It has long been apparent that the JNF is a pillar of Israeli Apartheid. These 2 short factsheets illustrate the development of the JNF’s role over time (Timeline) and, in the second factsheet, we note some observations and quotations; these further support the proposition that the JNF has significantly contributed to Israel’s system of cruel and inhuman apartheid.
January 2022:
The Charity Commission has announced that it will examine whether “regulatory action is required” in respect of the Jewish National Fund UK following Islamophobic statements by its longstanding head, Samuel Hayek. This coincides with the revelation that the Honorary Treasurer of the JNF UK, Gary Mond, had expressed support for Islamophobic statements in his social media postings. In the past, the Charity Commission has summarily dismissed calls to investigate the JNF’s funding for projects that, in clear violation of international law and the professed policy of successive British governments, have promoted the expansion of Jewish settlements and their armed vigilantes.
It is not Hayek’s and Mond’s repugnant views that make the JNF racist. Racism is integral to the JNF. It exists to promote the Israeli state’s policy of building Jewish ethnic supremacy in Israel and the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinians. As the Charity Commission turns its attention to the racism of JNF officials, Bedouin villagers in the Negev are resisting their dispossession by the JNF’s forest planting which its fundraising publicity, in this country, claims to be for environmental improvement. On 15th January, the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, reported: “Police disperse hundreds of protesters with stun grenades and tear gas, as Israel’s Negev erupts in protest over Jewish National Fund’s tree-planting on land used for agriculture by local Bedouin.” As an editorial of the same newspaper (13th January) stated: “Only the naive can believe that planting the trees near the Bedouin villages Mulada and Sawa area was meant to celebrate Tu Bishvat (Jewish Arbor Day) or to improve the ecological fabric of the Negev.” The JNF, through a front organisation called Himnuta, is also pressing to expel Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem. These land confiscations which will cause further bloodshed stem from Israel’s policy of concentrating the Palestinian population into ever smaller urban ghettos.
In an announcement last year, the JNF stated its intentions openly to acquire land across the Green Line, dispensing with the services of proxy agents and signalling an escalation of land confiscation from Palestinians.
The Charity Commission is a British government agency that approves the JNF UK’s fundraising as a charitable activity. However, the Commission far from ensuring that the JNF complies with charity laws and regulations has assisted the JNF to circumvent them. The Commission’s 2005 report on the JNF following its “review visit”, noted: “We recommended that the trustees review the JNFCT [JNF Charitable Trust] website and all other information they publish. They should try to ensure that such information refrains from indicating a moral/political support for the state of Israel, but rather explains the focus of the charitable activities currently being funded by the Trust”. The Commission did not demand that the JNF cease to fund projects that support the Israeli state but merely that it should describe them differently because “such language has arguably given ammunition to those wanting to question the legitimacy of the charity’s work”.
In 2018, that legitimacy was challenged by Kholoud Al Ajarma, a Palestinian woman. She was from a family that had lived in one of the seven villages that, in 1948, Zionist forces ethnically cleansed and were subsequently planted over by the JNF UK sponsored British Park to prevent the villagers’ return. The Commission was able to protect the JNF from scrutiny by successfully arguing at a First Tier Tribunal hearing that Ms Al Ajarma had no legal standing to challenge the Commission’s original decision to dismiss her case, which had called for the deregistration of the JNF UK as a charity. In a subsequent correspondence with a person querying the JNF’s charitable pretention, the Commission wrote: “In simple terms, the test for charitable status is a test of what an organisation was set up to do, not what it does in practice”. For a regulatory body that supposedly exists to monitor what charities do in practice, such an argument is risible. It is also untenable even on its own terms. The JNF is doing precisely what it was set up do and, by any standard definition of the term, it is not charitable. It promotes taking over Palestinian land to make it available exclusively for Jewish settlement. This is now widely acknowledged to be instrumental in the Palestinians’ ethnic cleansing.
Given the Commission’s track record, the outcome of its current inquiry into the JNF leadership’s racism can be safely predicted. It will recommend to the organisation how to revamp its tarnished image. What the Commission will not do is expose to the British public the JNF’s role in entrenching Israel’s system of apartheid. Like Humpty Dumpty, the JNF has had a fall. The Charity Commission can be counted on to help put it together again but it will be still racist.
The UK recognises the Israeli administered vaccinations. It does not recognise the vaccinations carried out by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, so key Palestinian environmentalists are effectively denied participation on COP 26.
Human Rights Watch showed that Israel operates Apartheid in the area that it controls. One of the discriminatory policies was with the Covid vaccinations. All adults in Israel were offered a jab and all the 600,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank were offered a jab but not the Palestinians.
This is in defiance of the Fourth Geneva rule that states that an occupying power must look after the health of the occupied population.
Instead of condemning this blatant discrimination commentators like the BBC congratulated Israel for its prompt vaccination program.
The UK recognises the Israeli administered vaccinations. It does not recognise the vaccinations carried out by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The result is that Palestinians will not be able to come to Cop 26.
However, organisations like the racist Jewish National Fund which has a record of complicity in Israeli Apartheid are able to attend.
The UK authorities favour the oppressor rather than the oppressed
We welcome the overwhelming vote by delegates at the UK Labour Party Annual Conference supporting the call for sanctions against Israel (a key demand of the Palestinian-led BDS campaign), citing reports identifying Israel as a state practising the crime of apartheid, and condemning the ongoing Nakba, attacks on Al Aqsa, forced evictions in East Jerusalem and the deadly assault on Gaza. Importantly, the resolution also recognises the right of Palestinians to return to their homes, a right enshrined in international law.
This vote should be seen in the context of long-term popular suspicion and disapproval of the policies of the State of Israel. The displays of solidarity in May this year are one illustration of the widespread hostility to the crimes of the state of Israel which exists across Britain and all of Europe.
Governments are at variance with their citizens on this issue. As long ago as 2003, the pattern was made clear when an EU foreign affairs spokesman apologised to Israel for the results of an opinion poll the EU itself commissioned and promised Israel that this public opinion would not be allowed to influence EU policy.
We await the Labour leadership’s response to the landmark Conference resolution.
Public opinion must be channelled into collective action, by raising the BDS campaign to yet higher levels and by holding Israel, and its para-statal arms, such as the racist JNF-KKL, the Jewish National Fund, to account under international law.
The KKL-JNF is a key pillar of Israeli apartheid. It is complicit in the historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Despite this, it continues to fundraise openly while holding charitable status in the UK and scores of other countries around the world. Stop the JNF UK calls on civil society bodies to demand this charitable status be stripped immediately, as a step towards holding it accountable for its complicity in the violation of the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights.
The Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network- Friends of Earth Palestine (PENGON-FoE Palestine) is a coordinating body among different Palestinian NGOs working in the field of the environment. It aims to serve Palestinian environmental issues by coordinating endeavours between the member organizations. The idea of establishing a network of Palestinian environmental organizations took root when a number of NGOs felt the urgent need to protect our environment and face the violations perpetrated on it.
PENGON leads environmental advocacy campaigns, working with people at the grassroots to make their voices heard and help them build their capacity to pursue their environmental rights, fighting together in the cause of environmental and social justice.
PENGON members conduct projects on various issues such as for environmental justice and against violations of rights, pursuing the equitable management of natural resources and sustainable development, advocating and lobbying for environmental research and gender equality.
One of the main campaigns organized by PENGON is the Climate Justice campaign that contributes to the strengthening of claims for justice in Palestine based on the vision of human rights, sovereignty, the fair and gender-just control over resources and full access to the decision-making processes. Our campaigns highlight the linkages between environmental issues and dimensions of equality, human rights, gender and sustainability. In addition, these issues promote debate and discussion on environmental sustainability and justice.
Although climate change is affecting the whole region, it seems that Palestine is more vulnerable than others due to the Israeli occupation and its colonial system of oppression and discrimination; Israel imposes on Palestinians a complex system of violations of human and environmental rights, built on a model of the subjugation of the people, land and natural resources of the indigenous people.
The Israeli occupation is the biggest non-environmental threat facing the Palestinians; it ignores the rights of sovereignty for Palestinians over their own natural resources; it controls and steals Palestinian water resources; it puts a whole series of restrictions on the development and adaptation of the Palestinian territories: all these steps undermine the resilience of Palestinians in the face of climate change.
At the same time, Israel portrays itself as the eco-friendly country par excellence, – pioneer in agricultural techniques such as drip-irrigation, in dairy farming, desert ecology, water management and solar energy – while practising environmental colonialism and eco-apartheid. It operates through different institutions that support Israeli state polices, including the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which proclaims itself to be a transnational environmental NGO, planting 250 million trees, building more than 210 reservoirs and dams, developing more than 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1000 parks and providing the infrastructure for more than 1000 communities throughout Israel.
Throughout, the JNF – helping to exile hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, their homes bulldozed to make way for Jewish settlement – bought large tracts of land from absentee landowners, evicted local Arab tenant farmers, uprooted the natural vegetation of olive, carob and pistachio trees and planted throughout the land, in place of indigenous arboreta, vast swaths of European Pinera (conifers) and eucalyptus trees.
Forests, parks and recreational facilities were strategically placed atop the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages, so that the fast-growing pines would erase the history of Palestinian existence and prevent refugees from ever returning to their homes. In addition, pine forests were planted to guard and expand settlements built on stolen land and, after 1967, to seize and divide Palestinian territory within East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
In Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we see how environmental devastation coincides with ethnic cleansing and how the former is used to deepen the latter.
The quest for climate justice in Palestine lies at the heart of the struggle to defend the land and the rights of the Palestinian people.
