Uri Avnery: Abolish the JNF
Last week I noted my effort to prevent Brookline’s selectmen from jumping on the latest Jewish National Fund’s fundraising efforts. Today an email brought a link to a Saturday article by Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri describing the JNF in more detail. It starts:
What would we say if an American institution, holding a seventh of all the land in the United States, adopted statutes that allowed it to sell or rent land only to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
We would not believe it. And it is, indeed, impossible.
But that’s the way things are in Israel. This is now the subject of a stormy public debate.
These are the facts: The Jewish National Fund (in Hebrew Keren Kayemet le-Israel - KKL) holds 13% of all the land in Israel. Its statutes explicitly prohibit the sale or rental of land to non-Jews. This means that every Jew in the world, living anywhere from Timbuktu to Kamchatka, can get land from the KKL, without even coming to Israel, while an Arab citizen of Israel, whose forefathers have lived here for hundreds - or even thousands - of years, cannot acquire a house or an apartment on its land…..
Further along:
In an official brief, the KKL [JNF] argues that it does not owe loyalty to the principles of the State of Israel, as put down in the 1948 Declaration of Independence (equality between all citizens, regardless of religion and race), but to “The Jewish People”. This means that “The Jewish People”, which is not a political body, is being presented as an independent entity superior to the State of Israel.
The KKL does not act, of course, for “the Jewish People”. It is an instrument of the Israeli Jewish community against the Israeli Arab community. It has become an instrument for institutionalized discrimination…..
May 20th, 2007 at 11:59 am
I grew up in a Zionist Youth Movement in the US, during the 80s and 90s. In 1999, after attending university, I decided to make aliyah. I was such an idealist Zionist, always promoting Israel on campus and serving as a “one woman hasbara (PR)”…
After living here (both in Jerusalem & Tel Aviv), I see things way differently than I had ever wanted to. I’m less observant, as I became ever-increasingly left-wing and secular, and bitter towards the religious right and organized religion in general.
Institutions I once held in such high regard - such as the JNF, working to promote Israel and “make the country bloom” - started to seem exactly how you described them “an instrument for institutionalized discrimination.” I almost even voted for the Worker’s Partyy (predominantly Arabs) in the last election, but stuck with Meretz.
I remember writing a paper once on my year program about how “the Aliyahs of escaping religious persecution in Russia were equivalent to the Pilgrims in the US” and how the Native Americans… well.. nevermind…. this isn’t quite the forum… but… you see where I’m going. I am leaving Eretz Yisrael after only 8 years… but… i’ll probably be back…
May 24th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Uri Avnery never gets tired from blaming Israel for every thing wrong in the world. He mish mash history and talk about a “thousands of years” of Arabs in Israel land and harming their rights to the land. But when we look back to the Arabs in Israel they keep their land and houses free of Jews while they are moving to dwell in Jewish communities, for better neighborhood.
Israel is the state of the Jewish people and has the task to correct the historical discriminating of Jews even by Arabs and even in Israel land for the last centuries. Arabs don’t give Jews the minimum rights needed for living in safe and prosperity, while Israel give their Arabs the same rights as the Jews, in some exceptions as results of historical and survival dispute over the right of the Jews to have their own state in the ME. That is the issue and the Arabs know it very well. It is quite stupid to ask Israel to suicide by her own deeds.