The Dominion - Ramallah

Jewish National Fund Challenged for Complicity in Ethnic Cleansing

Tim McSorley — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:32:37 +0000

Canadian, Israeli activists push to remove organization's charitable status

JERUSALEM—Israeli, Palestinian and international protestors gathered in Tel Aviv and Ramallah in late February to denounce ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But instead of levelling their criticisms at the Israeli state, the chants and banners were aimed at an unexpected target: Canada.

Among other issues, protesters were targetting Canada for its role in building Canada Park, an Israeli park built over the ruins of three Palestinian villages with donations made to the Jewish National Fund of Canada (JNF-Canada). JNF-Canada's role is being challenged both at home and in Israel, while a targetted campaign against the JNF overall is underway.

“Canada Park was planted and funded with the support of the Jewish National Fund of Canada over the lands and over the ruins of three ethnically cleansed villages: Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, occupied and ethnically cleansed in the course and the wake of the 1967 [Six Days] war,” explained Israeli activist Uri Davis, member of the Committee for Defending the Latrun Villages, in Tel Aviv.

Institutionalized Racism: The history of the JNF

The Jewish National Fund was created in 1901 before the founding of the State of Israel. Early Zionist leaders used the organization to secure property and land rights for exclusive Jewish use in British-mandate Palestine.

“The JNF was the principal Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine. It served as the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land upon which it then settled Jewish immigrants,” wrote Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

According to Pappe, in the early 1940s the head of the Jewish National Fund’s settlement department, Yossef Weitz, stated, “All we need is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3,000 dunam—cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands.”

Today, the JNF controls approximately 13 per cent of the land in Israel, which it continues to lease only to Jews. This land falls under the management of the Israeli Lands Administration (ILA), an Israeli governmental agency that controls 93 per cent of the land in Israel.

In addition, the JNF controls 50 per cent of the seats at the ILA Council, giving the organization substantial power to decide how virtually all ILA lands are distributed. Under Israeli law, the JNF has also been given the same status as a public authority for the purposes of confiscating land.

According to a 2006 brief submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, “Palestinian citizens, who constitute 20 per cent of the population, are denied access to [the JNF’s] 13 per cent of "Israel Lands." This discriminatory policy contributes to the institutionalization of racially segregated towns and villages throughout the state.”

The report continues: “Due to the explicitly discriminatory nature of the ILA and JNF’s policies, Adalah and HIC call upon the Commission to initiate an investigation into Israel’s discriminatory land allocation policies and to urge the State of Israel to cease discriminatory land allocation practices using institutions such as the JNF, and to apply covenanted principles of equality, just distribution and fairness.”

“Canada Park represents a blatant violation of international law, but it also represents a blatant violation of official Canadian policy condemning any intervention of settlement or occupation or change of demographic composition or any other alteration in the 1967 occupied territories,” he added.

JNF-Canada operates as a charity and collects approximately $10 million annually in tax-deductible donations. Canadian citizens have donated about $15 million to the JNF, which has gone to fund Canada Park and similar projects.

Located in the Latrun enclave, just off the major highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Canada Park is a popular weekend picnic and hiking spot for Israeli families. What most road signs or tourist brochures won’t tell you, however, is that Canada Park extends several kilometres into the West Bank, far beyond the Green Line, the internationally recognized armistice line separating Israeli and Palestinian territory.

Today, the majority of Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba’s original Palestinian inhabitants are refugees living in Jordan or in and around the West Bank city of Ramallah. Since they are barred from entering Israel, these Palestinian residents are unable to access Canada Park, or visit the ruins of their ancestral villages.

According to the JNF-Canada website, “The history of the Jewish National Fund of Canada and the State of Israel are inseparable. Jewish National Fund of Canada land reclamation projects have created the infrastructure for countless residential areas and other communities across Israel.”

Operating as a branch of JNF-Israel, the JNF-Canada website vaguely states that the funds raised by JNF-Canada “are primarily directed to the payment of wages to workers engaged in various aspects of Jewish National Fund activities.”

Today, the JNF operates 11 regional offices across Canada, from Vancouver to Halifax.

Scott Weinstein is a Steering Committee member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), which according to its website is “an organization that promotes a just resolution to the dispute in Israel and Palestine through the application of international law and respect for the human rights of all parties.”

Weinstein told The Dominion that IJV is working on a campaign to raise awareness in Canada about the Jewish National Fund and its activities, including how it built Canada Park over Palestinian communities. The long-term goal, he said, will be to de-list the JNF as a Canadian charity.

“The JNF's legal mission and strategy is explicit—Land [sic] for Jews only. Technically, the land is collectively titled to the JNF. Palestinians are denied the right to their land—forever—be it in Israel or even the occupied territories,” Weinstein wrote in an email to The Dominion.

“Since Israel was founded, no new Palestinian villages, forests or territory in Israel have been allowed, but hundreds of Jewish villages, cities, parks and forests are constructed. Thanks to Canadian JNF tax support, Palestinian territory shrinks as Jewish territory expands. Palestinian olive trees are destroyed so Jews can plant non-native pine trees, or orange trees,” he explained. “The propaganda cover-up of a very unethical mission is frankly upsetting, and shocking to many who learn the reality.”

A few hundred metres from the Palestinian Bedouin village of al-Araqib sit a half-dozen bulldozers. Surrounded by razor wire and heavily guarded by Israeli police officers and soldiers, a sign hangs on a shed inside the permanent bulldozer encampment: “Works being carried out by Keren Kayemeth Leisrael –Jewish National Fund.”

“There was police in al-Araqib and also the [JNF] bulldozers. They plowed some parts of the land. We tried to resist them, but we were arrested and handcuffed,” explained 17-year-old al-Araqib resident Adam Salim Abu Mdeghem.

Located inside Israel proper in the Israeli Negev desert about an hour south of Tel Aviv, al-Araqib has been demolished a total of 19 times since July 2010. The village’s destruction was commissioned by the JNF’s Israeli branch.

The Jewish National Fund in Israel aims to plant a forest over the village of al-Araqib. Co-sponsored by evangelical Christian organization God-TV, this forest would involve forcibly displacing the 300 Indigenous residents of al-Araqib, who are all Israeli citizens.

Since JNF-Canada is a chapter of JNF-Israel, funds allocated to the JNF in Canada are transferred to projects sponsored by the organization in Israel, such as planting trees in the Negev or Galilee, or restoring the Old City walls in Jerusalem, among others.

It is unclear whether the specific trees JNF-Israel wants to plant over al-Araqib lands were donated or purchased thanks to donations provided by Canadians. JNF-Canada does, however, advertise a project called "Action Plan Negev.” This is “a program designed to meet the challenge of developing the Negev for the 21st century” and aims to populate the Negev region.

The destruction of al-Araqib is part of a larger JNF-Israel project called “Blueprint Negev.” Launched in 2005 at the cost of $600 million, the project aims to increase the population in the Negev area by 250,000 Jewish residents by 2013.

Whether “Action Plan Negev” and “Blueprint Negev” are directly related, or constitute two parts of the same program, however, is unspecified.

Haia Noach, the Director of the Negev Co-Existence Forum, a joint Jewish-Arab organization that, among other things, works for Bedouin land rights in the Negev, explained that as the forestation authority in Israel, the JNF developed the project to plant trees over al-Araqib.

She said that while the JNF initially denied any involvement in the destruction of al-Araqib, residents and local activists saw JNF bulldozers destroying property in the village during a demolition in early February 2011.

“We connect them directly and they are responsible for what is going on there, to the fact that people lost their houses, lost their herds, their orchards,” Noach said.

“The situation is devastating, but this is what we have,” said Abu Mdeghem, sitting on the hillside next to the small, make-shift tent where he, his parents and seven other siblings now live. “I am...very sad for what has happened to the al-Araqib area. We never expected that anything would happen to our land.”

According to Noach, the JNF’s policy doesn’t end in al-Araqib; the organization is threatening the existence of dozens of other Palestinian Bedouin villages that have existed in the area for hundreds of years.

“The JNF is willingly part of this game where they serve as a foresting authority. [You] see it all over Israel, in the North and even in the South,” Noach said.

“There will be more and more Arab villages in the Negev that are threatened by the forestation of the JNF.”

A new campaign called “Stop the JNF” was recently launched with the goal of documenting and exposing the Jewish National Fund’s complicity in Israeli ethnic cleansing, disrupting JNF fundraising activities and revoking the organization’s charitable status in countries around the world.

According to Akram Salhab, an organizer of this international campaign and Communications Officer at Badil, the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, the campaign aims to co-ordinate between various organizations and provide the resources and information needed for a united campaign.

“One of the first aims of the campaign is to expose and document the role of the JNF. One of the problems with trying to understand the role of the JNF is that it's shrouded in an esoteric legal language, which is indicative more broadly of the way in which the Israeli apartheid regime functions,” Salhab explained.

Despite this challenge, Salhab said he is hopeful that the campaign will unite activists around the world who are working to raise awareness about the JNF’s complicity in Israeli crimes.

“Our main aim is to influence public opinion and influence individuals in places where the JNF collects the largest amount of revenue. The problem with that is that those are the places where the JNF has a [great] deal of support. So we’re trying to find places where we can set a precedent of JNF discriminatory policy,” he said.

According to IJV’s Weinstein, this campaign will focus on first educating the Canadian public about the JNF’s true nature and making connections between Indigenous land rights in Israel/Palestine and Canada.

“Imagine if we had a Canadian charity that provided homes and parks to English Canadians only, on land taken from French Canadians. It could never happen, except if we lied about what the charity does. Yet it is precisely what we have done to the Native people of Canada—and few of us are proud of that legacy. So there are Canadian examples where we can make common cause with human rights issues around Indigenous land rights,” Weinstein explained.

“Most Canadians don't realize that our taxes support the JNF mission to erase Palestinian villages and lives so Jews can live as first-class citizens,” he continued. “We don't know that we support racial discrimination in Israel that would be illegal in Canada.”

Originally from Montreal, Jillian Kestler-D'Amours is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. More of her work can be found at http://jilldamours.wordpress.com.

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Canada Park 2

The Boycott Debate

Moira Peters — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:39:11 +0000

Klein, Lerer, Baskin on the effects of internal, external pressure on Israel

EAST JERUSALEM—"More than twenty-five people were arrested today in Beit Ummar," says a Canadian member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who sits behind me in a Ramallah auditorium in the West Bank. In front of me in the Friends School Hall, writer Naomi Klein prepares to speak to about 500 internationals, intellectuals, activists, NGO workers and journalists packed into the auditorium meant to seat 350. Spectators stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the back of the hall; a handful crouch in the aisles.

"Last week the same thing happened," explains the ISM activist.

The police had arrested eight activists from Ta'ayush, an Israeli human rights organization, although they had documentation from the Israeli Supreme Court proving the military isn't allowed to shut off agricultural areas. Bat Ayin settlers uprooted over 100 trees near Beit Ummar in late June, reported The Palestine Media Center. The Israeli Army's response was to name the area a closed military zone. Anyone going in and out of the area would be arrested.

The Bat Ayin settlement is within Gush Etzion, one of the largest Israeli settlement blocks. The region, southwest of Bethlehem, is the most agriculturally fertile land in the West Bank. According to the spiritual beliefs of religious Jewish settlers, all of British Mandate Palestine should be returned to the Jews. This includes the West Bank, or what they call by the biblical term Judea and Samaria. The settlement of Bat Ayin is home to the "Bat Ayin Underground," a group that plotted the bombing of a Palestinian girls’ school in East Jerusalem in 2002.

International Palestinian solidarity workers and Israeli human rights activists have been escorting farmers from Beit Ummar to their agricultural lands near Hebron to protect them from violent attacks by nearby Israeli settlers.

Settler attacks, military arrests, and uprooted trees (which are a means of sustenance, livelihood and spirituality) are daily realities for Palestinians since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 and radical religious Jewish settlers began setting up outposts across the West Bank. Concurrently, on the other side of the separation barrier – which will stretch more than 700 km when completed – Jewish Israelis live without such disturbances. The Israeli Security Agency Shin Bet admitted in May that there is no security reason to continue building the wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice five years ago. Nonetheless construction continues.

Klein’s talk in Ramallah (full transcript here) heralds the first coordinated speaking tour in Israel/Palestine promoting the boycott of Israeli cultural and academic institutions. Palestinian civil society first called for a broad boycott, divestments and sanctions against Israel in 2005. The boycott demands Israel honour UN Resolution 194 and end the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantle the separation barrier, and recognize as equal the rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and the right of refugees to return to their homes.

Klein blushes as Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian Initiative lauds her as a woman of her word for participating in the weekly nonviolent demonstration against the separation barrier in the border town of Bil'in. The barbed wire fence annexes over 50 per cent of Bil'in's land to Israel. This has allowed two Canadian-registered companies, Green Park and Green Mount, to construct settlements on the annexed land. A Quebec judge is currently deliberating on whether to hear Bil'in's case against the companies, which argues that their actions violate international law by transferring civilians onto occupied territory.

"There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way," Klein tells the audience in Ramallah. "Whether the lesson of the Holocaust should be 'never again' to anyone, or 'never again to us.'" For Klein the answer is clear. Growing up Jewish in Toronto, she first became active in the social justice movement as a student at the University of Toronto, where she occupied administrative offices to call for divestment from apartheid South Africa. "It is precisely because of what we experienced as Jews that we must denounce racism, denounce systems of segregation wherever they crop up, even and especially when they crop up amongst our own," says Klein.

As Israeli attacks on Palestinians have escalated, Israeli trade relations haven’t suffered, but deepened, says Klein. There's a reason there is no motivation for peace, she explains: People in Israel can live normal lives.

The economy, built on homeland security, is thriving, says Klein. "The Occupied Territories are the laboratory and [...] the Palestinian people are the test market for these technologies." Israeli companies like Elbit Systems, who built the "apartheid wall" in the West Bank, are selling their expertise to the US government. The main subcontract for a network of sensors, guard towers and electrified fences on the Canada-US and US-Mexico borders went to Elbit, Klein reports.

"We are challenging the idea of normalization because when a film that you really want to see isn’t playing in the Jerusalem Film Festival, when a conference you wanted to go to isn’t going to happen in Tel Aviv because people have decided that they are not going to have it there, that challenges such a central part of Israeli identity," explains Klein. This, she believes, will pressure a part of Israeli society to say: "We need peace to have a normal life."

Klein thinks there has been a change within Israeli society after the 2008 massacre in Gaza and the election of the far right Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. "Most progressive Israelis drew the line at calling Israel an apartheid state and calling for a boycott," but now, she says, a group of Israelis have come together to form Boycott from Within.

****

Yael Lerer is the founder of Andalus Publishing and a Boycott from Within member.

The publishing company hasn't turned a profit. It can barely afford to translate The Shock Doctrine into Hebrew. Fortunately, Klein donated Andalus the publication rights. All royalties from Hebrew copies sold in Israel will go towards Andalus for translating Arabic literature into Hebrew. "I think that all our work is a work of resistance," says Lerer. She explains that publishing books in Hebrew by authors like Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Khoury (both donated publishing rights to Andalus) is part of the fight against the cultural hegemony in Israel. Most Israelis "don't really want to be part of the Arab world," says Lerer. "They don't want to read Arabic literature or to be aware of what is going on around them."

From her home office in Tel Aviv, Lerer tells me, "With every book that I publish, I always have some moments that I think 'this is the last book that I publish'; and for what, for whom?

"But on the other hand," she adds, "I think that if there are a thousand Israelis that read Naomi Klein, like some of those that read our Arabic translations, it’s going to make some impact."

Lerer says boycotting Israel doesn't mean you must stop speaking to Israelis. Instead, she wants to end the normalization of the occupation. "I cannot bear this normality that Israelis live," explains Lerer. "Personally, I'm disturbed by all of these Israelis who think of themselves as enlightened people and at the same time don't do anything against the occupation, or do things, but in a very minor way." She hopes intellectuals won't be welcomed to international festivals if they're contributing to the portrayal of a "normal liberal Israel, when Israel is an apartheid state." Lerer thinks more academics who fear the repercussions of speaking against Israel might be motivated to speak out if they’re pressured by the international community.

Lerer has been an activist for nearly 30 years. "No-one could imagine then what is going on now. Nobody could imagine massacres like Gaza," she says. "With the slogans of peace Israel gets all this support and can continue to do what it wants." The Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the peace agreement with Egypt in 1978. And yet, says Lerer, "So much blood has been shed since then."

Lerer doesn't expect change from inside Israel anymore. "I need this boycott. I need external pressure." When I ask her if she thinks the boycott will further antagonize Israel she reminds me of the Tel Aviv University poll: 94 per cent of Israeli Jews supported the attack on Gaza. "What is more aggressive than this [attack on Gaza]?" she asks. "Concentration camps? Gas chambers?"

****

Some critics of the boycott believe the BDS campaign will only increase Israeli fears that they're being attacked. Very few Israelis, including those calling themselves peace activists, support the boycott.

"What we're going to do by doing that [boycotting Israel] is create greater anxiety amongst Israelis," says Jerusalem Post columnist Gershon Baskin. CEO and founder of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), Baskin believes that if there is still a chance for a two state solution—"the only solution," in his view—then the focus should be on that.

IPCRI is housed in a unique location inside the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, overlooking East Jerusalem. Down the road is the concrete wall and the checkpoint into Bethlehem. Across the street at the foot of the hill, an active construction site builds block houses in the settlement of Har Homa.

"I think it's using ammunition too early," reiterates the peace activist. "It won't get the support of governments around the world at this point. It'll be on the margins."

Baskin thinks the international community should instead employ a concentrated boycott of products coming from the settlements, focusing on Israeli policies in the settlements and the occupied territories. "That would have more support amongst ordinary Israelis and it would not be using a tool that might be important to use at a later stage, and we're not there yet," says Baskin.

"If you check you'll find a direct correlation between those who are using the language of apartheid South Africa and how they see the solution to the conflict. And I disagree with them entirely," says Baskin. "I think it denies Palestinian people the right to self determination. A large majority of Palestinians want an independent state. They don’t want to be part of a bi-national state, neither do Israelis." Furthermore, Baskin believes that one secular democratic state for all Israeli and Palestinian citizens will mean continuing the conflict. According to Baskin, "It means that we're going to be killing each other in much greater numbers with much greater intensity."

****

Nonetheless, Israel's assault on Gaza this winter has turned more people into supporters of the worldwide boycott, especially in Canada. Independent Jewish Voices Canada (including signatory Naomi Klein) became the first national Jewish organization to support the boycott in June.

The University of Toronto held the first Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in 2005. This year, 40 cities participated in IAW and Hampshire College became the first American school to completely divest from Israel. (The institution has withdrawn its investments in six companies that supply the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied territories.)

Citing IAW events in Toronto, Canadian director John Greyson pulled his film from TLVFest in June, the annual LGBT film festival in Tel Aviv. "The Israeli apartheid forum this week, and particularly Naomi Klein's speech, helped clarify my thoughts. Her words took me back to the BDS movement of the Eighties, against South African apartheid, and the first 16mm film I ever made, which was in support of that struggle, clips of which are included in Fig Trees [Greyson's latest film]. The cultural boycott worked in South Africa's case, and lead directly to the sweeping changes and activism that Fig Trees celebrates in song. Therefore, in the spirit of the film, and those activists, I don't feel there's a choice any longer," explains Greyson in his letter to the director of TLVFest.

The Yes Men also chose not to screen their film at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July.

In Jerusalem, according to an Israeli currently organizing a social justice literature festival in the city, there is no place to hold an event where both Israelis and Palestinians will come.

Meanwhile, Ma'an News reports settlers from Bat Ayin set fire to fig, olive and grape trees in Beit Ummar, and ten more Palestinians from Beit Ummar were arrested in July.

Klein’s arguments for BDS are expounded on in her article for The Guardian, "Enough, it's Time for a Boycott.

Carmelle Wolfson is an independent journalist from Toronto currently based in Israel/Palestine, and a copy editor for Briarpatch Magazine.

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Yael at Andulus