Kamala Harris spoke at AIPAC earlier this week, in a session that was not listed on the conference’s program or its website. During the conversation, she reportedly said:
"As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a JNF box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel."
The session was kept off-the-record and AIPAC said it had no recording for it, which it said was the norm for “breakout sessions for students”. However, the statement is similar to one Harris made at last year’s AIPAC conference:
So having grown up in the Bay Area, I fondly remember those Jewish national fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel. Years later when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom. — www.policyconference.org/...
Most people who follow Israeli and Palestinian issues were genuinely startled by this statement. Historians and observers of Israeli-Palestinian politics have long understood that the “plant trees in Israel” mission statement of the JNF masked a more morally problematic set of policies.
In actual practice, the JNF served as a convenient, private vehicle to discriminate against Palestinians in housing, while maintaining the fiction of equality under state law. The JNF’s role is the Israeli equivalent of red-lining or segregationist policies in the US, and it continues till today.
After 1948, Israel prevented the return of Palestinians who had fled its armies. The IDF razed Palestinian villages and the state turned over much of the land to the JNF. Once in the hands of a supposedly “private entity”, this land could then be opened to Jewish settlement, and exclusively to Jewish settlement. When decades later, the Israeli Supreme court ruled the JNF could no longer discriminate on the basis of religion, a bill was introduced in the Knesset specifically to permit such discrimination.
The JNF is in large measure a mechanism utilized to erase the evidence of Palestinian history, and to evict Palestinians. The JNF continues to co-ordinate with hard-line settler groups to evict Palestinians from their homes, not just in remote areas, but also in the center of cities like Jerusalem:
The JNF, through a subsidiary called Himnuta, has been attempting to evict the Sumarin family for decades. In 1991, after the JNF received land and houses in Silwan from the Israeli government, it leased the land, including the Sumarin’s home, to Elad, a right-wing settler organization that runs the City of David archeological site in Silwan.
The JNF filed suit to evict the Sumarins in 2005, and in the fall of 2011 the Sumarin family received an eviction notice. A massive letter-writing campaign led by Israeli and international activists successfully delayed the eviction of the family. [...]
“We are here to demonstrate against the activities of the JNF, an organization that’s been in the service of the right and the settlements, collaborating with the settlers to uproot Palestinians from their homes,” said Shabtay Bendet, head of Peace Now’s settlement watch program.
— mag.com/...
The JNF funds and builds projects in illegal West Bank settlements, but is careful to mask this activity from American donors.
As for those famous forests planted with the coins American kids collected to send to the JNF, their actual purpose was a bit different from reforestation:
More than two-thirds of KKL forests and sites – 46 out of 68 – conceal or are located on the ruins of Palestinian villages demolished by Israel. Nurit Kliot shows that one purpose of KKL’s afforestation activities is to take over land to prevent “trespassing.”(1) The Supreme Court determined that afforestation in Israel justifies the expropriation of land even for settlement and development purposes, rejecting the suit by refugees from al-Lajjun to reclaim a small portion of their land on which Megiddo forest stands today.(2) Michal Kortoza, who’s in charge of KKL signage, has said that “many of the JNF - KKL parks are located on land where Palestinian villages once stood; the forests are there to conceal this.” The fact that some JNF - KKL forests covering the ruins of Palestinian village have no names and that some are not cared for nor accessible for hiking or leisure activities shows their sole purpose is to take over land and cover up the remains of villages in order to prevent the refugees’ return. This important Zionist organization is also directly responsible for the demolition of some Palestinian villages, acting, of course, on behalf of the state.
The New KKL exhibit included a complete list of these JNF - KKL forests and parks.(3) Here are the 46 KKL forests and parks located on 89 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel – 87 during the Nakba and two in the 1967 war. — www.zochrot.org/...
And in case you thought this was all dusty old history, here’s a story about the JNF seeking to demolish a Bedouin village to “plant a forest”. It’s from 2011. This is part of a broader tactic of declaring Palestinian lands parks or forests, and then annexing them as “public property” which is then turned over to Jewish communities for their exclusive use.
All these strategems should be familiar to Americans familiar with the dispossession of native Americans and the various subterfuges used to force out black/brown land-owners. And increasingly, Americans are questioning their understanding of the JNF’s role. In fact, activists have been questioning the JNF’s tax-exempt status since the 1980s. Along with the JNF, several organizations that fund West Bank settlements also enjoy tax-exempt status. The Kushner family, for instance has made several million dollars worth of tax-deductible contributions to an illegal settlement.
As for making “the desert bloom” (a phrase implanted in an entire generation’s mind, but contested all along):
During the Mandate the Zionists' overriding concern was to ensure unhindered Jewish immigration to Palestine. To this end, they attempted to convince world opinion that the country was a virtually uninhabited desert - a land without people for a people without a land - in which Jewish immigrants could settle without prejudice to anybody's interests.
At the same time, to those who knew that Palestine was already inhabited by Arabs, the Zionists emphasized the technical superiority of their agriculture to that of the native farmers. The latter, it was argued, would benefit greatly from the adoption of modern farming methods learned from the Jewish immigrants.
Since the establishment of Israel, Zionists have most frequently used the contention that they have "made the desert bloom" to justify the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine in 1947-48. On the one hand, the extent of the catastrophe suffered by the Palestinians is belittled by repetition of the old assertion that the country had been an almost unpopulated desert before the Zionists' arrival. On the other, Zionists have taken their argument about the superiority of their own, to Palestinian, agriculture one step further and contend that they have a stronger claim to sovereignty over the country because they have exploited its agricultural potential more efficiently than the Palestinians could have done. — www.palestine-studies.org/...
If some of this sounds familiar, it should. The arguments presented by settler-colonists in Israel seeking to dispossess the indigenous Palestinian population are virtually identical to those employed by European settler-colonists seeking to dispossess indigenous American-Indian populations in the US. Kamala Harris is a US Senator from a state with a remarkably brutal and terrible history of indigenous persecution. The virtual erasure of California’s Indian tribes under Spanish, Mexican and US rule is considered a genocide by many historians. If Kamala Harris is unaware that she is repeating rhetoric designed to support settler-colonization and conquest, her statements are problematic. If she said this with an understanding of the historic context, it is inexcusable.
Land claims in Israel-Palestine are complicated by several factors, including the legacy of tax-farming by distant Ottoman grandees. But even after making allowances for these issues, the role of the JNF remains deeply problematic and should not be unreservedly applauded by someone like Harris who seeks to be recognized as a progressive.
Perhaps someone should ask Kamala Harris whether this is the caliber of due-diligence she intends to bring to all her foreign policy positions and speeches.
Lastly, we should not forget that the famous “trees” planted by the JNF are in large part, non-native species. There are not indigenous to the area, planted by the millions to create a more familiar European landscape.
— @subirgrewal