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Jewish National Fund

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aliasesJNF

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Summary

A colonisation institution established by the Zionist Organisation in 1901, in Sayegh’s account one of the first instruments created to plan, finance and supervise the colonisation of Palestine, and one of the bodies that vigilantly enforced Jewish labor only in the Zionist colonies.

Details

  • The Jewish National Fund (1901) was among the first institutions established by the Zionist Organisation, alongside the Jewish Colonial Trust (1898), the Colonization Commission (1898) and the Palestine Office (1908); their joint purpose was to plan, finance and supervise the process of colonisation (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.5 / printed p.210).

  • Sayegh names the Jewish National Fund, with the Jewish Agency, the Palestine Foundation Fund and the Jewish Federation of Labor, as vigilantly ensuring observance of the principle that only Jewish labor would be employed in Zionist colonies (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.11 / printed p.216).

  • In Said, Chapter One IV: absentee-property laws made Arab land liable to expropriation by the Jewish National Fund, which legally owns the land in Israel for the whole Jewish people, a formula Said calls without analogy in any other state (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.69-70 / printed p.48-49).

  • In Said, Chapter Two II: the JNF came out of the Jewish Colonial Trust in 1901, empowered to buy land and hold it in trust for the Jewish people, usable exclusively for purchase of land in Palestine and Syria, always under the control of the World Zionist Organization; first purchases in 1905; it existed to develop, buy or lease land only for Jews (Walter Lehn’s research, relied on by Said); by statehood it had acquired 936,000 dunams (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.118-119 / printed p.97-98).

  • In Said, Chapter Two II (this part): after statehood, laws assimilated refugee Arab land, pronounced absentee property, to the JNF in order to expropriate it and prevent return under any circumstances — the process of land alienation completed — and the JNF supplies a method for legally metamorphosing neglected land into the property of the Jewish people (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.119-120 / printed p.98-99).

  • Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund from 1932 (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.120 / printed p.99).

  • In Pappe the JNF, founded in 1901 and inaugurated by the fifth Zionist Congress, was the principal Zionist tool for the colonisation of Palestine, the agency used to buy Palestinian land and settle Jewish immigrants on it, designed to become the ‘custodian’, on behalf of the Jewish people, of the land gained in Palestine, a role it maintained after the creation of the State of Israel (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.41).

  • At Ben-Zion Luria’s proposal the JNF conducted the inventory of Arab villages that became the Village Files — “This would greatly help the redemption of the land” — and its settlement department head Joseph Weitz drove both the tenant evictions on purchased land and the files project as a ‘national project’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.41-42).

  • In Pappe’s Chapter Seven, the destroyed Palestinian villages are today covered by pine-tree forests planted by the Jewish National Fund for the purpose of ‘recreation and tourism’ — Lubya among them — hiding their remains under vast ‘green lungs’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.187-188).

  • In the ‘Dividing the Spoils’ of Chapter 9, the Custodian sold a million dunam out of the total 3.5 million dunam Israel had taken over directly to the JNF at a bargain price in December 1948, and another quarter of a million was passed to the JNF in 1949; by 1950 half of the dispossessed rural lands were still in the JNF’s hands (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.250-251).

  • Joseph Weitz, head of the JNF settlement department and de facto leader of the ad-hoc ‘transfer committee’, followed every rural takeover to make sure the villages passed into JNF custody (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.248).

  • The JNF Law of 1953 granted the agency independent status as land-owner on behalf of the Jewish state, and the laws of 1960 and the Law of Agricultural Settlement of 1967 barred selling, leasing and finally sub-letting its land to non-Jews, a regime Pappe says applied to more than ninety per cent of Israel’s land (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.257-258).

  • The Naming Committee, reconvened by Ben-Gurion in July 1949 as a sub-division of the JNF, Hebraized Palestine’s geography; Chapter 10, ‘The Memoricide of the Nakba’, argues the JNF’s forests and parks planted over destroyed villages conceal the remnants of Palestine and erase its memory — see Memoricide (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.261-265).

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, World Zionist Organization, Jewish Labour Only, Jewish Agency, Settler Colonialism

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