Zionism: “forging” a bond with the land.

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.

JNF’s Slick (or should that be sick?) Publicity

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

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 19th 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 19th 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.