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.
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
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.
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.
