Al-Awda NY is an endorser of the following international campaign to Stop the JNF! Extensive campaign materials are available at the Stop the JNF website. An Al-Awda speaker will also be presenting at the March 30 event in New York City as part of the international campaign launch, and we encourage you to join us!
Stop the JNF
Stop Greenwashing Apartheid
Call for an international campaign to stop the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
To endorse the campaign, visit StoptheJNF.org
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) [1] was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba [2], and continues to play a central role in maintaining Israel’s regime of apartheid [3]. The JNF provided political, financial and intelligence [4] support for the Zionist forces in their conquest, massacres and ethnic cleansing operations that characterized the 1948-49 war and the Palestinian Nakba. Today, the JNF controls vast properties belonging to millions of Palestinians, developing them exclusively for persons of “Jewish nationality”, a concept established and promoted in the JNF’s charter to exclude all others.
The JNF was created in 1901 to acquire land and property rights in Palestine and beyond for exclusive Jewish settlement. While indigenous Palestinians are barred from leasing [5], building on, managing or working their own land, the JNF holds the land in trust for “those of Jewish race or descendency” living anywhere in the world to “promote the interests of Jews in the prescribed region” [6]
To ensure such racist control over the majority of confiscated Palestinian lands, Israel adopted the JNF model of discriminatory land management as official state policy. In 1953, the Israeli Knesset legislated special status for JNF, enabling it to carry out governmental functions as a Zionist institution (“for Jews only”). The JNF continues to operate as a state-chartered organization under Israeli law [7], with direct control over some thirteen percent of the land in pre-1967 Israel. Further, the JNF appoints six out of thirteen members of the governing board of the Israel Lands Authority (ILA), which manages the JNF’s thirteen percent, in addition to another eighty percent of all land in Israel. It is through this relationship with the JNF that Israel, while portraying itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, in fact, outsources the land-management functions of the state to this discriminatory state-chartered organization.
After the 1948 Nakba and the expulsion of approximately two-thirds of the Palestinian population from their homeland, the JNF was repackaged as an environmentalist organization carrying out forestation activities. The JNF’s forests, parks and recreational facilities, planted and built on the ruins of hundreds of destroyed and depopulated Palestinian villages, have critically served to veil from public view the continuing official Israeli attempts to erase the traces of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The JNF is thus fundamentally complicit in the denial of displaced Palestinians’ rights to return, restitution and compensation, and in green-washing Israel’s regime of apartheid, colonization and occupation.
The JNF’s activities are not limited to the part of mandate Palestine that became Israel in 1948. The JNF’s Canada Park, for example, covers the remains of the Palestinian villages Imwas, Yalu, and Beit Nuba, which the Israeli army depopulated and razed on the explicit orders of the then Chief-of-Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, in the course of the 1967 war. Moreover, through its subsidiary Himnuta, the JNF has illegally acquired lands and houses in the occupied West Bank, and particularly in 1967 occupied Jerusalem.
Today, the JNF’s projects of displacement and forestation continue, particularly in the Naqab (Negev) and the Galilee. In these areas, “development” projects in which the JNF plays a central role, aim to continue the forced displacement of Palestinian citizens of Israel to make way for exclusively Jewish settlements and for JNF parks and forests.
The JNF continues to serve as a global fundraiser for Israeli colonization and apartheid. Despite its complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and despite its status as a chartered agent of the State of Israel, the JNF and its affiliate organizations enjoy charitable status in over 50 countries as environmental charities. These JNF branches worldwide also work to muster the political support necessary for legitimizing and promoting Israeli apartheid, a task greatly facilitated by the political, economic and cultural elites in each country that have signed on as JNF patrons.
As part of the global movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the State of Israel until such time as it respects and implements international law, we the undersigned organizations call on global civil society to join us in a campaign to challenge the JNF by:
exposing and documenting the role of the JNF in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine;
protesting and disrupting the JNF’s fundraising activities across the globe;
opposing and acting to nullify the JNF’s charitable and tax exempt status in Europe, the Americas, Oceania and Asia, and Africa;
condemning the activities of the JNF through popular tribunals and truth commissions;
supporting Palestinian and Israeli organizations resisting the forced displacement of Palestinians in the Naqab and Galilee; and
urging those organizations collaborating with the JNF, and especially those with environmental and anti-racist mandates, to break ties with the JNF.
Notes
[1] In Hebrew, the JNF takes the name Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (KKL) (literally, the “Perpetual Fund for Israel”). In some states, JNF affiliate organizations use this name instead of JNF.
[2] Ethnic cleansing by means of expulsion, massacre and population transfer and related grave breaches and crimes defined in the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), as well as the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (1945) and the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court (1998).
[3] The term apartheid refers to the crime defined in article 2 of the “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid” and article 7 of the “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.
[4] The JNF played an important role in the preparation of the “village files”, used by Zionist forces as a primary reference in planning and executing the depopulation and destruction of Palestinian communities in the 1948 Nakba (See Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: One World Press, 2006)
[5] In some cases, Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab have been allowed 3-year leases (compared to the 49-year leases granted Jewish citizens of Israel).
[6] Jewish National Fund Memorandum of Association (1907).
[7] State-chartered, or para-state, organizations are organizations that through a formal, legal agreement, participates in the functions of the state.
[8] Most villages of Palestinian Bedouin of the Naqab were rendered non-existent by Israel’s 1965 Planning and Construction Law. Today, over 80,000 of these Palestinian citizens of Israel live in the “unrecognized villages”, their land has been confiscated, they receive no water, electricity, or any other form of government-provided means of existence, and face the constant threat of home demolition and forced eviction. The state aims to displace them to the urban townships and use their land for exclusively Jewish settlement.The JNF aims to play a leading role in this process through its “Blueprint Negev” fundraising campaign, through which it plans to invest $600 million in 10 years “supporting a new generation of Israeli pioneers”. See the JNF eBook Volume 1, p. 18.
Endorsing organisations
Al Awda-NY: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition
AL-BEIT: Association for the Defence of Human Rights in Israel
Alternative Information Centre (AIC)
American Jews for a Just Peace (AJJP)
American Muslims for Palestine
Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP)
Askapena
Australians for Palestine
Birthright Unplugged
Boycott Israel Network (BIN)
Boykot Israel Denmark
Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Cambridge Palestine Solidaritiy Campaign
Campagne BDS France
Campagne Civile Internationale pour la Protection du Peuple Palestinien
Canada Palestine Association
Collectif 69 De Soutien Au Peuple Palestinien
Collectif Judéo Arabe et Citoyen pour la Paix, Strasbourg
Don’t Buy Into Apartheid
Global Women’s Strike
Human Rights Legal Aid Fund
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG)
JNF eBook Series
Labor for Palestine
Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA)
National Lawyers Guild
Nederlands Palestina Komitee
New York City Labor Against the War.
Palestine Legal Aid Fund
Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC)
Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)
Pedal 100 days to Palestine
Philadelphia Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Coalition
Right of Return Congress
Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Siege Busters Working Group
SOAS Palestine Society
Students Against Israeli Apartheid, Carleton
Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix (UJFP)
US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
US Palestinian Community Network
Women for Palestine
York Palestine Solidarity Campaign
