Feb 8, 2023
It seems the case to some observers that the Israeli state has increasing recourse to naked violence in seizing Palestinian land either via settlers with the support of the Israeli military or utilising the military itself through declaring areas as required for its Firing Zones or for what are called “security reasons.” To what extent is this overt and unashamed violence a new development?
We’ve grown used to the claims of the JNF that it’s taking over of Palestinian land is to regenerate the land by planting trees or building reservoirs in desert areas. The JNF was for many decades the public face of Zionist colonisation, but it was never the whole story as an article by Professor Zachary Lockman of New York University written as long ago as 2012 makes clear. He argued that the apparently more ‘pacific’ nature of Labour Zionism and the JNF – seizing land and control of the labour market by economic means – was essentially just the result of a tactical decision, forced on it in the period when the Zionists did not control state power in ways they did later. Once they had that control, the violence implicit in the essential project could be unleashed (though they still had to consider international pressures.)
Today, there remains for the Zionist state, notwithstanding that it now has a monopoly of state violence, the problem of maintaining control over the land mass that they covet. For this they want the Jewish population to spread out more widely and break up Palestinian population concentrations. (See Allegra and Maggor, Political Geography 2022.)
As alluded to above, one method of doing this – and an area of JNF activity over the years – is the confiscation of Palestinian land for national parks, forests, and so on at the same time as the army has “needed” firing ranges where Palestinians happen to be living or raising their animals, but the other major method it seems, is by housing development or what the two academics call “metropolitanization”. While the JNF’s land seizures continue to be presented in Israeli propaganda as limited to agricultural and environmental development, some of the land under its control and its environmental projects are used for the Israeli state’s housing development schemes on Palestinian land. JNF publicity boasts of creating “open public spaces and gardens for urbanites to improve their quality of life and well-being.”
A major form of Jewish colonisation of the West Bank, in terms of population transfer, has been by the expansion of settlements serving as suburbs mainly for Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. This is a bonanza for private developers in neoliberal Israel but also draws a wide section of the Israeli population into supporting further colonisation by making available cheaper housing to them (subsidised by the state).
So, it’s not just a few Zionist fanatics who are driving this process – claiming ownership of certain archaeological sites or asserting fundamentalist readings of their holy texts as justification for throwing Palestinians out of their homes or attacking Palestinian farmers, chasing off their animals and destroying their crops. Different social groups are being coaxed into acting as state operatives, consciously or unconsciously, in the new housing developments.
What this has meant is that kindly-disposed, liberal Israelis, who are apparently merely seeking a family home that they can afford, have been given a vested interest in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the state apparatus, whether in post-48 Israel or the West Bank.
Might this be another reason why each Israeli government is more right-wing than the last and the armed forces of the state are increasingly brutal in a whole range of circumstances where Palestinians are concerned?
Feb 8, 2023
Our partners in Palestine work with farmers on the ground to identify the best strategic locations for tree planting which both support those battling to hold on to their land by cultivating it and specify the most ecologically suitable trees/plants for that area: usually olives or vines are chosen, depending on the circumstances.
Our latest contribution: We recently sent £2000 across to Palestine to secure olives and vines. This sum has been generated over a period of time and one particular event hosted by a Palestinian hotelier raised over £1000 pounds.
Plant a Tree as a Gift: This aspect of the campaign was launched over Christmas but is equally valid all year round. We encourage people to make their donation as a special present for someone, (£5 per planted tree). Gift donations receive a certificate which can be passed to the person in whose name the donation was made. The launch of the Plant a Tree as a Gift raised over £900. This is currently held in reserve towards our next planting project, Masafer Yatta.
Plant a Tree: Next Funding Target
Masafer Yatta: The situation in Masafer Yatta is rightly causing international outrage: another “Firing Zone” initiated; another round of ethnic cleansing as a prelude to replacing the indigenous population with illegal settlers.
The background to this forcible eviction is here on our website, as is the story of Hajjah Fatima al Huraini . We celebrate the fortitude of people like Hajjah Fatimah of Masafer Yatta. She survived the Nakba and remained committed to the nurturing of Palestinian life on the land until her death. Her descendants have given us permission to share her story and – around her central narrative – we have built a contextual frame, showing how she is emblematic of so many Palestinians who will not surrender their legitimate claims to their homeland.
- Download the leaflet here or get in touch to ask for some copies to be sent to your group.
- For more information and to make a donation see this page.
- Date for your Diary: March 30th, Land Day. We aim to stage a fund-raising webinar on this special day.
Feb 8, 2023
An initiative of Stop the JNF (Britain), Middle East Children’s Alliance (USA) and Stop the Wall (Palestine), Plant a Tree was re-launched after lockdown as a campaign that encourages international supporters, both individuals and organisations, to donate funds to enable Palestinian farmers to buy and plant trees in the occupied West Bank.
There are many projects encouraging tree planting in Palestine – so why is Stop the JNF involved in another?
Tree planting in Palestine is political. In the hands of the Palestinians it is an act of resistance to the occupation of the West Bank and the settler colonisation of Palestine. Trees, whether vines, olives, almonds or any other indigenous woody perennials that are cultivated for their produce, enable Palestinians to have a permanent occupation of their land in defiance of the Zionist colonisers’ acts of eviction and ethnic cleansing. That is why trees are targeted by settlers and subject to vandalism – uprooted, burned, poisoned and damaged as part of the persecution of Palestinians. And Palestinians re-plant, cultivate and reclaim their land as resistance. Plant a Tree helps support this material form of Palestinian resistance.
Tree planting in Palestine is also political when carried out by the Jewish National Fund.
Throughout its history, the JNF has planted trees in Palestine as part of its project of ethnic cleansing, to erect barriers, ‘Judaise’ the landscape, displace Palestinian communities, prevent refugees returning, erase depopulated villages and generally greenwash the crimes of colonisation. These trees have often been alien species and ecologically damaging. Moreover, the JNF has used tree planting as a propaganda tool to promote Zionist ideology amongst international Jewish communities who are encouraged to donate to the colonial enterprise, and through the duplicitous naming of their Parks and Forests: British Park; Coretta Scott King Forest; Canada Park; Ambassadors’ Forest.
- By supporting Palestinians planting and cultivating indigenous trees, Stop the JNF is exposing the JNF propaganda as greenwash for ethnic cleansing.
- Internationally, Plant a Tree provides the opportunity to support Palestinian resistance materially and politically.
- It is attractive to solidarity activists as well as to environmentalists, gardeners, horticulturalists and farmers.
- It provides an alternative to the JNF for concerned Jewish citizens and an opportunity for people of good will everywhere to stand in solidarity with Palestinian grassroots resistance.
Jan 5, 2023
Posted January 2023
In this article, Manal Shqair provides an account of the brutalization of the Jordan Valley by Israeli settler-shepherds who, along with the violent Hilltop Youth and the Israeli military, are ranged against pastoral Palestinian communities
The paper was originally published in the journal “Transactions of the JNF” . Read the full text here.
Oct 14, 2022
When the JNF was formed 121 years ago it was the heyday of colonialism. Taking land from non-white people to put in the hands of European colonisers was widely considered to be part of the march of progress. And among liberals, settler colonialism was the most effective way of spreading the benefits of Western enlightenment. The ‘natural overflow of nationality,’ as J.A. Hobson called it, had as its corollary the removal and, in several cases, the extermination of the indigenous people who resisted such “progress”. Support for colonialism was by the early part of the 20th century adopted in socialist circles, too, including by the Labour Zionists, who developed a range of ideological currents through different syntheses of Jewish nationalism and socialist ideas. It was Labour Zionist propaganda abroad which propagated the Zionist movement’s acquisition of land through the JNF as laying the basis for co-operative forms of agriculture. In reality, the kibbutzim, were a way of forming exclusively Jewish settlements, which resulted in 150,000 Palestinian tenant farmers being pushed off the land over the four decades prior to the expulsions during the Naqba. In the urban sector, it was the Histadrut, the Zionist trade union federation, that played the role of stifling Palestinian economic activity, by barring the employment of Palestinian workers wherever it could.
Settlement is central to Zionist ideology and the JNF has been key to facilitating it. All the other elements that have formed Zionism into a political force: the backing of the imperial powers and capitalist investors, the racism and violence directed at the Palestinians, the ethnic nationalism and religious fanaticism and the apartheid system under Israeli rule, have their own momentum but they are ultimately governed by the overall objective of extending Jewish settlement in Palestine. Settler colonialism’s specific dynamic is to consolidate itself in the face of the indigenous people’s resistance, the elimination of which it seeks either by assimilation, expulsion, segregation, genocide or by combinations of all these. This reflects in Israel’s sense of permanent insecurity which fuels its constant incitement against the indigenous people. The fear of reverse colonisation has haunted colonial powers since the end of the 19th century and manifests itself in Israel’s obsessive militarisation.
At the end of 2021, Samuel Hayek, chairperson of JNF UK, echoed the Great Replacement argument that far right circles have been peddling for the past ten years but which has several earlier incarnations. It claims that white people face the threat of extinction by being overwhelmed by Muslim immigration. According to Hayek, this was making Britain unsafe “for Jews” though he could just as well have said “for whites,” it was unmistakeably the same argument. For the Board of Jewish Deputies and the Union of Jewish Students, Hayek’s statement was unacceptable. The wicked man was throwing away their dummy. Their support for the JNF had been carefully nurtured over the years on the pretence that the JNF’s purpose is to make Israel’s desert bloom through afforestation, nature reserves and other environmental projects. They were only too happy to ignore that the JNF largely controls Israel’s land allocation and owns much of the land the state claims – all seized from Palestinians. From its inception, in 1901, the JNF’s mission has been to transfer land from Palestinians to Jewish immigrants. There should be no confusion. As Mahmoud Mamdani points out: “Settlers are made by conquest, not just by immigration. Settlers are kept settlers by a form of state that makes a distinction – particularly juridical – between conquerors and conquered and isolate the conquered politically”. The JNF is integral to the Israeli state as an instrument of conquest, displacing Palestinians and replacing them with settlers. Little wonder that the head of its UK branch is an advocate of the Great Replacement. The JNF has been practising it in Palestine for 121 years.
Oct 14, 2022
The year was 2015 and in the Library Theatre Sheffield, near the more famous Crucible, we had watched a short play about the “conflict” in historic Palestine. Indeed, one of the actors was a member of “Breaking the Silence” and he joined three other panellists on stage for an after-show discussion of the issues that the work had thrown up. One of the contributors was a prominent member of the local PSC group, invited, presumably, to achieve “balance”.
The master of ceremonies invited a panellist to comment on a question from the audience. She was described as a long-standing anti-racist and active campaigner in the town since the days of the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 80s – obviously, someone whose commitment had stood the test of time and whose presence in the discussion was clearly merited.
She opened with the comment, “I am an anti-racist and a Zionist,” and proceeded to give her opinion of the play we had witnessed. I was taken aback, firstly by the words themselves and secondly by the lack of response from the audience. The speaker had clearly felt that she was not saying anything very controversial in the self-designation and most of the audience seemed to acquiesce to her assumption that her statement did not contain a contradiction – that it wasn’t a comment along the lines of, “I am not a racist but I don’t like people with black or brown skin.”
I raised my hand to make a comment. The MC invited me to speak and I hoped that the anger I was feeling did not render what I had to say incoherent or that the constriction across my chest did not cause me to collapse amidst incoherent spluttering. Zionism was the wrong answer to the right question, I said. A flight from the issue of antisemitism rather than any attempt to tackle it. And what about the Palestinians? What were they meant to do while the land on which they and their ancestors had been living for millennia was secured for people who were to be defined along a different religious/ethnic line and whose sole claim to it rested on a literalist reading of a religious text?
This is what I think I said, but who knows? I was so agitated by what I had heard. But the disturbance was not over. A Jewish friend of mine explained to me that the speaker on the stage was a friend of his who probably just meant that she supported the idea of a Jewish homeland. The implication was that surely, I could understand that, though what it required of me was to imagine this Jewish homeland by erasing the Palestinian presence, precisely as Zionism does.
Perhaps this explains how “soft Zionism” gets away with it. It requires a species of sentimental non-thought: irrationality with a hint of Klezmer, consisting of generalisations that are never examined, assumptions never challenged, the refusal to think through what “redeeming the land” means, the overlooking of the ethnic cleansing that Zionism has been attempting to accomplish for 125 years in plain sight, the labyrinth of the Israeli legal system designed to obscure a process established to dispossess and discourage – all these characteristics must be glossed over because Zionism is accepted as a reasonable response to antisemitism. The trouble is Zionism wasn’t ever just about settling; that’s another reason the word “settlements” just won’t do. It was always about replacing. That’s why the Palestinians had to go and why the JNF is still involved in making them go, by whatever means it can turn its hand to.
Herzl’s conclusion is the starting point and the endpoint. Antisemitism is the inevitable characteristic of the goyim, so Zionism must become the Jewish response. That’s it! No question.
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