Jul 11, 2023
FoE Scotland’s 2023 motion at the AGM to support Palestinian land rights by engaging with the Plant a Tree passed unanimously. The motion noted that this campaign is “supporting indigenous, sustainable, farmer-led tree-planting in order to support Palestinians in areas under attack from settler and Israeli military violence, to remain, steadfast, on their lands and resist the settler colonisation of their lands.”
This move is timely. Israeli settlers, all of them living illegally on occupied Palestinian land, are habitually carrying out pogroms against Palestinian farmers and village communities: Plant a Tree offers practical support and political solidarity.
During these attacks, the Israeli Occupation Forces either stand back and support the outrages – or they protect the settlers. These settlers’ attacks are nothing new but are an intensification of established practices and policies of making life unbearable for Palestinians on the land – in reality the settlers are agents of the government’s drive to take Palestinian land by uprooting Palestinian people– an age-old Zionist tactic of erasure of the indigenous people.
Stop the JNF applauds Friends of the Earth Scotland for this decision and urges other FoE and environmental groups to follow suit by taking this practical step to show solidarity with the men and women of the land of Palestine.
Just as we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people resisting Zionist colonisation, so we extend solidarity to all peoples fighting for environmental justice as supported by our Friends of the Earth comrades. (The full text of the FoE Scotland motion is below).
Background: Friends of the Earth International and Friends of the Earth Scotland have a distinguished history of supporting Palestinian land rights:
In 2012, an International Friends of the Earth delegation led to the publication of “Environmental Nakba: Environmental injustice and violations of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” This report documents some of the environmental injustice, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing that the delegation observed across historic Palestine.
In 2020, the AGM of FoE Scotland overwhelmingly supported a motion in advance of COP 26 which threw a spotlight on the glaring error of allowing the JNF/KKL to have observer status in this important environmental conference. Friends of the Earth Scotland’s resolution that year (“Stop the JNF Greenwashing Ethnic Cleansing”) recognised that the JNF played a major role in the colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine from its inception in 1901 to this day.
As well as challenging JNF’s observer status at COP 26, FoE Scotland committed itself to offer support to the Sumarin family who face eviction at the hands of Himnuta, a JNF proxy, and to call on MPs to sign EDM 529 in support of the family. The organisation also agreed to support a future challenge to the charitable status of the KKL in Scotland.
Full text of the 2023 FoE Scotland Resolution:
Friends of the Earth Scotland notes that:
2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Palestine Nakba (catastrophe), when Zionist militia, empowered by the Balfour declaration and trained and supported by British mandate administration, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their lands in a project of ethnic cleansing in order to control the ecological resources of Palestine free of its indigenous population;
The Nakba (catastrophe) of ethnic cleansing has continued, not least through environmental degradation of Palestinian land and water by settler colonisation, which has been documented by Friends of the Earth Palestine and International;
The Jewish National Fund has played a key role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for over 100 years, but today presents itself as an environmental organisation, including through its subsidiary branch JNF/KKL Scotland, registered as an environmental charity in Scotland;
The Stop the JNF Plant a Tree in Palestine campaign is supporting indigenous, sustainable, farmer-led tree-planting in order to support Palestinians in areas under attack from settler and Israeli military violence, to remain, steadfast, on their lands and resist the settler colonisation of their lands.
Therefore, FoES agrees to:
Support and promote the Stop the JNF Plant a Tree in Palestine campaign.
Nov 7, 2022
This year, we’ve seen the climate crisis wreak havoc across the world. From record-level extreme heat, forest fires, to flooding and droughts – we’ve seen that the climate catastrophe is here and ongoing. 2022 has demonstrated once again that those who contributed the least to the crisis suffer the most.
As the IPCC has recognised, colonialism – which devastates ecosystems, and exploits and destroys land and resources – was, and continues to be, a key driver of the crisis.
There is a gap between recognising the problems and taking decisive action.
Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid, has destroyed Palestine’s environment, pillaged its natural resources, and left Palestinians without the control over, or access to, their land and resources necessary to mitigate and adapt to the effects of the climate crisis. The Jewish National Fund has always been a key instrument in the settler colonisation of Palestinian land, expropriation of Palestinian resources, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, yet the JNF has observer status with the UNFCCC and regularly accompanies the Israeli government at COP meetings.
Indigenous and global majority movements, in Palestine and beyond, are leading the struggle for justice. In advance of COP27 in Egypt, the Stop the JNF Campaign joins movements across the world in demanding climate justice – for rich countries to pay their climate debts and reparations, and for an urgent and just transition to renewable energy.
Specifically, the Stop the JNF campaign amplifies calls for:
- A people-led overhaul of the negotiations, rejecting its narrow corporate agenda.
- For organisations and corporations that profit from ecological destruction to be held accountable – including Siemens and Chevron, who are both engaged in fossil gas projects with Israel.
- The removal of the racist Jewish National Fund from observer status to the UNFCCC.
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 7, 2021
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.
May 15, 2011
Stop the JNF Campaign announcement
15 May 2011
On this 63rd commemoration of the catastrophe which is marked by the foundation of an Israeli state in Palestine, the will of the Palestinian people to resist occupation and expulsion is steadfast.
Demonstrations demanding an end to apartheid and ethnic cleansing are occurring across occupied Palestine. Tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees now living in Lebanon,Syria and the open air prison which is Gaza marched toward the boarders that separate them from each other and from their places of origin; they were repelled with Israelimilitary force and many have died.
In honor of this day, and the ongoing struggle it represents, the campaign to Stop the JNF shares therelease of the e-book Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up and announces the Plant-a-Tree in Palestine project.
Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up
The book, Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up, is available free on line. It documents evidence that the JNF is not an environmental organization but rather an instrument of ethnic cleansing and complicit in war crimes. Contributors are from the USA, UK, Canada and Palestine, with an afterward by American writer and environmental activist Joel Kovel. In the book, Akram Salhab describes the environmental disaster by the JNF’s draining of Lake Hula and Corey Balsam analyses the ideological role of tree planting. David Schwartzman makes the connection between the JNF, the siege of Gaza and climate security, while Coya White Hat-Artichoker, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, contributes a speech on First Nations-Palestinian solidarity.
One of the contributors, Eurig Scandrett of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh said:
“The book is a contribution to making people aware of the real nature of this organization, which plants trees and establishes nature parks and pretends to be environmental, but infact exists for more insidious purposes – to drive the Palestinians from their homes and prevent them from returning.”
Dan Glass, environmentalist and member of IJAN said: “It is important to name and shame the JNF for what it is – a racist organization which plants trees on illegal settlements to hide the war crimes of the Zionist militias and Israeli army. They do not represent Jews or environmentalists and we will continue to blow their cover.”
The 4th JNF e-book Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up, is published by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN).
Launch of the Plant-a-Tree in Palestine Project
We are pleased to announce a joint project of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop the Wall), the Palestinian Farmers Union, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
Please honor the 2011 commemoration of the Nakba by planting a tree in Palestine.
The project is part of the Stop the JNF campaign. It is not possible to replace what is lost when people are displaced, land and a way of life is destroyed, 1,000 year old olive trees uprooted. In Palestine scores of 2,000-year-old cities and historical sites are buried under JNF planted forests and parks. Rebuilding and replanting are acts of daily resistance in Palestine.
This project seeks to support the on-going struggle ofPalestinians to sustain and rebuild their land by providing resources for villages to plant trees that are indigenous to Palestine’s natural environment and agricultural life.
Mar 22, 2011
Stop the JNF Campaign announcement
22 March 2011
The Palestinian BDS National Committee has called for a Global Day of Action to commemorate Palestinian Land Day.
On March 30, 2011, join the international campaign to Stop the Jewish National Fund.
Palestinian Land Day is the annual commemoration of the 1976 general strike and marches against massive land expropriation by Israel in which six Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were jailed and wounded.Since then it has been a day to recall many decades of Palestinian resistance to historic and on-going displacement and dispossession.
A key pillar of the colonization of Palestine – from the founding of the State of Israel to the present – has been the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (KKL), commonly known in English as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF enjoys charity status in over 50 countries. This is despite its role in the on-going displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land, the theft of their property, the funding of historic and present-day colonies, and the destruction of the natural environment.
Join the campaign to Stop the JNF. The campaign is already underway in Britain, Canada, France and the US, and challenges to the JNF continue across Palestine, including in Israel.
To join the campaign:
- Sign your organization to the international call
- Include the JNF in your BDS and Palestine solidarity work
- Bring the campaign to your city or region
- Tell us about your activity at info@stopthejnf.org
The campaign to challenge the JNF will launch on Land Day 2011. As part of the global movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and until such time as the State of Israel respects and implements international law, we call on global civil society to join in a campaign to challenge the JNF.
