Jul 9, 2021
The JNF is a pillar of Israeli apartheid and a militant component of the Zionist coalition hell bent on the ethnic cleansing of the entire land surface of Palestine. A key part of this project involves building forests to cover scenes of crimes past – massacres and expulsions of Palestinians from their homes and villages – within the greater ethnic cleansing crime-scene that is the State of Israel.
But JNF parks and forests do more than conceal this ethnic cleansing; for additional reasons, many deserve the attention of all those committed to justice, or, at least, who want to avoid being thought to be complicit in the JNF’s crimes.
By calling one park “British Park” the JNF seek to suggest that, somehow, British people endorse the massacre and dispossession of the Palestinians whose land was taken to provide it.
The JNF Coretta Scott King Forest appropriates the anti-racist legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.in the service of Israeli state-driven racism.
The JNF Rev. Bastiaan Ader Forest similarly dishonours the memory of one who made the ultimate sacrifice to fight state-enforced racial segregation in Europe.
The JNF names its parks and forests to send a message to Palestinians as well – that Israel violates them not only with the active support of our governments, which is generally true, but that this is with the agreement of their populations – although the pro-Israel lobby knows this is very far from the truth.
JNF British Park
The policy of naming scores of JNF parks after countries from South Africa to Canada is psychological warfare, a part of the Israeli campaign to crush and disperse the Palestinian people. Stop the JNF campaigns with those whose once-thriving communities were destroyed by Zionist militias that used execution squads and rape to drive out Palestinians, then employed fire and dynamite to burn and destroy homes to prevent them returning.
The JNF-UK (Hon. Patrons Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) funded the development of the British Park upon the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. An insolent sign at the entrance to the park – which remains Palestinian property – reads “British Park, A gift of the Jewish National Fund of Great Britain”. Their hubris reveals the JNF UK’s criminality, that it was previously in receipt of stolen lands of the Palestinian villages of Ajjur and Zakariyya. By their own admission the JNF UK have benefitted from the proceeds of this great crime – how can they gift what they hadn’t received? – and continues to violate the rights of the Palestinian refugees, who still have legal claim under international law to the land on which the British Park stands.
The razing to the ground of a civilian community and the pillage and onward sale of the property constitutes a war crime under international law. War crimes are not subject to the rules of legal limitation. The JNF UK, in common with its counterparts worldwide, is a criminal organization in its own right and as well as being part of the larger international JNF.
JNF Coretta Scott King Forest
In addition to naming their parks after countries, the JNF covers the scenes of some Israeli massacres with anti-racism-themed parks and forests. The organization promotes the Coretta Scott King Forest as a symbol of “commitment to peace and justice” but the forest covers up destroyed Palestinian villages, including Ayn al-Zaytoun, whose inhabitants the JNF helped to kill and expel.
Walid Khalidi in All That Remains refers to a group of thirty-seven young villagers chosen at random; Israeli historian Benny Morris concludes that “these teenagers were probably among a group of seventy people later massacred in a gully between Ayn Al Zaytoun and Safad under orders from Moshe Kelman who, in anticipation of a Red Cross visit to the area, ordered their hands to be untied to conceal the fact that the killing had been done in cold blood”.
In 1976 the JNF also named a forest after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. within the Mount Turan Forest in the Upper Galilee region, near Nazareth, which they claim later grew to include 10,000 trees.
Icons of anti-racist struggle are co-opted in the service of ethnic cleansing, for the JNF’s involvement in such crimes is both historical and ongoing.
JNF Memoria Forest
The JNF’s Memoria Forest also does double duty, covering up an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians while also concealing Israel’s sacrifice of thousands Argentinian Jews tortured and killed by the fascist junta that Israel armed and helped to train. Ben Shemen contains Memoria Forest and sits, like the scores of other JNF parks, on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, in this case including Jimzu, of which Zionist records report on 10 July 1948, “Our forces are clearing the Innaba-Jimzu-Daniyal area and are torching everything that can be burned.”
While the Ayn Al Zaytoun villagers saw their killers erect an “anti-racism” themed park to conceal their destroyed homes and land, the survivors of Jimzu and other villagers saw insult piled on injury: – the Memoria Forest planted over their village is promoted as a symbol of tolerance and anti-fascism, a tribute to those 30,000 Argentines, including 3,000 Jewish citizens of that country, who died at the hands of the Argentine Junta.
The Memoria Forest visitors’ centre, however, conceals not only the history of the Palestinian villages underneath, but the sinister record of Israel’s arming and training of the military officers who carried out the mass killings of 1976-83. At the height of the Junta’s terror, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires reported that there was “no country in the world in which so many Argentine officers were staying simultaneously for the purposes of weapons procurement, training, etc.”
The Israeli Embassy refused Jewish leftists the passports that would have sprung them from the regime’s torture chambers. Torturer Peregrino Fernandez revealed much later that assistance in his work came from the Israeli Embassy’s Herzl Inbar (later Israeli Ambassador to Spain).
Prisoner Jacobo Timerman later wrote: “I will forget my torturers, but I will never forget the Jewish leaders who acquiesced to the torture of Jews”.
JNF forest dedicated to Rev. Bastiaan Jan Ader
The JNF Coretta Scott King Forest dishonours that iconic family name and the JNF nationally themed parks and forests implicate citizens of multiple countries in the crimes of the JNF. The Memoria Forest is not the only JNF park to exploit the memory of those who fought and died to oppose fascism around the world, while concealing Israeli savagery in Palestine and support for extreme-right wing regimes elsewhere.
Rev. Bastiaan Jan Ader was a Dutch resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of WWII who rescued and hid many Jews from the Nazis. In 1944 he was planning an attack to rescue more Jews when he was betrayed, and then tortured and killed by the Gestapo. Israel’s Yad Vashem concluded that Bastiaan and his wife, Johanna, saved the lives of two to three hundred Dutch Jews.
The JNF planted a forest of 1,100 trees with a memorial stone in memory of Rev. Ader. The forest was built over the ruins of the Palestinian village of Bayt Natiff, which the Israelis reduced to rubble to prevent the return of the villagers whom Jewish militias had expelled in October 1948. Many villagers ended up in Bethlehem, in Aida Refugee Camp.
In 2016, Rev. Ader’s son, Erik, learned of the JNF’s role in the ethnic cleansing and, therefore, how the legacy of his father’s fight against the Nazi occupation regime had been incorporated into the service of Israel’s programme of ethnic cleansing: “I can’t ask my father what he thinks about his name being associated with this injustice, but knowing what he stood for, it’s not hard to guess”.
What you can do
If you oppose the JNF’s efforts to implicate citizens of your country in its crimes, if you honour the record of Dr. King in fighting against racism, if you are repulsed by Israel’s alliance with a fascistic regime and then mourning the victims it allowed to be slaughtered by that same regime, if you are inspired by the heroism of Rev. Bastiaan Ader in protecting Jews under Nazi occupation and the consistency of his son in opposing Israeli ethnic cleansing – you should support the efforts of Stop the JNF and be part of the movement to expose them for what they are: the “charity for apartheid”, in Gideon Levy’s words.
For more information or with any queries, contact:
Mick Napier, scotland@stopthejnf.org, WhatsApp/Signal +44 795 800 2591
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.
Mar 18, 2021
March 18th 2021
For the first time, the JNF has approved publicly allocating its funds to expand Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, risking making overseas donors directly complicit in war crimes.
For decades, Jews around the world have cherished the Jewish National Fund’s supposedly “charitable” work buying and managing land in Israel. Generations of Jewish children have been encouraged to drop pennies into its iconic blue collection boxes.
The Fund is held in similar high esteem by western governments, which typically subsidize their citizens’ donations to the JNF by treating them as tax exempt. Meanwhile, international agencies seek out its advice on environmental and sustainability issues.
But a vote last month by the JNF’s board threatens to unmask the Zionist charity, even to its most faithful supporters. For the first time, the organization has agreed to publicly allocate funds to expand Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
$12 million set aside
The JNF has initially set aside nearly $12 million for what it describes as “land purchases” in the occupied West Bank. In reality, the JNF will be funding the confiscation and takeover of Palestinian lands by Israel’s occupation authorities.
According to reports, the JNF may ultimately funnel hundreds of millions of dollars from its reserves into the West Bank in a bid to more than double the size of the settler population there – from at least 450,000 to one million Jews.
Analysts have noted that the KKL-JNF – as the organization is known in Israel – is being rapidly reinvented as a “bank” for right-wing politicians. They want to use its enormous reserves to entrench the government’s de facto annexation policy by helping the settlers tighten their hold on the West Bank.
Collusion in war crimes
Worried about how this will look outside Israel, and the threat it could pose to the JNF’s fundraising activities overseas, five of the JNF’s 32 board members have demanded that the decision be rescinded.
They are pinning their hopes on a follow-up meeting, after Israel’s March 23 election, when the board will vote on whether the JNF changes its declared policy and operates openly inside the West Bank.
Unless the decision can be overturned, donors to the JNF – as well as foreign governments that bestow charitable status on the Fund – will be directly and visibly colluding in the development of the settlements and the further erosion of prospects for a Palestinian state.
Significantly, such collusion will be occurring immediately after the International Criminal Court in the Hague announced last month an investigation into potential Israeli war crimes that include its building and expansion of settlements.
Public money laundered
The JNF’s decision is a dramatic indication of how ultra-nationalists allied to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have co-opted Zionism’s most venerable international organization.
Till now, the JNF in Israel has been careful to veil its involvement in the settlements to avoid both alienating more liberal American Jews and endangering its overseas charitable status by openly flouting international law. Instead it has hidden its operations inside the West Bank behind a subsidiary called Himanuta.
But that approach has changed since the JNF’s new chairman, Avraham Duvdevani, took office in October. He previously headed the World Zionist Organization, whose settlement division has been the main vehicle by which Israeli governments have laundered public money to expand the settlements, often in breach of Israel’s own laws.
‘Land theft division’
An editorial in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz in 2017 labelled the WZO settlement division, then under Duvdevani, as “the land theft division”, following a series of investigations by the paper.
As well as financing settlements on territory seized by the Israeli state in violation of international law, the WZO has transferred lands to the settlers that even Israel’s occupation authorities recognize as belonging to private Palestinian land-owners. On those lands, the WZO has helped to establish what are officially termed “unauthorized outposts”.
These fledgling settlements are home to the most extreme and violent settlers, who are often behind attacks on Palestinian farmers intended to drive them off their land. The Israeli state has used the WZO as a means to veil its own role channeling money into these “outposts”.
Haaretz concluded: “The [WZO] Settlement Division is acting like a publicly funded crime organization.”
Greenwashing plans
Now Duvdevani appears to be encouraging the JNF to mimic the WZO in publicly funding the same lawless settlement practices.
To placate donors, the JNF is reported to be planning to greenwash its activities in the West Bank by characterizing them as involving “education, forestation and environmental protection” – echoing similar deceptions it perpetuates inside Israel.
There, the JNF has planted hundreds of forests over the lands of Palestinian refugees to prevent them from ever returning home, after they were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, during events Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe.
Other JNF forestation programs have been weaponized against a section of Israel’s own citizens – a large minority of 1.8 million Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.
In collusion with the government, the JNF has forced Palestinian villagers, like those of al-Araqib in the Naqab (Negev), off their land by planting trees in place of their homes, or the JNF has used forests to tightly box in Palestinian communities to prevent expansion, leading to overcrowding and social tensions.
In Israel’s early years, officials transferred 13 percent of Israeli territory to the JNF so the organization could enforce residential segregation between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. The JNF’s charter specifically requires it to reserve all its land for Jews only.
Zionist ‘consensus’
Since its founding in 1901, the JNF has been strong-arming Palestinians off the land it controls – whether inside Israel or in the occupied territories, especially in East Jerusalem.
However until now, the JNF has successfully remained within the Zionist “consensus” by focusing public attention on its operations inside Israel. Its activities in the occupied territories have been concealed behind Himanuta.
Peace Now recently reported that, before the early 2000s, Himanuta had claimed ownership of at least 16,000 acres of West Bank land on which settlements were founded, including Itamar, Alfei Menashe, Einav, Kedumim and Givat Ze’ev.
Himanuta’s work has concentrated in particular on occupied East Jerusalem, where it has allied with an extremist settler organization, Elad. The pair are behind efforts to evict an extended Palestinian family, the Sumarins, from their home in Silwan, an area that has been aggressively targeted for takeover by armed settlers backed by the Israeli state.
Secret fund
After a long lull of activity, the JNF quietly revived its operations in the West Bank through Himanuta back in 2018.
Duvdevani’s predecessor, Daniel Atar, a Labor party appointee, set up a secret war chest, in the name of Himanuta, amounting to some $70 million. The money was disguised as funds for use in Jerusalem.
But it was actually used to “purchase” Palestinian land and properties – including through the use of forged documents – in the Jordan Valley, Jericho, Hebron and the Etzion bloc south of Bethlehem.
When the fund was exposed, Atar justified the move by citing the opinion of a retired senior judge that the JNF’s bylaws sanctioned it working in the occupied West Bank. That opinion referred to a memorandum of association from 1953 – long before Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – that permitted the Fund’s operations “in any area subject to the jurisdiction of the Government of Israel”.
Atar thereby paved the way to Duvdevani’s current moves to change the JNF’s public policy towards the settlements.
Apartheid system
The real significance of the JNF’s latest decision is that it strips away the pretense that the Fund makes a distinction between land in Israel and the occupied territories.
It underlines the argument made in a report in January by Israel’s most prominent human rights group, B’Tselem, that Israel operates a single apartheid system inside Israel and the occupied territories.
The JNF is a linchpin of that system, helping to enforce superior rights for Jews over Palestinians across the entire region.
The decision is therefore likely to expose further the self-delusions of many Jews outside Israel. They have long claimed that Israel’s state ideology, Zionism, is an uncontroversial matter relating only to a supposed right by the Jewish people to self-determination on the lands of Palestinians. Further, they have claimed that anyone questioning this right must be antisemitic.
Now it will be difficult for self-identified Zionists to deny that their movement is complicit in violations of international law and that its key institutions, including the JNF, are carrying out war crimes.
End to ‘bluffing’
It is telling that many of the JNF’s leaders have been quick to note that the decision to establish a fund to confiscate Palestinian land for Jewish-only settlement will not depart from the Fund’s historic role. Duvdevani himself has argued that the JNF is simply continuing its traditional task of “redeeming” land.
Davidi Ben Zion, a settler who serves on the JNF’s board, similarly observed: “The JNF acted over the years to buy lands for the Jewish people in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. Even those who objected knew it was going on. The only difference is that we’ve finished with the bluffing.”
In other words, the JNF intends to stop pretending to Jews abroad that it is only engaged in non-controversial forestation and desert-reclamation projects. Rather, it is ready to go public with aggressive Judaization projects designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Another board member, Yishai Merling, a 31-year-old activist from Netanyahu’s Likud party who lives in the settlement of Efrat, said after the vote: “We’re the new generation, we don’t work under the table.”
Image damaged
Those opposed to the move, from the so-called Zionist center and left, have objected less on principle than on the basis that the decision risks damaging the JNF’s image abroad and curtailing its ability to fundraise.
Mercaz Olami, the political arm of Conservative Judaism, warned last month in the run-up to the vote that a public change of policy could put the JNF “in a situation which potentially violates international law”.
It could also, “harm” Jewish communities in the 55 countries that have JNF fundraising branches, the group noted. “An irresponsible decision could severely damage [the JNF] KKL ability to continue operating in these countries.”
Charity probe
That already appears to be the case.
In an interview with the Haaretz newspaper, Russell Robinson, head of the JNF-USA, was keen to underscore that his donors’ money was no longer filling the coffers of the KKL-JNF, the JNF parent organization in Israel. Nonetheless, Haaretz reported, some of the JNF-USA’s own donations were also directly assisting the settlements.
JNF-Canada, meanwhile, is under investigation by Canadian tax authorities for funneling “charitable” donations to the Israeli military and the settlements.
In a letter on its website after last month’s vote, JNF-Canada sought to distance itself from the KKL-JNF. That included by rebranding its logo. A new agreement between the two would ensure JNF-Canada funds were not “co-mingled with KKL’s general accounts”, the letter said.
In the UK, a similar pressure group, Stop the JNF UK, has been ramping up the pressure on the UK government’s Charity Commission to act against the JNF-UK over its involvement in dispossessing Palestinians.
Immune to pressure
A predictable statement from the U.S. State Department reiterated the importance of avoiding “unilateral steps” and undercutting “efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution.”
But the JNF, like the Israeli government, is long past worrying about international pressure to support negotiations or peacemaking. It is apparently no longer concerned either about the need to deceive its donors and foreign governments over its support for war crimes in the occupied territories.
The question now is whether the penny finally drops for Jews in the US, Canada and Europe – and whether, as a result, they refuse to continue dropping their figurative pennies into the JNF’s blue boxes.
