recorded attacks. In 2019, there were 335 such attacks.  These settler attacks are primarily directed against rural Palestinian families living on small farms or in villages and towns in the occupied West Bank located in close proximity to Israeli settlements.” Israel/OPT: UN experts warn of rising levels of Israeli settler violence in a climate of impunity – occupied Palestinian territory | ReliefWeb 

The settler attacks are an integral part of Israeli state policy. A B’Tselem report (State Business, November 2021) notes: “the state has misappropriated land from Palestinian shepherding and farming communities in the West Bank through systemic, ongoing violence perpetrated by the settlers living near them, with the full support of state authorities”. About 50 of the 150 settler outposts in the West Bank are farms, all of them illegal in international and even in Israeli law. A report describing the activities of one such farm near Batir, noted: “Farms are considered ‘cost-efficient’ outposts as they mostly consist of one family, a herd of sheep, and volunteers to help herd and guard. The herding is often used to enlarge the outpost’s territory – pushing out Palestinians whose herds grazed the same area before the new outposts popped up”. (Ha’aretz,17 March 2022)  

This is eerily reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing carried out by 19^th century settler colonialism. In South Africa, “…the Boers were in the habit of extending their territory by simply herding their cattle into native territory, destroying native gardens and taking over native lands”. (John Bodley, Victims of Progress, p.30) This is not the only parallel.  Settlers at the frontiers of their expansion equip themselves with firearms.  In the West Bank, settler outposts have their own groups of vigilantes though they can also call on help from the Israeli army and police.

The Israeli state, to pre-empt international criticism, disavows any role in the settlers’ violence against Palestinians even as it facilitates it. This tactic of dissimulating the state’s outsourcing the most egregious colonial practices also has precedents. On the British state’s colonisation of land in Queensland, Australia, Mark Levene writes: “It is a paradox that the frontier became a more vicious place after the Crown withdrew its army from frontier operations in 1838, insisting instead that the Australian colonies organise their own border patrols to deal with aboriginal disturbances. By exterminating the natives not at one remove, but twice-removed, while at the same time making it invisible, Queensland effectively gave to the Colonial Office in London freedom to claim that such behaviour had nothing to do with official native policy but was the result of rogue administrators, in subordinate junior police officers or unruly settlers.” (The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, p.76).  Although the Israeli army has not withdrawn from the West Bank and participates in some settler attacks on Palestinians, like the British in Queensland, it allows the settlers the space to roam freely, enabling them to attack Palestinian farmers, their livestock, orchards and agricultural equipment. The army subsequently denies any knowledge of these activities.

Of the thousands of acres of land in the West Bank that have been confiscated from Palestinians, Human Rights organisation B’Tselem in Settler Violence=State Violence, notes that some were seized “using official means: issuing military orders, declaring the area ‘state land,’ a ‘firing zone’ or a ‘nature reserve,’ and expropriating land. Other areas have been effectively taken over by settlers through daily acts of violence, including attacks on Palestinians and their property.” While these appear to be two different approaches, they are, in reality, one. B’Tselem points out: “Settler violence against Palestinians is part of the strategy employed by Israel’s apartheid regime, which seeks to take over more and more West Bank land.”

Reflecting the overall drift to the far right in Israeli politics, the JNF-KKL has come to directly funding the most radical wing of the settler movement, which is currently behind the most aggressive expansionism in East Jerusalem and the West Bank..  Aligned with this is the JNF UK’s support for several pre-army academies: Derech Eretz, Naveh-Otzem, Ein Prat, Or Me’Ophir, Nachson, Meitarim Lachishand and Hashomer Hachadas.  These academies publicise themselves as providing military training programmes for those aspiring to reach officer rank in the Israeli army. The geographical location of several of them suggests that they are turning out vigilantes for the settler movement who, with the connivance of the Israeli military, are behind the growing number of attacks on Palestinians and their farms. 

Getting to Know the JNF.

Mar 25, 2022

The role of the JNF in the establishment of the state of Israel and in its conduct after that is something that is neither well known nor understood. We are more used to thinking that the Government of the State of Israel is responsible, quite straightforwardly, for most of the injustices that Palestinians suffer. In many instances this is true, but in some it is not. The KKL/JNF has performed a role for the state apparatus that we don’t really have an equivalent for in the UK.*

It has been called a “parastatal” body, obviously not an official governmental department in itself but with some of the powers and, crucially, none of the international responsibilities of a state. So, when the UN passed resolution 194 in 1948, giving the Palestinian refugees the right of return to their lands after they had been chased out by the Jewish militias, the KKL was an extremely useful receptacle for those lands – ostensibly a private body, not part of the state apparatus and, therefore, not responsible for carrying out its international duties. And since the KKL was committed only to furthering the interests of the Jewish population with regard to owning and leasing land, Palestinians could not possibly be allowed to return to such land – even the ones living within the 1948 borders, a few miles away from their homes and farms.

Many Zionists in 1948 assumed that with the foundation of the state of Israel there was no longer a need for the Jewish National Fund. Indeed, it was seen as a potential source of conflict for the government of the fledgling state, too powerful to ignore and a source of a rival authority to the government itself. Ironically, it was “saved” by the United Nations Resolution cited above, which enabled the Israeli state to sidestep the resolution without appearing, as a member state, to be doing so. It did this by “selling” the land to a new owner – the Jewish National Fund, but as Shlomo Sand wrote: “…when will the Jewish National Fund… return the 130,000 hectares of “absentee” lands that were sold to it by the state for a symbolic amount…?” (The Invention of the Jewish People. P312.)

Just how the JNF operates is not obvious to people living in a state that is not involved in “…ceding state sovereignty…and entered into Covenants vesting its (the state’s) responsibilities with organizations such as …the Jewish National Fund which are constitutionally committed to serving and promoting the interests of Jews and Jews alone.” (Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel. P48)

*It could be argued that the extensive privatisation that many states, including the UK, have carried out in the last 40 years has attempted to provide just such a mechanism for denying state responsibility for myriad services and facilities by establishing  buffer organisations that can be held responsible without being held to be properly accountable.

JNF: Remaking the Map of Palestine.

Mar 25, 2022

On 23^rd September 1980, in Derry, a new play opened in the Guildhall. Nothing remarkable there you might think, except that a military helicopter was flying overhead, and the audience in this occupied city had to run a tight security gauntlet.

The play was “Translations” by Brian Friel of the Field Day Theatre Company. The historical setting was the English cartographical expedition of 1822-42. This military mission was disguised as a benign operation, clarifying and transcribing Gaelic names into the English language. Carried out by soldiers with some local support, the process signalled an approach to colonialism that reached far deeper than military conquest alone into the realms of language and identity; as one character in the play remarked, “It’s a kind of eviction.”

This word, replete with historical resonance in Ireland, exposes the politicisation of cartography by imperial forces, the erasure of historic names with their cultural associations, and the imposition of the stamp of imperial ownership, a claiming of the land by linguistic means.

As the medieval linguist Antonio de Nebrija said, “Language has always been the perfect instrument of empire”.

Scroll forward to Kuwait, 2022. Dr Salman Abu Sitta, who knows full well the operations of empire, sits at his desk mapping his homeland, reclaiming it from Zionist settler colonialism, reasserting the Palestinian past and – we trust – prefiguring its future.

Dr Salman’s latest venture, adding to the magisterial “Atlas of Palestine” he has already produced, is the mapping of JNF Parks and Forests: – 46 of the 68 “leisure” facilities of the JNF lie over ethnically cleansed Palestinian land. Salman patiently peels away the layers of Zionist colonial impositions on Palestine, and, with no great drama, resists the attempted erasure of Palestine from the river to the sea by Israel and its leading agent, the JNF. Names are restored to their original, legitimate form.

Cartography, like archaeology, has been subordinated in Israel to the Zionist imperative of wiping Palestinians off the map, both literally and figuratively. A recent book, “Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Villages of 1948” by Noga Kadman, offers insights into this little publicised aspect of the JNF’s work.

Maps of Palestine published by the British Mandatory authority showed thousands of Arabic names for communities and geographical locations. A tiny percentage (5%) were in Hebrew; some of these Hebrew names were ancient, some ascribed to new Jewish communities by the Jewish National Fund Naming Committee, founded in 1925. When the new state was formed in 1948, these Hebrew names were vastly outnumbered by original Arabic ones. Ben Gurion said of these names: “We must remove the Arabic names due to political considerations; just as we do not recognise the political ownership of Arabs over the land, we do not recognise their spiritual ownership and their names.”

From this point, the process of re-naming Palestine began, an exercise in colonial power and an assertion of ownership, as in Ireland, deracinating (or trying to deracinate) the people from their homeland. The work involved was carried out by a sequence of groups like the Negev (sic) Committee, established in 1949. Ben Gurion called the process the removal of “the infamy of alienage and foreign tongues…. Liberating the Negev from foreign rule.” The committee’s remit later expanded beyond the confines of the Naqab. 

Later, in 1951, the JNF’s Naming Committee and the Negev Committee merged to form the Government Names Committee, which is active to this day, still with JNF involvement. The ideology of this committee is to “revive” Hebrew names in an attempt to assert a right to the land, a “right” rooted in a remote past, connecting new immigrants to the land by obliterating evidence of Palestinian ownership of the land across millennia.

The committee tried first to find ancient Jewish connections in Arabic names and then to “revive” these. Where this proved impossible, the Arabic was Judaized or transliterated to make it sound Hebrew, foisting a false identity on the landscape. Thus, Tall Abu Huraya (named after one of the Prophet’s companions) was changed to Tel Haror – a name with no Hebrew meaning, but with a Hebraic phonology. 

Other strategies were adopted to eradicate the Arabic identity of the land; new Jewish communities were linked with biblical names or names alluding to the Zionist war against the British, symbolic names hinting at redemption, the ingathering of Jewish people, or names of Israeli heroes. 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).

And so it continued. The Nakba villages were, of course, problematic.  Those villages which fell in the Nakba and were settled by Jewish people had to have their names Judaized. But the names of demolished villages were a problem. Some urged that they should not appear on any map at all, until they were settled by Jews, at which point they would be renamed. Eventually it was agreed to assign Hebrew names to Palestinian villages which absolutely needed to appear on the map.

Noga Kadmon tells us that the majority of depopulated Palestinian villages (302) were never assigned an official name in Israel; they were wiped off the map. Of the 116 that were named on maps, 69 were given names indicative of their ruined status, ignoring the cause of their ruination. For instance, Kudna under British Park was labelled ‘Iyei Kidon, (“Iyei” indicates ruins). Only 13 retained the original Arabic name.

These naming committees, still working today, with the JNF playing its usual role of Zionist agency, strive to consign the Arabic past to oblivion. In a manner analogous to the faux archaeology of the City of David theme park, Naming Committees have desperately dug about in history, seeking to leap over the Palestinian presence and connect today’s Zionist enterprise with a redemptive biblical/ancient past.

The effort of these bureaucratic committees is, indeed, to “redeem” – but, on a more significant level, it is increasingly impossible to rescue Israel from its settler colonial self, to drag the JNF from its fundamental racism and to salvage a scrap of decency from the ugliness and cruelty of the Zionist project.

Stop the JNF: Once More to the Charity Commission. March 9th 2022.

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.