Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Imagine the Wehrmacht naming a town it captured after Gandhi, or the Apartheid South African government naming a park after Malcom X? Yes, sounds inconceivable, because its odd — as odd as the the JNF (Jewish National Fund), which Ilan Pappe calls Israel’s main “agency of ethnic cleansing”, naming a forest after Coretta Scott King. This news, however, is real. The news was duly covered in the world’s major news media, without any mention of the role JNF plays in the dispossession of Palestinians. In Electornic Intifada, Ben White writes, “Although it was a small story that merited a few paragraphs of a news agency feed, unpacking this publicity stunt can be instructive in understanding just how successful Zionist propaganda has been in tapping into US popular culture, appropriating symbols for Israel’s benefit.”

More powerfully than this rather forced pitch, however, is the extent to which the JNF’s work in forestation and other ways of “preserving and developing the land of Israel” strikes a chord with the US’ mythologized history of the frontier and the Wild West. On their website, the JNF proudly state that their “singular task” has been the “reclaiming of the Land of Israel” (my emphasis). Reclaiming, of course, implies two things: that the land was possessed by an Other, and that this possession was illegitimate. Zionists continue to take advantage of the US’ own past expansions at the cost of an indigenous population. See, for example, the official blurb at the end of the organisation’s press releases, which describes the JNF as “supporting Israel’s newest generation of pioneers in developing the Negev Desert, Israel’s last frontier”…

Less than a fortnight after the Coretta forest announcement, an illustration of the real nature of the policies the JNF are involved in implementing was reported in the Israeli press. Ha’aretz published a story on 8 May relating the demolition of a Bedouin village in the Negev that left 100 people homeless, an all too common event. With almost unbelievable irony, the Israel Lands Authority (ILA) described the event as the evacuation of “invaders”. Welcome to life on Israel’s “new frontier”, where as no sooner are the villages destroyed and the Arabs cleansed, then the JNF is ready to move in to make the desert bloom.

Half of the seats on the ILA are of course held by the JNF. While JNF itself only holds about 14% of Israeli land, through its control of ILA it administers a total of 93% of Israeli land.

Thus despite the JNF’s public image, the organisation has played a key role in Israel’s appropriation of land belonging to Palestinians, both in the major expulsions of 1948, as well as the piecemeal ethnic cleansing that has continued ever since. The official line hints at the truth: the organisation self-defines its modus operandi as being “to serve as caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners — Jewish people everywhere”. Thus the Middle East’s ‘only democracy’ is not, in fact, a state for all its citizens (i.e. native Palestinians), but is ‘owned’ by Jews worldwide, a claim contested by both Jews angry at the presumption, as well as the Palestinians whose land has been stolen.

On the rubble of Palestinian villages, the JNF planted forests; on the remains of village schools, picnic parks sprung up. Maps were redrawn, Arab place names erased, and soon, all that remained were piles of stones, the fragments of structures, and the memories of the exiled. Uri Avnery describes what happened in the years following Israel’s creation:

the new state transferred to the KKL millions of dunams of land expropriated from Arabs — the refugees who were not allowed to return (‘absentees’ in legal language), those who had remained in the country but were absent on a given day from their villages (‘present absentees’), as well as Arabs who became citizens of Israel.

Avnery, in his piece, ‘Abolish the JNF’, notes that the JNF’s statutes “explicitly prohibit the sale or rental of land to non-Jews”, meaning that a Palestinian in Israel “whose forefathers have lived here for hundreds — or even thousands — of years, cannot acquire a house or an apartment on its land”, in contrast to a Jewish New Yorker who decides to emigrate. Uri Davis, author of Apartheid Israel, also succinctly summaries the disparity between the JNF’s public face, and the reality buried underneath the top soil:

[The JNF] projects itself as an environmentally friendly organization concerned with ecology and sustainable development. It plants forests and establishes recreation facilities open to all. Well, it is the case that JNF forests and facilities are open to all, but it is equally the case that that most — almost without exception all — of these forests are planted on the ruins of Palestinian Arab villages ethnically cleansed in the 1948-49 war.

One of the JNF’s forests is Birya, planted on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages — and it is here that Israel will pay homage to Coretta Scott King. What better example, not only of the Palestinian Nakba, but also the extent to which Zionist propagandists will not only deny the ethnic cleansing, but even repackage colonialism as the victory of the colonised.