In 1948, the State of Israel was created on land that only a year before had been a majority Palestinian population with a majority of Palestinian villages. As the graphs below demonstrate, by 1949, Israel had expelled 750,000 Palestinians and erased more than 500 Palestinian villages. As a result, within two years, Israel had become a… Read More
Over the past week, Israeli police have been patrolling the village, although police say preparations for evacuation have yet to commence. According to Haaretz, head of the Bedouin resettlement authority, Yair Maayan, says all the structures in the village, including one used for prayer, will be demolished. According to the Israeli government, Umm al-Hiran is… Read More
In late 2011, I publicly resigned from the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in order to expose and protest the JNF’s efforts to use Israel’s arcane Absentee Property Law to steal the Sumarin family home in Jerusalem along with many other Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the occupied territories. Sadly, I just learned that the… Read More
The story of the Nakba—the expulsion and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of more than 400 villages, by the Zionist movement and then Israel from 1947-1949—has been well-documented by Palestinian as well as Israeli and other international sources. However, not only in Israel but also in the United States and within the… Read More
Donald Trump’s intervention is not a mere aberration. It’s part of the continuing story of injustice in Palestine One hundred years ago, on 11 December 1917, the British army occupied Jerusalem. As General Allenby’s troops marched through Bab al-Khalil, launching a century of settler colonialism across Palestine, prime minister David Lloyd George heralded the city’s… Read More
Last week, Jewish settlers working with an Israeli organization called Elad took over 25 apartments in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem. It was the largest such takeover of Palestinian property in East Jerusalem in decades, further inflaming already high tensions in the city. Elad and the Jewish National Fund, which often… Read More
On 19 June in New York City, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), in collaboration with the UN’s Department of Public Information and NGO Relations, will convene a panel of “experts” to discuss water management and sustainability in “arid countries.” The presentation is just the latest example of how the JNF, founded at the turn of… Read More
In 1948, when hearing of the massacres by Zionist militias in Deir Yassin, the residents of al Walaja, a village located between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, fled their land across the valley to wait out the fighting in caves and small structures. Almost 70 years later the original site of their village is now covered in… Read More
Laura van Rij interview with Sari Nasir Laura van Rij (LR): What is your connection to Lifta? Sari Nasir (SN): I was born in Lifta in 1938, but in 1948 we were kicked out of there. I remember how they drove us out. They told my father: “You better take your family away because… Read More
The origins of the modern Israeli land and planning law regimes can be traced back to 1901, the year in which the Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established. The JNF, which, as will be seen, still plays a dominant role in the Israeli land law regime, was originally founded for the purpose of acquiring land… Read More
Since the idea of Zionism first gripped the minds of a few intellectuals and the limbs of many agrarian pioneers in the early 20th century, the State of Israel has presented its settlement of the land of Palestine, and its uprooting of the Palestinian people, as a rejuvenation of the earth. By “greenwashing” the occupation,… Read More
Israel has exploited the country’s natural environment for its own political ends for decades. Since 1948, olive trees have been uprooted, quarries mined, the most fertile lands taken for settlements and water illegally extracted. However, in the Naqab (Hebraized as Negev) desert and the Galilee this ecological occupation takes on a very different form. Instead… Read More
For anyone taking a road trip along the highways of the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948, one is bound to spot a blue and green structure in the shape of a bird marked with the Hebrew letters KKL, which stands for Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael, the Hebrew name of the Israeli branch of… Read More
Synopsis The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is a multi-national corporation with offices in about dozen countries world-wide. It receives millions of dollars from wealthy and ordinary Jews around the world and other donors, most of which are tax-exempt contributions. The JNF’s aim is to acquire and develop lands exclusively for the benefit of Jews residing in… Read More
