Ha'aretz: A racist Jewish state

Ha'aretz editorial: A racist Jewish state
Friday, 20 July 2007
Every day the Knesset has the option of passing laws that will advance Israel as a democratic Jewish state or turn it into a racist Jewish state. There is a very thin line between the two. This week, the line was crossed. If the Knesset legal counselor did not consider the bill entitled "the Jewish National Fund Law" as sufficiently racist to keep it off the agenda, it is hard to imagine what legislation she will consider racist.

Is the JNF racist?
Shahar Ilan, Ha'aretz, 25 July 2007
Here is an embarrassing fact: In 1957, when the Knesset passed the Jewish National Fund (JNF) Law, one of the great leaders of Mapam (the United Workers Party), Yaakov Hazan, said: "The JNF lands, which were purchased with the money of the Jewish people, are sacred for Jewish settlement, just as the Muslim waqf [land held in religious trust] is sacred to the Muslim community." Now, Hazan's ideological successor, Haim Oron (Meretz), argues that the bill seeking to designate JNF lands for Jews only is racist. Oron explained that "only a fossilized movement doesn't change its mind over the years." Yet one cannot help but wonder how what was sacred turned into racism.

Article 3A of the JNF's articles of incorporation states that one of its goals is to purchase and lease lands on which to settle Jews. The JNF bill, which passed its preliminary reading last week, requires the state to manage JNF lands in keeping with this principle. The bill, by the way, is not intended to circumvent a High Court of Justice ruling; its goal is to preempt a ruling on a petition now before the High Court. In other words, it is a preemptive bypass of the High Court. The immediate reason for the bill was Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's opinion that the lease of JNF lands to non-Jews should be permitted. Thus for now, this is a bill to bypass Mazuz.

The Knesset presidium has the authority to bar racist laws from the floor. But the Knesset's legal adviser, Nurit Elstein, ruled that "only bills whose essentially racist nature cries out to heaven and shakes the very foundations" should be barred. Elstein felt that the JNF bill does not cry out to heaven. But is it silently racist?

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Sabra
Alissa Wise, July 27 2007
We visited Al Lajoun with Abu Omar, whose grandfather was killed by the Israeli army in 1948 and who is now, along with other families from Al Lajoun, bringing a case to the Israeli High Court to try to get their land back. During the war in 1948, he and most of the villagers of Al Lajoun fled to Um il Fahm, now a Palestinian city within Israel (it is right outside the Green Line, and there have been suggestions by Israel to bring it into the West Bank in exchange for other other land to be brought into Israel).

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is busy reforesting the village of Al Lajoun, where they make use of an old Ottoman law that says that if you work the land for 7 years, it becomes yours. This is a common practice of JNF.

When someone buys a tree for Israel from the JNF it is often wielded as a weapon in this way. The JNF plants its trees on Palestinian land, to disguise the remnants of the villages there or to take advantage of this law to confiscate it.