This Tu B’Shvat, our community must address the JNF’s role in the occupation
As we celebrate the festival of Tu B’Shvat this Monday by eating new fruit, reflecting on the natural world and planting trees, it is important that we do not ignore the elephant in the room: the occupation, and specifically the largest ecological organisation in Israel’s role in entrenching the occupation.
Tu B’Shvat, or Rosh HaShanah La’Ilanot (New Year of the Trees), is celebrated throughout the Jewish community as an ecological awareness day. For over one hundred years, one of the most common ways Jews have marked the festival is through supporting the Jewish National Fund (JNF) — Hebrew: קֶרֶן קַיֶּימֶת לְיִשְׂרָאֵל, Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (KKL)— an Israeli non-profit ecological organisation dedicated to ‘strengthening the bond between the Jewish people and their homeland’.
There is a long tradition of JNF certificates being given to those who donate to these schemes — schemes which seem, on their surface, benign. Many Jews receive such certificates as gifts on their Bar/Bat Mitvah or at their wedding. Through successful fundraising, the JNF claims to have planted over 250 million trees, built more than 200 dams and reservoirs, and developed more than 250,000 acres of land since its founding in 1901.
Yet the JNF uses its green credentials to uproot Palestinians from homes in which they have lived for decades, and claim land for exclusive use by Jews: a practice commonly known as ‘greenwashing’. Through their tree planting and infrastructure programmes, the JNF perpetuates the occupation, hiding forms of violence, dispossession and injustice behind a veneer of environmentalism.
The JNF is involved in expropriating land for settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In October 2019, US Reform Judaism — the largest Jewish denomination in the USA — turned down a donation from the JNF, accusing the charity of purchasing more than $14 million worth of land in the West Bank and failing to uphold high standards of transparency.
The JNF’s role in the occupation is not a historical footnote. It is happening right now in places like Silwan, a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem sitting just outside of the Old City.
A small number of Israeli settlers have already moved into houses in Silwan, forcing Palestinian families to vacate. Settler violence and harassment are a daily part of life for Palestinians in Silwan. As the JNF has been planting trees with diaspora donations, an insidious uprooting has been taking place — the eviction of the Palestinian Sumarin family by Himnuta, a JNF subsidiary.
The JNF uses Himnuta to avoid the stigma associated with being connected to extremist settler activities amongst many Jews in both Israel and the diaspora. The Sumarin family is just one example of the JNF’s greenwashing activity.
Despite their decades living in Silwan, on 20 September 2019 the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court gave the family only 90 days to abandon their home and turn it over to the JNF.
Not only will the family not receive any compensation for leaving their home, Himnuta wants them to pay for the eviction and NIS 500,000 (Israeli New Shekels, equal to $137,000) back rent for having stayed so many years on the land.
This court order is the culmination of decades of litigation by the JNF, through weaponisation of the 1950s Absentee Property Law — declared by Israel’s Klugman Committee in 1992 as seriously defective and exploited by settler groups. The Absentee Property Law allows properties to be declared abandoned if the legal owners do not currently live there — even if numerous other family members do. This opens up Palestinian homes to seizure by far-right and settler groups.
In the Sumarin family’s case, the house was acquired by the Custodian of Absentee Properties in 1991; owner Musa Sumarin had passed away in 1983 and at the time of the acquisition his three sons lived overseas. This occurred even though there were other family members living in the home at the time.
As JNF-KKL attorney Abraham Hilleli testified when this litigation saga began: “We have an interest for those properties to be under Jewish ownership.”
The Custodians for Absentee Property swapped the home and other Silwan properties and land with the KKL/JNF subsidiary Himnuta in 1991. After the Israeli government’s own Klugman Report in 1992, and under pressure from the Israeli High Court, the Israeli government agreed not to apply the law in the way it was used to take the home from the Sumarin family. After this report, the approach to stealing Palestinian homes in East Jeruslam via use of the Custodian of Absentee Property was abandoned, “but take-overs already in process were not made null and void and the legal procedures continued”: in other words, it was too late for the Sumarins.
It is hard to overstate the devastating impact this process has had on the Sumarins. The actions of the JNF mean an innocent family faces homelessness. A Palestinian family will be displaced in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers.
There is hope, however. In 2011, the JNF was poised to evict the Sumarin family and impose a huge sum of back rent when an international outcry forced them to freeze proceedings. It is time to make the JNF halt these proceedings for good.
That is why we are calling on JNF-UK to speak out. JNF-UK operates independently to JNF-KKL in Israel. This places it in the powerful position of being able to use its platform to show leadership and speak out against its Israeli namesake.
This Tu B’Shvat, we are calling on JNF-UK to condemn the occupation-supporting activities of JNF-KKL, and stand in solidarity with the Sumarin family.
Our communal institutions’ silence fertilises the soil of oppression, and allows injustice to bloom. It is time we changed that.
