Campaign Targets Jewish National Fund (JNF) Charitable Status in Canada
Co-authored by Hazem Jamjoum
An international effort to challenge the JNF’s charitable status could form an important component in mobilizing a broader international movement against Israeli apartheid. In 2006, people in Palestine will be marking the 30th anniversary of Land Day. It will also mark the year when the world will observe the 30th anniversary of the entry into force of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (on 18 July 1976) – a largely forgotten convention that was never ratified by Israel (or other settler-colonial states like the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand for that matter), but that clearly outlines the illegal nature of the apartheid policies practiced by the Israeli state and its affiliated agencies.
On 30 March 1976, thousands of indigenous Palestinians occupied
by Israel in 1948 participated in a mass strike against systematic
discrimination triggered by the government’s plans to expropriate
5,500 acres of Arab-owned land. The villages of Arraba, Sakhnin,
Deir Hanna and other smaller communities in the Galilee – a region
of northern Israel with a Palestinian majority – were particularly
targeted. The Israeli police responded to the demonstrations with
violence, killing six unarmed Palestinian youths, wounding another
hundred activists and arresting over three-hundred people.
In the intervening years, these events have become consecrated in
Palestinian memory as Land Day and are celebrated on both sides of
the ‘Green Line’ (i.e. the 1949 Armistice Line that separates
‘Israel’ from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Just as the
Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 served to galvanize a whole
generation of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, the
killings of Raja Abu Rayya, Khader Khalayla, Khadija Shawahneh,
Khair Yassin, Mohsen Taha and Ra’fat Zuheiri on 30 March 1976
mobilized a sense of community among Palestinians in opposition to
the systematic racism they faced within the Israeli state. The
demonstrations were an important moment in the re-invigoration of
community activism through organizations like the Communist Party
and younger groupings of Palestinian activists such as the Abna
al-Balad movement (or Sons of the Land).
The massacre also highlighted the Israeli government’s strategy of
yehud ha-galil, the project of ‘Judaizing’ the Galilee, which
remained a clandestine program until 1976 when it was openly
adopted as a slogan of the Israeli Housing Ministry. The rationale
for this policy was provided by Israel Koenig - the head of the
Israeli Interior Ministry’s Galilee Division - in a report drafted
for then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. This report was leaked in
1976. It claimed that the Palestinian citizens of Israel were “a
cancer in the Jewish body that had to be curbed and contained” and
argued for a policy of “terror, assassination, intimidation, land
confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the
Galilee of its Arab population.” The Koenig report led to a brutal
wave of land confiscations and the establishment of Jewish
settlements known as mitzpim (‘lookouts’ in Hebrew) in the Galilee,
culminating eventually with the general strikes and protests of
Land Day.
Uri Davis’ recent book Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the
Struggle Within (2004) helps to underline the on-going colonial and
racist nature of the Israeli state itself. Davis’ book argues that
a central component of Israel’s colonization project continues to
be the so-called ‘redemption of the land’ – read: the forcible
expropriation of Palestinian livelihood for the purposes of
Jewish-only settlement. The slogan of ‘redeeming’ land was used by
early Zionists to highlight one of the central goals of the Zionist
movement, which was to acquire lands in Palestine for Jewish-only
settlement. This slogan was first adopted by early Zionists and
entrusted as a task to the Keren Kayemet LeYesrae’l or Jewish
National Fund (KKL-JNF), which was established during the Fifth
Zionist Congress in 1901 as an executive arm of the Congress. Since
then the JNF has continued to acquire lands for Jewish-only
settlement, often establishing new communities or ‘natural
reserves’ over destroyed Palestinian villages.
This land-grab has traditionally focused on areas whose demographic
composition remained predominantly Palestinian after the foundation
of the State of Israel in 1948 – known to Palestinians as the Nakba
(Catastrophe) during which 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically
cleansed, an estimated 31,000 individuals were internally
displaced, at least 14,000 civilians killed, over 530 villages and
11 towns were destroyed and millions of acres of land were
expropriated. The ‘internal’ colonization that followed this bloody
chapter in the establishment of the state of Israel has translated
into forcible attempts to ‘Judaize’ the Galilee and the Naqab, in
southern Israel, and the further expropriation of roughly another
one-million acres of Palestinian land. While prior to 1948
Palestinians owned 94 percent of the land in what became the
Israeli state of today, this number was reduced to 3 percent of all
lands in this polity as a result of successive waves of systematic
land-confiscation. By 1993, 80 percent of the lands that had
remained in Palestinian hands after the Nakba were now in the hands
of new Jewish settlements or the Israeli state itself.
International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the
Crime of Apartheid
Article II
For the purpose of the present Convention, the term "the crime of
apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of
racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern
Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the
purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial
group of persons over any other racial group of persons and
systematically oppressing them:
[…] (c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to
prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the
political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and
the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full
development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to
members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and
freedoms, including […] the right to leave and to return to their
country, […] the right to freedom of movement and residence […]
d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide
the population along racial lines by the creation of separate
reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups,
[…] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial
group or groups or to members thereof;
In Toronto, Palestinians and their allies will be launching a
campaign to strip the JNF of its charitable status in Canada this
Land Day. We hope that it will be a stepping stone in broadening
the international struggle against Israeli apartheid and a means of
holding our own governments accountable for their obligations under
international law.
The entire convention can be found at
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/11.htm
The practice continues to this day in regions of Israel that are
still predominantly inhabited by Palestinians. While international
media focuses on the illegal Israeli colonies established in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip – which are often euphemistically referred
to as 'settlements' – the privately-run JNF, in tandem with other
Israeli state agencies, continues to lay claim to Palestinian lands
within Israel. Most recently, the JNF has begun targeting the
Bedouin populations of the Naqab. This is part of a broader process
in which the Bedouin population of the state, numbering some
110,000 people has been systematically separated from its land base
over the years. Most recently this process has occurred through
government fumigation programs, Jewish settlement activity in the
Naqab and the IDF’s expropriation of lands inhabited by the Bedouin
for ‘military’ purposes (including the creation of firing ranges,
closed military areas, etc).
It should be noted that the JNF manages its lands policy through a
range of acquisitions coordinated with the Israeli Lands
Administration (ILA). The ILA is responsible for the management of
all publicly held lands in Israel and is governed by the Basic Law
establishing the ILA (1960); the Israel Lands Law (1960); and the
Covenant between the State of Israel and the World Zionist
Organization (1960). According to the ILA’s own data it is
responsible for managing 93 percent of all lands in the state (most
of which were formerly owned by Palestinians). The JNF holds half
the seats in this institution and thus has an important say in the
way these lands are managed. According to the JNF’s Memorandum of
Association it is responsible for raising funds for Jewish-only
settlement.
Despite the racist and colonial nature of the Fund it is
nonetheless listed as a charitable organization in most Western
countries. In Canada, the JNF raised $15-million in the early 1970s
to establish ‘Canada Park’ a ‘recreational’ area built on
land-occupied by the Israeli military in 1967 in order to cover-up
the destroyed Palestinian villages of Imwas, Yallu, and Beit Nuba.
Such a blatant manipulation of historical memory in the name of
‘nature conservation’ highlights the way in which the JNF and ILA
are used in an attempt to erase any signs of the indigenous
population of Palestine. According to a 1986 UN report prepared by
the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting
the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories,
which dealt, in part, with the situation of those displaced by the
hostilities of 1967:
“One particular illustration of this situation is the fate of the
inhabitants of Imwas, Beit-Nuba and Yalu, reduced to the state of
wandering refugees since their villages were razed by the occupying
authorities in 1967. The Special Committee considers it a matter of
deep concern that these villagers have persistently been denied the
right to return to their land on which Canada Park has been built
by the Jewish National Fund of Canada and where the Israeli
authorities are reportedly planning to plant a forest instead of
allowing the reconstruction of the destroyed villages.”
Spurred by Davis’ work, in the summer of 2004 activists from the
Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in Scotland launched a campaign
to strip the JNF of its charitable status in Scotland. The demand
put forward by PSC activists is one that can be produced in other
countries were the JNF enjoys charitable status. It allows people
to begin challenging the racist policies and institutions upon
which the Israeli state and the dispossession of the Palestinian
people in 1948 was built. In November 2004, the Scottish
parliament’s Communities Committee agreed to take the PSC’s
concerns into account in deliberations on the new Charities Bill
before the legislature. The successes of the PSC should be built
upon in other countries.
Kole Killibarda and Hazem Jamjoum are members of Al-Awda
Toronto.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
1. Sign the online petition being delivered to Canada Revenue
Agency demanding that the JNF be stripped of its charitable status.
You can sign the petition at:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/jnfca/petition.html
2. Support the campaign by Calling/Faxing Canada Revenue Agency to
demand the JNF be stripped of its charitable status.
Contact:
Elizabeth Tromp, Director General, Charities Directorate, Canada
Revenue Agency
In the Ottawa area: (613) 954-0410 (English) or (613) 954-6215
(bilingual)
Toll free elsewhere in Canada: 1-800-267-2384 (English) or
1-888-892-5667 (bilingual)
Fax: (613) 954-2586
3. Join Al-Awda’s JNF Campaign Contact [email protected] URL:
http://www.al-awda.ca