The JNF has had a fall…

JVL Introduction

Statements by Samuel Hayek, the Jewish National Fund’s chair, and social media postings by Gary Mond, its Treasurer, giving vent to Islamophobic views have provoked condemnation by the Board of Deputies and the Union of Jewish Students.

The students state:  “We will not sit idly by as Islamophobia and bigotry is tolerated at the heart of British Jewry.”

Both bodies have suspended their support for the JNF.

These condemnations, however welcome, do not go beyond implying that the JNF has some “rotten apples” to remove. The Charity Commission, which has announced a review into Hayek’s and Mond’s comments, can also be counted on to call for cosmetic remedies.

The Stop the JNF campaign argues that this will not overcome the JNF’s racism, which is embedded in the organisation’s core purpose to transfer land from the Palestinians into Jewish ownership.

KKL-JNF the JNF UK’s parent organisation is currently promoting the expulsion of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and developing a forestation programme aimed at removing Bedouin villagers from their lands in the Negev.

Communal organisations have yet to speak out on these widely condemned examples of JNF support for ethnic cleansing.

This article was originally published by Stop the JNF on Tue 18 Jan 2022. Read the original here.

The JNF has had a fall, the Charity Commission will put it together again

The Charity Commission has announced that it will examine whether “regulatory action is required” in respect of the Jewish National Fund UK following Islamophobic statements by its longstanding head, Samuel Hayek. This coincides with the revelation that the Honorary Treasurer of the JNF UK, Gary Mond, had expressed support for Islamophobic statements in his social media postings. In the past, the Charity Commission has summarily dismissed calls to investigate the JNF’s funding for projects that, in clear violation of international law and the professed policy of successive British governments, have promoted the expansion of Jewish settlements and their armed vigilantes.

It is not Hayek’s and Mond’s repugnant views that make the JNF racist. Racism is integral to the JNF. It exists to promote the Israeli state’s policy of building Jewish ethnic supremacy in Israel and the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinians. As the Charity Commission turns its attention to the racism of JNF officials, Bedouin villagers in the Negev are resisting their dispossession by the JNF’s forest planting which its fundraising publicity, in this country, claims to be for environmental improvement. On 15th January, the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, reported: “Police disperse hundreds of protesters with stun grenades and tear gas, as Israel’s Negev erupts in protest over Jewish National Fund’s tree-planting on land used for agriculture by local Bedouin.” As an editorial of the same newspaper (13th January) stated: “Only the naive can believe that planting the trees near the Bedouin villages Mulada and Sawa area was meant to celebrate Tu Bishvat (Jewish Arbor Day) or to improve the ecological fabric of the Negev.” The JNF, through a front organisation called Himnuta, is also pressing to expel Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem. These land confiscations which will cause further bloodshed stem from Israel’s policy of concentrating the Palestinian population into ever smaller urban ghettos.

In an announcement last year, the JNF stated its intentions openly to acquire land across the Green Line, dispensing with the services of proxy agents and signalling an escalation of land confiscation from Palestinians.

The Charity Commission is a British government agency that approves the JNF UK’s fundraising as a charitable activity. However, the Commission far from ensuring that the JNF complies with charity laws and regulations has assisted the JNF to circumvent them. The Commission’s 2005 report on the JNF following its “review visit”, noted: “We recommended that the trustees review the JNFCT [JNF Charitable Trust] website and all other information they publish. They should try to ensure that such information refrains from indicating a moral/political support for the state of Israel, but rather explains the focus of the charitable activities currently being funded by the Trust”. The Commission did not demand that the JNF cease to fund projects that support the Israeli state but merely that it should describe them differently because “such language has arguably given ammunition to those wanting to question the legitimacy of the charity’s work”.

In 2018, that legitimacy was challenged by Kholoud Al Ajarma, a Palestinian woman. She was from a family that had lived in one of the seven villages that, in 1948, Zionist forces ethnically cleansed and were subsequently planted over by the JNF UK sponsored British Park to prevent the villagers’ return. The Commission was able to protect the JNF from scrutiny by successfully arguing at a First Tier Tribunal hearing that Ms Al Ajarma had no legal standing to challenge the Commission’s original decision to dismiss her case, which had called for the deregistration of the JNF UK as a charity. In a subsequent correspondence with a person querying the JNF’s charitable pretention, the Commission wrote: “In simple terms, the test for charitable status is a test of what an organisation was set up to do, not what it does in practice”. For a regulatory body that supposedly exists to monitor what charities do in practice, such an argument is risible. It is also untenable even on its own terms. The JNF is doing precisely what it was set up do and, by any standard definition of the term, it is not charitable. It promotes taking over Palestinian land to make it available exclusively for Jewish settlement. This is now widely acknowledged to be instrumental in the Palestinians’ ethnic cleansing.

Given the Commission’s track record, the outcome of its current inquiry into the JNF leadership’s racism can be safely predicted. It will recommend to the organisation how to revamp its tarnished image. What the Commission will not do is expose to the British public the JNF’s role in entrenching Israel’s system of apartheid. Like Humpty Dumpty, the JNF has had a fall. The Charity Commission can be counted on to help put it together again but it will be still racist.

Comments (3)

  • Margaret West says:

    “War on Want” has also posted about the actions of JNF
    in attempting to displacing indigenous Palestinian Bedouin communities – in the guise of “forestation” of the al-Naqab desert,

    They have also told of the case of the Salhiya family who were forcibly evicted from their home in Sheikh Jarrah, in the process of which they were arrested and beaten by Israeli forces. Their home was subsequently demolished to rubble.

    Incidentally – in previous posts – War on Want has identified the routine use of JCB diggers and excavators in demolishing Palestinians homes.

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  • Jon Kurta says:

    Guess I’m not the only one here who, with the encouragement of local chedar class (in my case Newington Green then Finsbury Park synagogues) naively brought in money and fund raised for the ubiquitous blue box, wonder now where those trees were planted and what they covered up….

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  • George Wilmers says:

    What this article doesn’t mention is that Mond was also, until he was forced to resign earlier this month, the senior vice president of the BoD. Like others in the BoD his overt bigotry has been well tolerated in that organisation until it became just too embarrassing in the light of the publicity. He didn’t exactly make a secret of his views. In a Facebook post from 2016 he wrote:

    “We just have to hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that all civilization — West and East, American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, whatever — is at war with these evil bastards, and I have to say it, at war with Islam. And, just as Islam has lost before in history, it will lose again.”

    Just substitute ‘Judaism’ for ‘Islam’ in the above and ‘Palestinian’ for ‘Israeli’ and imagine that a senior member of the Labour party had posted such a statement!

    So what did the White Queen of the BoD, whose position requires her to regularly practise believing six impossible things before breakfast, have to say? Note Marie van der Zyl’s careful wording:

    “We greatly regret the circumstances which have led to Gary’s resignation, which are a matter of public record. As an organisation we are committed to fostering strong and positive relations with other faith and minority communities.”

    https://www.thejc.com/news/news/'islamophobic'-board-official-was-'criticising-the-paris-terrorists'-1lkQRdmLxtbhgQIJIty2XO

    The White Queen’s circumspection is hardly surprising. According to Jonathan Hoffman, one of more than 100 militant Zionists who signed a letter supporting of Mond and Hayek, some 75 members (36%) of those voting voted against the BoD motion to censure Hayek:

    https://mobile.twitter.com/jhoffman1/status/1485216079538442242?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

    Of course the wider “circumstances” to which the White Queen so delicately refers, are the total collapse of liberal zionist ideology under the weight of its internal contradictions.

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