We Need To Talk About the Jewish National Fund

The world took little notice last month when over 100 Bedouin, a third of them minors, were arrested in the Negev/Naqab desert in Southern Israel. They were protesting the Jewish National Fund’s planting trees on 300 dunams as part of a 5,000 dunam (1,236 acre) afforestation project on land where 300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live and farm.

Because the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund evokes images of the iconic blue box and such figures as Albert Einstein planting trees, too little attention has been placed on the role they have played, and continue to play, in Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Take the home of the Bakri family in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron for example.

In 2001, during the thick of the Second Intifada, while Israeli restrictions were keeping Palestinian residents away from their homes, Jewish settlers entered the Bakri family’s house near the Al Ibrahimi mosque in the center of the city. First, the settlers claimed that they had leased the house from its owners. Then, when that was rebuffed, they said that they had purchased the house from one of the Bakri family members. This was proved false and the settlers were indicted for forging that paperwork. Finally, the settlers attempted to claim that land was previously owned by a pre-1948 Jewish trust they were representing.

In 2019, having squatted illegally in the house for 18 years, Israel’s court finally ordered the settlers to evacuate the property and pay the Bakri family NIS 600,000 (around $187,000 USD). However, one of the settlers argued that the ground floor of the building, where he had taken up residence, had been purchased in 2018 by the KKL-JNF, through its subsidiary Himanuta. He was granted a stay, secured by a 108,000 shekel (around $34,000) deposit paid by the KKL-JNF.

The KKL-JNF (commonly and henceforth referred to just as the JNF) was founded in 1901 at the fifth Zionist Congress to establish a national fund to purchase land for Jewish settlement in then-Ottoman ruled historic Palestine.

According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, in 1940, Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department, suggested a national project of meticulously compiling the topography, roads, land, and water sources and a profile of the entire Palestinian population by age, political affiliations, and hostility to the Zionist project. Known as the Village Files, these documents became a crucial tool for Jewish militias, who in 1948 burned villages, carried out massacres, and drove between 750,000 and one million Palestinians from their homes and villages, making them refugees.

Following the events of 1948, the JNF planted pine trees on the ruins of the destroyed Palestinian villages to prevent the expelled Palestinians from returning.

Following Israel’s 1967 capture and occupation of the West Bank, the JNF expanded its activities.

The Sumarin family lived in their Silwan neighborhood East Jerusalem home since the 1950s until, without their knowledge, using Israel’s controversial Absentees’ Property Law, their property was classified as “abandoned” and JNF was appointed the property’s custodian. In 1991, an eviction lawsuit was filed against them by the JNF’s subsidiary Himanuta. A complex legal battle ensued until July 2020 when the court ordered all 18 members of the family to vacate their home and pay the JNF 20,000 shekels (about $5,800).

Later that year, the Israeli organization Peace Now filed a lawsuit demonstrating that the eviction case against the Sumarin family had been funded and managed by the right-wing settler Elad organization under the JNF’s name. In return for financing and managing the eviction proceedings, Elad would receive the property from the JNF after the Palestinian family was removed.

Dr. James Zogby, in the Palestinians: the Invisible Victims, lays out how the JNF, from its very inception, was designed as an exclusivist organization, its charter stating that a lessee of JNF land “is asked to assure the JNF that only Jewish labor will be employed on this land.” A recent report on the JNF by Maya Rosen and A Daniel Roth, reveals the deeply intertwined – as of 2007, the JNF owned 13% of the total land in Israel – and mutually beneficial relationship between the JNF and the Israeli state allowing the JNF to carry out blatant discriminatory and internationally provocative actions (such as the purchase of West Bank land) in place of the state.

Up until now, peace activists have focused their attention on halting settlement expansion in the West Bank and expulsions in East Jerusalem. It appears that is not enough. To reach the goal of a just and durable peace in Israel/Palestine, it will be imperative to dismantle the JNF, a provocative agent in the dispossession of Palestinians.

Ariel Gold is the national co-director and Senior Middle East Policy Analyst with CODEPINK for Peace. Mary Miller is a CODEPINK intern.

5 thoughts on “We Need To Talk About the Jewish National Fund”

    1. The only terminations seem to be those of the Palestinian’s who are being evicted at astounding rates in every part of Palestine where most all of them and their familied have lived for hundreds of years and some for millenia.

      1. No one, Jewish or Arab,in Palestine, is well served by regurgitations of alternate versions of history. Israel as a political state is going to be around for a while. A secular Palestinian state, even confined to Gaza and the entire West Bank and part of Jerusalem, is not in the interest of not only the Jewish majority now residing in Palestine, but in the interest of the Arab neighbors of Palestine. It seems to be that a focus of Arabs within Israel and in the “occupied” territories, should be property rights. Leasinng, purchases, financing of real property on as equal terms as possible. There are economic reasons for some secular Israelis to support that, which in turn raises the economic power and standard of living for Arabs. The political changes follow economic facts on the ground. No one, Jewish or Arab, is admitting any mistakes or could have or should haves. It’s best to refrain from berating either group, as there is no benefit to that. As for the ‘refugee’ sector of the disputes, perhaps Russia is taking back millions of expelled Germans, or China taking back Tibetans? There are quite a few Syrians who would like to return in peace to Syria, but that isn’t happening either. Refugees who never go back are the normal,not the exception. Another pebble in the shoe that needs to be tossed, not adjusted to . Or we could ask all the Arabs to return to Arabia from whence they came in the 8 cent to overrun Greek Levant , Visigoth N Africa and Spain, and Persian Babylon.

  1. Surprised ?? Zionazi Terrorists learned their “Trade” well from their former Nazi masters…!!

    1. that is simply a distorted view. the zionists tried to bargain with the devil to get a few jews out of europe. they had no illusions about the nazis. By 1940, the possible expulsions of Jews from Europe by Nazis as Hitler’s solution had been replaced by annihilation. Everyone knew it, including st roosevelt. The German offensives in N Africa in 1941 were going to go right thru Palestine where there were a few hundred thousand Jews. Those Jews were going to be deported to Europe and exterminated, or simply shot in ditches in Palestine, with the help of the pro Nazi Arab ruling class. The large Jewish communities in Iraq and Syria likewise were slated for extermination, again with the help of the Arabs. Funny, the Jews who had lived in those lands in some cases longer than the Arabs had began to think emigration to a liberated Jewish palestine might be a practical solution. You want justice?History contains none.

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