The JNF: 121 years of ethnic cleansing and ‘making the desert bloom’
Next weekend, the Jewish National Fund USA (JNF-USA) will hold its annual national conference in Boston. This US-based tax-deductible charity spent nearly $67 million on projects in Israel in FY 2020 alone.
JNF-USA has long been known for the blue boxes in which Jewish school children for over a century have dropped coins to develop land and plant trees in Israel. As adults, many have been shocked to learn that their coins have subsidized the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and created an environmental hazard.
Founded in 1901 as an arm of the World Zionist Organization to acquire land and colonize Palestine for exclusive Jewish use, the JNF (Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael in Hebrew) helped compile ‘village files’ that were used to determine which Palestinian villages to erase to make way for the new Jewish state. After some 530 Palestinian villages were destroyed during the 1948 Nakba, the JNF planted trees on the ruins of many of them to hide the evidence of ethnic cleansing.
With funds collected from dozens of branches around the world, the JNF, which owns 13% of the land of Israel, has planted some 240 million trees over the years. Its forests of highly inflammable pines, that reminded Jewish migrants from Europe of their old homes, are ecologically ill-suited to the land and climate of Palestine, as frequent wildfires attest.
Control of water has played a vital role in the JNF’s colonizing project, which was intended, according to the Zionist myth, to ‘make the desert bloom’ in the ‘empty land’ of Palestine. For the past few decades, the JNF has targeted for ethnic cleansing the Palestinian Bedouin farming communities that inhabited the Naqab (Negev) desert well before Israel was founded, and have since then been denied access to piped water, sewage systems and electricity.
As part of the effort to ‘Judaize’ the Naqab and drive Bedouin citizens of Israel from their land, the JNF has planted in the desert forests of swiftly growing, water-guzzling eucalyptus trees, while its paramilitary ‘Green Patrols’ have confiscated livestock, sprayed toxins on crops and destroyed homes. On October 24, 2022, the Bedouin village of Al Araqib was destroyed for the 208th time.
In its fall 2022 newsletter, JNF-USA announced that thanks to its funding, “Negev cities are blooming” with dozens of reservoirs, wastewater treatment plants, and even a $300 million river park initiative that includes Israel’s largest manmade lake. These accomplishments are likely to be celebrated at the Boston conference, while the reported role of the Israeli JNF in expelling Palestinians from East Jerusalem and settlement expansion could well be overlooked.
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