Mar 3, 2021
Last month, for the first time in its long history, the Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) openly declared that it will fund land confiscation in the West Bank, in defiance of international law. Its board of governors voted through the allocation of NIS 38 million to take over land, previously confiscated by the Israeli state, to expand Jewish-only settlements yet further. All Israeli settlements, based on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, constitute a war crime under international law. Yet the British arm of KKL-JNF, JNF UK, continues to be a registered charity, enjoying tax exemption to raise funds for its parent organisation.
This decision is not an aberration, or a reversal of existing JNF policy, but a clear indication that the settlement expansion driven by Israel’s far right government and emboldened by the support it received from the Trump administration, is set to continue, more blatantly than previously.
Last year, it was revealed that over a two-year period JNF-KKL secretly acquired West Bank land earmarked for the expansion of illegal settlements, while its subsidiary Himnuta spearheaded fresh attempts to force Palestinians from their homes in annexed East Jerusalem. Himnuta and the right-wing settler group Elad have long cooperated to force Palestinian families to leave East Jerusalem. Their eviction has been condemned by a cross-party group of MPs, in signing EDM 529.
The KKL-JNF decision brings into the open what it has, for decades, been doing behind closed doors, or through a nexus of subsidiaries. In fact, KKL-JNF has been deeply complicit in the ongoing colonisation and settlement of Palestinian land, since its foundation in 1901. As Peace Now confirm, in the past decades KKL-JNF have acquired at least 65,000 dunams (16,000 acres) of land for settlements. The KKL-JNF has acted as a parastatal partner in the consequent forced displacement, occupation and apartheid policies of the state.
Here in Britain, JNF UK supports numerous KKL-JNF projects on both sides of the Green Line and is listed as KKL-JNF’s office in the UK. Much of JNF UK’s activities have been presented either as benign environmental projects or disguised through front organisations.
Once more, we call for the Charity Commission to remove JNF UK’s charity status, as a step towards holding UK businesses and organisations accountable for their complicity in Israeli violations of international law.
Feb 19, 2021
The following article was published in Ha’aretz on February 16th 2021
Their fingerprints are on every square centimeter, their expertise and professionalism in every bend in the road. They are the planners, architects and contractors who are turning the West Bank into an Israeli-Jewish district: a mix of upscale towns and neighborhoods in the style of Ramat Hasharon and Savyon combined with the Tower and Stockade Zionist communities of the 1930s, Wild West-style ranches, New Jersey-style suburbs and roofs like Swiss chalets. Prestigious living at reasonable prices for Jews only. And on Palestinian land, at the expense of the Palestinian freedom of choice, development and future.
The Israeli planners and developers are the first to benefit from the theft of land and water carried out by various Israeli authorities and whitewashed by jurists and judges. My advice to the Palestinians would be to focus on them. Publicly submit their names to the International Criminal Court in The Hague along with their (alleged, alleged) crimes.
Far-sighted Israeli planning has turned Palestinian villages and shepherds’ encampments into distant, Orientalist décor within an Israeli space. The Palestinian cities have been hidden behind walls, checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and warning signs. Here and there, the Jewish motorist on a bypass road catches a glimpse of the Third World – gray concrete, industrial buildings in the middle of residential neighborhoods, homes in the middle of industrial zones, a congested architectural jumble that is devoid of greenery; water tanks on every roof and high-rise apartments built without planning permits, abutting one another.
Upper Israel in an increasingly Jewish space, Lower Palestine made of a patchwork of enclaves, scattered and cut off from one another. There is a convenient and ever-expanding network of highways – on land stolen from the Palestinians, and off limits to them – providing natural, unimpeded access to Israel’s cities. Closed iron gates ensure that the distance between one Palestinian enclave and another is increasing and that traveling between them is becoming more and more complicated and discouraging.
This is not accidental. Thousands of Jewish Israelis, graduates of architecture and engineering departments in Israeli universities, are partners in this wonder of apartheid. When the ICC prepares the lists of suspects and those to be investigated, their unique contribution (allegedly, allegedly) to the commission of the crimes described in sections 1(d) and 1(j) of Article 7 (Crimes against Humanity) and Article 8 section 2(b)(viii) (War Crimes) of the Rome Statute creating the court must not be forgotten.
These provisions relate to apartheid, the expulsion of an occupied population from their place of residence and the transfer of the population of the occupying country to the occupied territory, directly or indirectly. The three crimes – expulsion, settlement and apartheid – feed, enable and strengthen one another.
There is an understandable Palestinian political, emotional and national need to see Israeli politicians, army brass, officers and soldiers brought to trail for their attacks in 2014 and subsequently against civilian population in the Gaza Strip, and for having killed and maimed thousands of children, unarmed young men, women and the elderly. But there is no doubt that the seasoned lawyers whom Israel will hire to defend them will come up with dozens of tricks to avoid disclosing the identities of those who committed them, dragging the matter out for years and turning the process into a vengeful saga against the Hamas authorities in Gaza.
The crimes and the suspects must be selected from places where Israel cannot make the Palestinians the guilty party. How would the planners and contractors respond when asked why they built a neighborhood exclusively for Jews on the land of a Palestinian village? That they were just following orders? Their bank accounts will prove that they committed crimes of apartheid in return for cash.
A Palestinian focus on the planners and builders of the settlement enterprise would put a decades-old system based on the principle of unequal development on trial and expose the collaboration of Israel’s civilians in its creation. That would also make it possible to deter new planners and builders, who will heed the following warning: You and the jurists who gave a stamp of approval to the system and the crimes will find yourselves on the list of defendants, charged and convicted in The Hague.
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Feb 19, 2021
The following article was published in Ha’aretz, February 18th 2021
Meet the Zionism of 2021: “Redeeming” land by the Jewish National Fund in the West Bank, “redeeming land” in the Galilee too, otherwise the holy lands might fall into the hands of impure Israelis, those who are not Jews.
If anyone still had any doubts about the nationalist and racist – yes, racist – character of Zionism, even in its modern dress, then along came the chairman of the JNF, Avraham Duvdevani, and removed the last of these doubts.
Like many other Zionist texts, his interview with Kalman Liebskind on the Kan 11 public broadcasting station this week needs translation into a European language: just replace the word Arabs with Jews – and be shocked. When the text is in Hebrew and relates to Arabs, it seems it does not shock anyone in Israel. “Help, my neighbor is about to sell the land to a Jew,” the despicable European antisemite will say. “Help, my neighbor is about to sell the land to an Arab,” the pure and moral Zionist will say. That’s the way Zionism is, as one of its leaders told us.
The year is 2021, not 1921, the state has arisen and become a superpower, but nothing has changed in the real estate greediness of the desanctified movement. Let’s put aside the grotesque use of the term “redeeming land” – we grew up on it and the Blue Box, and we were already back then completely brainwashed – and let’s not ask from whom the land is being redeemed and for what. But how can an elected representative of the Zionist institutions speak about buying land in the Israeli Galilee, the Arab-Jewish Galilee, in a supposedly democratic country, to save them, lest they fall into the hands of the country’s Arab citizens.
The Galilee, Duvdevani, is not yours – it belongs to its residents, not all of whom were expelled by the forefathers of Zionism in 1948, so it remains the last region with an Arab majority. What’s wrong with that? It’s good. It’s their land, exactly the same way it’s your land, maybe even a little bit more so, because unlike you they have been its native inhabitants for generations.
On Fridays we would wear blue and white and put a coin into the Blue Box. It was meant even then for scrounging donations to buy land from its Arab owners. We believed that was redemption. We were so stupid, and so naïve. Today too most Jewish Israelis think that way. The fact is, it is possible to speak about redeeming land and not be considered to be Itamar Ben Gvir, but rather the mainstream of Zionism.
Duvdevani told how he was called into action: Someone in the Galilee recently informed on his neighbor who was about to sell land to Arabs. Here he entered the picture and redeemed the tormented land. “So tomorrow morning we won’t have to buy the land from Arabs,” said Duvdevani describing, without blinking an eye, the footsteps of the coming redemption. After that, Jewish developers will build a mall or parking lot on the land– and the redeemer will come to Zion.
The rot in the JNF can be smelled from far away. The fact that the Labor Party and Meretz are partners in this stinking nationalist enterprise testifies as much as 1,000 witnesses about the Zionist left.
A “public benefit corporation,” most of whose land is land that was stolen from its owners in the Nakba and was never returned to them; which covered over the ruins of hundreds of villages in forests, just to erase their memory from the face of the earth and block the possibility of their owners returning. A body which, throughout all the years, in practice sold lands only to Jews, and since 2009 even legalized this practice in an official decision; a body for which there is no occupation and no Green Line – just one state between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, in which you buy land only for members of one people; and which has now officially declared its partnership in the war crime called settlement too, after years of doing so via a front company.
On the tables of this company we all have our picnics in the heart of nature, a green company for the benefit of the public, which is nothing but an abominable racial company. It should have been liquidated a long time ago. Until then, it should be boycotted.
Anyone who still has their doubts, yes apartheid or no apartheid, needs to get to know the JNF. With members of the right and left in its top posts and positions for Meretz too – here you have the Jewish national fund for apartheid, the Israeli consensus.
Feb 12, 2021
Salman Abu Sitta’s memorable talk for Stop the JNF on Saturday February 6th proved, if proof were needed, that the refugees’ Right of Return is a live and compelling issue. As if to underscore this fact, recently the Arafat Foundation has released records of land ownership before the Nakba, classified as secret for many years, as reported here. The published records give Palestinians access to documentation for 540,000 plots of land across sixteen districts of pre-1948 Palestine, (not including the Naqab); the archive shows ownership, evaluations and, sometimes, tax classifications of the land.
These records originated in the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), established in 1948, the membership of which comprised the US, France and Turkey. The brief of the commission was to support the parties in reaching a “final settlement.” This aim, as we know, was never realised, but the Commission did set up a detailed database of the property seized in the Nakba belonging to Palestinian refugees, as well as endowments and the property of churches. This wealth of documented information remained with the UN until 1973 when Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel received copies: the PLO received a copy later.
The political context for the launch of the database is interesting. The Trump plan endorsed rampant annexation, encouraged illegal settlement and negated refugee rights. Trump’s labelling of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was meant to take the city “off the negotiating table”. The aggressive US moves against UNRWA have the same aim: to undermine refugee rights – and diminish support for refugees. The database may offer a riposte to these moves against the Palestinian refugees and their rightful ownership of the land.
It remains to be seen how the Arafat Foundation database can best be used by Palestinians and campaigners who support the justice of their cause. But the database certainly underscores Salman Abu Sitta’s core mantra: The Right of Return is “Sacred, Legal and Feasible.” Annie O’Gara
Feb 12, 2021
Said’s film shares the central concern of Salman Abu Sitta’s talk of February 6th- the longing to return to a home one was forced to flee from and the sense of burning injustice at being prevented from doing so. It extends and exemplifies what he wrote in a piece for The London Review of Books in February 1984, “Permission to Narrate”, written after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and complicity in the Sabra and Chatila massacres and also a title that sums up the refusal of the so-called Free World to allow the Palestinian narrative to be heard.
In this fifty-minute film made in 1998 – fifty years after the Nakba – there is no mention of the JNF as such, but its shadow falls over many of the issues discussed by Said and the activities it is still practising are seen to have been present then. It’s an emotional film, starting in the school where his grandfather had played cricket and finishing with Said, looking at the ground, shaking his head in bewildered disbelief.
He deals with the issues of land seizure and ownership, of the impossibility of Palestinian building permits, of the tragedy of Oslo and its hopelessly defeatist division of the West Bank, at a time when these issues were even more ignored in the world outside than they are now.
He stands outside what was his family’s home in Jerusalem, film of the present intercut with pictures of his family members in the garden. His father and grandfather had been born there, his mother hailing from Nazareth, but the family was forced to flee in 1947 and a Jewish family had taken it over. Said just mutters the word “unfair” to describe this; his American-born son, accompanying him, wonders why they can’t get it back. This question goes unanswered.
Immediately one thinks of the Sumarin family, currently fighting to retain their property in Silwan, trying to resist being driven out, being hounded by the JNF surrogate Himnuta and the Abramovich-funded Elad Settler movement.
Said visits Deir Yassin and speaks to a woman who had 25 members of her family killed in the village by a Jewish militia in April 1948. A youthful Ilan Pappé, interviewed, confirms that historians could now show that Palestinians had left their villages because they had not the means to defend them against such massacres and not because the Arab countries had told them to, a myth that at the time of the making of the film had only recently been rebutted.
In snatches of conversation with another Palestinian who had left for the USA, Ibrahim Abul Linghod, Said recounts how the Israeli victory in June 1967 had been a shattering blow to those who had felt that they were just waiting to return to their rightful homes and land and saw in the defeat, a crushing blow to these hopes. He had also been shocked by the racism of the US media in their coverage of the “war”, so much so that he wrote “The Arab Portrayed” to counter it. Other conversations with figures like Mahmoud Darwish and Daniel Barenboim give to the film a cultural element not often found, though the most radical of his interlocutors is Israel Shahak who refers to “annexation, apartheid and stolen land”. He also sums up the Oslo Accords as part of the process of joining the Palestinian Authority to the Israeli Government as parts of the same system.
These criticisms have become commonplace now, but I don’t believe that they were then, just five years after the documents were signed. The choice of “apartheid” as the word that best sums up the social situation between the river and the sea, alongside the pithy and cogent definition of this as “demographic separation without sovereignty” showed Shahak to have been as clear-sighted as he was fearless.
In a talk to a Palestinian audience during the visit, Said spells out his prescription: mass mobilisation for non-violent resistance. Palestinians could not prevail in an armed struggle, even if they could procure the arms, but they did not have to “construct failure” he asserted, in a memorable phrase.
In a discussion with a number of young Palestinian citizens of Israel, he hears them say that they have no intention of leaving what, post-1948, is known as Israel but they are not going to accept second-class citizenship either.
By this time, 1998, Said knew that he was suffering from an incurable leukaemia and probably had only a few years to live. For him, the film was overwhelmingly saddening; the Palestinians were utterly defenceless, had no voice, no hope of just treatment. At times, his own voice trails away and he seems close to tears, as if lost for words. There is a sense of a simple, strong, humanity when he appeals to individual IDF soldiers to think about what they are doing. And, in 1998, all this is before the “Separation Wall”, the endless checkpoints that his journey then was not subject to, the Nation State Law that spells out to Palestinian citizens of Israel that they are, indeed and de jure, second-class citizens, the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem in defiance of International Law, and so on.
For us now, looking back the twenty-three years since the making of the film, the issues are the same. We are bringing them out into the open in our campaign to stop the JNF: the charity for ethnic cleansing, for a faux environmentalism to obscure and hide numerous crime scenes. Its “charitable” status in the UK is a mockery of what the word is supposed to mean.
Thanks to Said and many others, the Palestinians do have a voice, both their own and through their worldwide support. The tide is turning.
Paul Wimpeney
Feb 12, 2021
Memoirs and autobiographies are powerful records of important lives, their significance corresponding, perhaps, with the stature of the writer. That is certainly the case with Salman Abu Sitta’s Memoir, recording as it does the life of a giant of Palestinian resistance, a champion of the Right of Return. Yet that characterisation fails to capture why this book is so memorable and a must-read for anyone interested in Palestine.
It is powerfully and eloquently written, and the opening pages are a lyrical recreation of Palestine before the Nakba, a land in which people, indeed, had everything that made life worth living, to paraphrase Darwish. At the same time, this early section of the work is deeply political, its subtext undermining the myth that Palestine was a land crying out for Zionist development, an empty desert, devoid of people.
And this is how the book operates throughout its trajectory. Salman’s narrative carries layers of meaning – personal, historical, political: telling his own story but illuminating his people’s collective experience, capturing at once episodes that have marked and shaped his own life and, through them, raising the voice of all Palestinians.
The variety is remarkable: From Arabic poem on one page, “Knowledge builds houses from broken stones / Ignorance destroys once glorious houses” to the Balfour Declaration on another, “legally void, morally wicked and politically mischievous.” There are stories that live in the memory, individual tragedies that echo the communal experience, such as that of young Nadid, eager for life, and his mother, from Khan Younis. Add to that insights into the author’s moral code, shaped early in life by a tiny note, pressed into his palm by his father, kept safe to this day, containing paternal imperatives that grew into the adult man’s quest for justice, informing his life’s work. And through it all, from the first to last page, runs the golden thread: The Right of Return, “sacred, legal and feasible.” A book to read and savour, without doubt.
The last word goes to the author: “I believe, even amid all of our political realities, that our family’s motto, “We Persevere” will be vindicated, that human spirit and determined will can triumph in the end.” Annie O’Gara
