Jewish National Fund Plans to Purchase Land to Expand Illegal Settlements

 April 14, 2021

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Israel approved on Sunday plans to purchase land in the occupied West Bank to expand illegal settlements, mainly in Nablus and Jenin, Haaretz has reported.

The fund is known in Hebrew as Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael and still needs to obtain final approval from its board of directors at their meeting on April 22.

According to Haaretz, JNF World Chairman Avraham Duvdevani wants the board to approve the plan so that “controversial land purchases that have already been made” can be approved retrospectively. A JNF-KKL subsidiary has spent “around $30 million” on buying occupied land since 2017.

Moreover, said the Israeli daily, “A group of progressive American Jewish organizations said it was ‘deeply troubled’ by the prospect that the JNF-KKL was moving toward making ‘Palestinian dispossession into its policy.’ The Progressive Israel Network said in a statement it was ‘hopeful that JNF-KKL’s general voting body will reject the decision to participate in settlement expansion when the decision comes to a final vote’ [on 22 April].”

Between 500,000 and 600,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law.

(MEMO, PC, Social Media)

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Israel’s Jewish National Fund Is Uprooting Palestinians – Not Planting Trees

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook

The Jewish National Fund, established more than 100 years ago, is perhaps the most venerable of the international Zionist organisations. Its recent honorary patrons have included prime ministers, and it advises UN forums on forestry and conservation issues.

It is also recognised as a charity in dozens of western states. Generations of Jewish families, and others, have contributed to its fundraising programmes, learning as children to drop saved pennies into its trademark blue boxes to help plant a tree.

And yet its work over many decades has been driven by one main goal: to evict Palestinians from their homeland. 

The JNF is a thriving relic of Europe’s colonial past, even if today it wears the garb of an environmental charity. As recent events show, ethnic cleansing is still what it excels at.

The organisation’s mission began before the state of Israel was even born. Under British protection, the JNF bought up tracts of fertile land in what was then historic Palestine. It typically used force to dispossess Palestinian sharecroppers whose families had worked the land for centuries.

But the JNF’s expulsion activities did not end in 1948, when Israel was established through a bloody war on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland – an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Israel hurriedly demolished more than 500 cleansed Palestinian villages, and the JNF was entrusted with the job of preventing some 750,000 refugees from returning. It did so by planting forests over both the ruined homes, making it impossible to rebuild them, and village lands to stop them being farmed.

These plantations were how the JNF earned its international reputation. Its forestry operations were lauded for stopping soil erosion, reclaiming land and now tackling the climate crisis.

But even this expertise – gained through enforcing war crimes – was undeserved. Environmentalists say the dark canopies of trees it has planted in arid regions such as the Negev, in Israel’s south, absorb heat unlike the unforested, light-coloured soil. Short of water, the slow-growing trees capture little carbon. Native species of brush and animals, meanwhile, have been harmed.

These pine forests – the JNF has planted some 250 million trees – have also turned into a major fire hazard. Most years hundreds of fires break out after summer droughts exacerbated by climate change.

Early on, the vulnerability of the JNF’s saplings was used as a pretext to outlaw the herding of native black goats. Recently the goats, which clear undergrowth, had to be reintroduced to prevent the fires. But the goats’ slaughter had already served its purpose, forcing Bedouin Palestinians to abandon their pastoral way of life.

Despite surviving the Nakba, thousands of Bedouin in the Negev were covertly expelled to Egypt or the West Bank in Israel’s early years.

It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the JNF’s troubling role in these evictions was of only historical interest. The charity, Israel’s largest private land owner, is actively expelling Palestinians to this day.

In recent weeks, solidarity activists have been desperately trying to prevent the eviction of a Palestinian family, the Sumarins, from their home in occupied East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers.

Last month the Sumarins lost a 30-year legal battle waged by the JNF, which was secretly sold their home in the late 1980s by the Israeli state.

The family’s property was seized – in violation of international law – under a draconian 1950 piece of legislation declaring Palestinian refugees of the Nakba “absent”, so that they could not reclaim their land inside the new state of Israel.

The Israeli courts have decreed that the Absentee Property Law can be applied outside Israel’s recognised territory too, in occupied Jerusalem. In the Sumarins’ case, it appears not to matter that the family was never actually “absent”. The JNF is permitted to evict the 18 family members next month. To add insult to injury, they will have to pay damages to the JNF.

A former US board member, Seth Morrison, resigned in protest in 2011 at the JNF’s role in such evictions, accusing it of working with extreme settler groups. Last year the JNF ousted a family in similar circumstances near Bethlehem. Days later settlers moved on to the land.

Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights group focusing on Jerusalem, warned that these cases create a dangerous legal precedent if Israel carries out its promise to annex West Bank territory. It could rapidly expand the number of Palestinians classified as “absentees”.

But the JNF never lost its love of the humble tree as the most effective – and veiled – tool of ethnic cleansing. And it is once again using forests as a weapon against the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian, survivors of the Nakba.

Earlier this year it unveiled its “Relocation Israel 2040” project. The plan is intended to “bring about an in-depth demographic change of an entire country” – what was once sinisterly called “Judaisation”. The aim is to attract 1.5 million Jews to Israel, especially to the Negev, over the next 20 years.

As in Israel’s first years, forests will be vital to success. The JNF is preparing to plant trees on an area of 40 sq km belonging to Bedouin communities that survived earlier expulsions. Under the cover of environmentalism, many thousands of Bedouin could be deemed “trespassers”.

The Bedouin have been in legal dispute with the Israeli state for decades over ownership of their lands. This month in an interview with the Jerusalem Post newspaper, Daniel Atar, the JNF’s global head, urged Jews once again to drop money into its boxes. He warned that Jews could be dissuaded from coming to the Negev by its reputation for “agricultural crimes” – coded reference to Bedouin who have tried to hold on to their pastoral way of life.

Trees promise both to turn the semi-arid region greener and to clear “unsightly” Bedouin off their ancestral lands. Using the JNF’s original colonial language of “making the desert bloom”, Atar said his organisation would make “the wilderness flourish”.

The Bedouin understand the fate likely to befall them. In a protest last month they carried banners: “No expulsions, no displacement.”

After all, Palestinians have suffered forced displacement at the JNF’s hands for more than a century, while watching it win plaudits from around the world for its work in improving the “environment”.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Jewish National Fund Challenged for Complicity in Ethnic Cleansing

Canadian, Israeli activists push to remove organization's charitable status

Canada Park is being built over the ruins of former
alestinian villages. The JNF-Canada is funding the
 project, leading Palestinians and Canadians alike
to demand that its charitable status be revoked.
Photo: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours

by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours

JERUSALEM—Israeli, Palestinian and international protestors gathered in Tel Aviv and Ramallah in late February to denounce ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But instead of levelling their criticisms at the Israeli state, the chants and banners were aimed at an unexpected target: Canada.

Among other issues, protestors were targeting Canada for its role in building Canada Park, an Israeli park built over the ruins of three Palestinian villages with donations made to the Jewish National Fund of Canada (JNF-Canada). JNF-Canada's role is being challenged both at home and in Israel, while a targeted campaign against the JNF overall is presently underway.

“Canada Park was planted and funded with the support of the Jewish National Fund of Canada over the lands and over the ruins of three ethnically cleansed villages: Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, occupied and ethnically cleansed in the course and the wake of the 1967 [Six Days] war,” explained Israeli activist and member of the Committee for Defending the Latrun Villages, Uri Davis, in Tel Aviv.

Plaques featuring the names of donors to Canada Park line the area. Donations to the JNF-Canada, the charity which built the park on top of bulldozed Palestinian villages, are tax-deductible. Photo: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours

Institutionalized Racism: The history of the JNF

The Jewish National Fund was created in 1901 before the founding of the State of Israel. Early Zionist leaders used the organization to secure property and land rights for exclusive Jewish use in British-mandate Palestine.

“The JNF was the principal Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine. It served as the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land upon which it then settled Jewish immigrants,” wrote Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

According to Pappe, in the early 1940s the head of the Jewish National Fund’s settlement department, Yossef Weitz, stated that, “all we need is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam – cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands.”

Today, the JNF controls approximately 13 per cent of the land in Israel, which it continues to lease only to Jews. This land falls under the management of the Israeli Lands Administration (ILA), an Israeli governmental agency that controls 93 per cent of the land in Israel.

In addition, the JNF controls 50 per cent of the seats at the ILA Council, giving the organization substantial power to decide how virtually all ILA lands are distributed. Under Israeli law, the JNF has also been given the same status as a public authority for the purposes of confiscating land.

According to a 2006 brief submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, “Palestinian citizens, who constitute 20 per cent of the population, are denied access to [the JNF’s] 13 per cent of ‘Israel Lands.’ This discriminatory policy contributes to the institutionalization of racially segregated towns and villages throughout the state.”

The report continues: “Due to the explicitly discriminatory nature of the ILA and JNF’s policies, Adalah and HIC call upon the Commission to initiate an investigation into Israel’s discriminatory land allocation policies and to urge the State of Israel to cease discriminatory land allocation practices using institutions such as the JNF, and to apply covenanted principles of equality, just distribution and fairness.”

Plaques featuring the names of donors to Canada
Park line the area. Donations to the JNF-Canada,
the charity which built the park on top of bulldozed
Palestinian villages, are tax-deductible.
Photo: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours

“Canada Park represents a blatant violation of international law, but it also represents a blatant violation of official Canadian policy condemning any intervention of settlement or occupation or change of demographic composition or any other alteration in the 1967 occupied territories,” he added.

JNF-Canada operates as a charity and collects approximately $10 million annually in tax-deductible donations. Canadian citizens have donated about $15 million to the JNF, which has gone to fund Canada Park and similar projects.

Located in the Latrun enclave, just off the major highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Canada Park is a popular weekend picnic and hiking spot for Israeli families. What most road signs or tourist brochures won’t tell you, however, is that Canada Park extends several kilometres into the West Bank, far beyond the Green Line, the internationally recognized armistice line separating Israeli and Palestinian territory.

Today, the majority of Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba’s original Palestinian inhabitants are refugees living in Jordan or in and around the West Bank city of Ramallah. Since they are barred from entering Israel, these Palestinian residents are unable to access Canada Park, or visit the ruins of their ancestral villages.

According to the JNF-Canada website, “The history of the Jewish National Fund of Canada and the State of Israel are inseparable. Jewish National Fund of Canada land reclamation projects have created the infrastructure for countless residential areas and other communities across Israel.”

Operating as a branch of JNF-Israel, the JNF-Canada website vaguely states that the funds raised by JNF-Canada “are primarily directed to the payment of wages to workers engaged in various aspects of Jewish National Fund activities.”

Today, the JNF operates 11 regional offices across Canada, from Vancouver to Halifax.

Scott Weinstein is a Steering Committee member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), which according to its website is “an organization that promotes a just resolution to the dispute in Israel and

Palestine through the application of international law and respect for the human rights of all parties.” Weinstein told The Dominion that IJV is working on a campaign to raise awareness in Canada about the Jewish National Fund and its activities, including how it built Canada Park over Palestinian communities. The long-term goal, he said, will be to de-list the JNF as a Canadian charity.

“The JNF's legal mission and strategy is explicit – Land [sic] for Jews only. Technically, the land is collectively titled to the JNF. Palestinians are denied the right to their land – forever – be it in Israel or even the occupied territories,” Weinstein wrote in an email to The Dominion.

“Since Israel was founded, no new Palestinian villages, forests or territory in Israel have been allowed, but hundreds of Jewish villages, cities, parks and forests are constructed. Thanks to Canadian JNF tax support, Palestinian territory shrinks as Jewish territory expands. Palestinian olive trees are destroyed so Jews can plant non-native pine trees, or orange trees,” he explained. “The propaganda cover-up of a very un-ethical mission is frankly upsetting, and shocking to many who learn the reality.”

A few hundred metres from the Palestinian Bedouin village of al-Araqib sit half a dozen bulldozers. Surrounded by razor wire and heavily guarded by Israeli police officers and soldiers, a sign hangs on a shed inside the permanent bulldozer encampment: “Works being carried out by Keren Kayemeth Leisrael – Jewish National Fund.”

“There was police in al-Araqib and also the [JNF] bulldozers. They plowed some parts of the land. We tried to resist them, but we were arrested and handcuffed,” explained 17-year-old al-Araqib resident Adam Salim Abu Mdeghem.

Located inside Israel proper in the Israeli Negev desert about an hour south of Tel Aviv, al-Araqib has been demolished a total of 19 times since July 2010. The village’s destruction was commissioned by the JNF’s Israeli branch.

The Jewish National Fund in Israel aims to plant a forest over the village of al-Araqib. Co-sponsored by evangelical Christian organization God-TV, this forest would involve forcibly displacing the 300 indigenous residents of al-Araqib, who are all Israeli citizens, from their homes.

Since JNF-Canada is a chapter of JNF-Israel, funds allocated to the JNF in Canada are transferred to projects sponsored by the organization in Israel, such as planting trees in the Negev or Galilee, or restoring the Old City walls in Jerusalem, among others.

It is unclear whether the specific trees JNF-Israel wants to plant over al-Araqib lands were donated or purchased thanks to donations provided by Canadians. JNF-Canada does, however, advertise a project called "Action Plan Negev.” This is “a program designed to meet the challenge of developing the Negev for the 21st century” and aims to populate the Negev region.

The destruction of al-Araqib is part of a larger JNF-Israel project called “Blueprint Negev.” Launched in 2005 at the cost of $600 million, the project aims to increase the population in the Negev area by 250,000 Jewish residents by 2013.

Whether “Action Plan Negev” and “Blueprint Negev” are directly related, or constitute two parts of the same program, however, is unspecified.

Haia Noach, the Director of the Negev Co-Existence Forum, a joint Jewish-Arab organization that, among other things, works for Bedouin land rights in the Negev, explained that as the forestation authority in Israel, the JNF developed the project to plant trees over al-Araqib.

She said that while the JNF initially denied any involvement in the destruction of al-Araqib, residents and local activists saw JNF bulldozers destroying property in the village during a demolition in early February.

“We connect them directly and they are responsible for what is going on there, to the fact that people lost their houses, lost their herds, their orchards,” Noach said.

“The situation is devastating, but this is what we have,” said Abu Mdeghem, sitting on the hillside next to the small, make-shift tent where he, his parents and seven other siblings now live. “I am...very sad for what has happened to the al-Araqib area. We never expected that anything would happen to our land.”

According to Noach, the JNF’s policy doesn’t end in al-Araqib; the organization is threatening the existence of dozens of other Palestinian Bedouin villages that have existed in the area for hundreds of years.

“The JNF is willingly part of this game where they serve as a foresting authority. [You] see it all over Israel, in the North and even in the South,” Noach said.

“There will be more and more Arab villages in the Negev that are threatened by the forestation of the JNF.”

A new campaign called “Stop the JNF” was recently launched with the goal of documenting and exposing the Jewish National Fund’s complicity in Israeli ethnic cleansing, disrupting JNF fundraising activities and revoking the organization’s charitable status in countries around the world.

According to Akram Salhab, an organizer of this international campaign and a Communications Officer at Badil, the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, the campaign aims to co-ordinate between various organizations and provide the resources and information needed for a united campaign.

“One of the first aims of the campaign is to expose and document the role of the JNF. One of the problems with trying to understand the role of the JNF is that it's shrouded in an esoteric legal language, which is indicative more broadly of the way in which the Israeli apartheid regime functions,” Salhab explained.

Despite this challenge, Salhab said he is hopeful that the campaign will unite activists around the world who are working to raise awareness about the JNF’s complicity in Israeli crimes.

“Our main aim is to influence public opinion and influence individuals in places where the JNF collects the largest amount of revenue. The problem with that is that those are the places where the JNF has a big deal of support. So we’re trying to find places where we can set a precedent of JNF discriminatory policy,” he said.

According to IJV’s Weinstein, this campaign will focus on first educating the Canadian public about the JNF’s true nature and making connections between Indigenous land rights in Israel/Palestine and Canada.

“Imagine if we had a Canadian charity that provided homes and parks to English Canadians only, on land taken from French Canadians. It could never happen, except if we lied about what the charity does. Yet it is precisely what we have done to the Native people of Canada – and few of us are proud of that legacy. So there are Canadian examples where we can make common cause with human rights issues around Indigenous land rights,” Weinstein explained.

“Most Canadians don't realize that our taxes support the JNF mission to erase Palestinian villages and lives so Jews can live as first-class citizens,” he continued. “We don't know that we support racial discrimination in Israel that would be illegal in Canada.”

Originally from Montreal, Jillian Kestler-D'Amours is a reporter and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. More of her work can be found at http://jilldamours.wordpress.com/.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

EU turns blind eye to Palestinian citizens in Israel

David Cronin, The Electronic Intifada, 12 April 2011

Palestinian children in the city of Lydd near Tel Aviv. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

Answering questions from YouTube viewers over the past few weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu depicted Israel as an oasis of interracial harmony in a region of strife. "There's only one country in the heart of the Middle East that has no tremors, no protests," the Israeli prime minister said. "That's Israel. Because we're the only one where we respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy full civil rights in Israel. It's the only place in this entire vast expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete equality before the law."

It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel "respects the rights of Arab citizens," its national parliament -- the Knesset -- had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminate against the country's 1.4 million Palestinian citizens.

First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakba, the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948 that accompanied the establishment of the State of Israel. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.

Netanyahu's comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is "never irritated" by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem), Merkel described her contacts with him as "fun."

Merkel's silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.

Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU's foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued a single statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.

Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country's ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of approximately twenty laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel's Palestinian minority.

In 1973, the United Nations recognized that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the 1948 Nakba and since then are denied that right.

When I asked Ashton's spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words "Israel" and "apartheid" in the same sentence, she replied that "Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities."

Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappe disagrees with Kocijanic's assessment. In an interview published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine Pappe explained that "Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters" (Reframing the Israel-Palestine conflict). He added that "The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don't give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level -- from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes -- Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group."

The EU's unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a February report published by Adalah, a human rights organization based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network ("EU and the Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel"). It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the "association agreement" between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.

That omission was partly compensated for by an "action plan" on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU's executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, "the Commission's language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years," the February report says.

"The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel," Nathalie Tocci, the report's author, told me. "This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticize Israel's democratic deficiencies -- regarding human and minority rights -- but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too."

The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20 percent of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50 percent for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80 percent for Bedouins.

When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognized by Israel were living in an "unbearable state." It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.

Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as al-Araqib, which has suffered more than twenty demolitions since July last year.

Even though the JNF's bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some fifty countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the State of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favor of ethnic cleansing. Yosef Weitz, one of the JNF's leading figures during the 1930s and '40s, argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.

The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13 percent of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where Prime Minister David Cameron is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organization dedicated to planting trees in Israel.

"The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests," said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. "The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace."

Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to this community, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. "You couldn't have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland," Jabareen said. "Europe should understand that."

In his new book Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. "The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust 'solution' that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination," he writes.

Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe's contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those holding Israeli citizenship; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU's refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.

David Cronin's book Europe's Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation is published by Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com).

Carmel fire costs 454 million dollars

[ 05/12/2010 - 04:47 PM ]

NAZARETH, (PIC)-- The material losses as a result of the huge forest fire that ravaged Carmel Mountain near Haifa might reach 454 million dollars, Israel media sources reported on Sunday.

Hebrew daily Ma'ariv said that the aforementioned sum does not include all direct and indirect damage as a result of the giant blaze, which exposed the Home Front's inability to cope with such a big fire that has been raging for the past four days in Haifa, north of Palestine occupied in 1948.

The Jewish National Fund reported that the fire had destroyed 12,000 acres of forest, around five million trees, just under half of the entire Carmel forest reserve. JNF officials said it would take decades to rehabilitate the area.

The enormous wildfire ignited an internal crisis in the Israeli coalition government as a number of ministers traded accusations over its responsibility with fingers pointing at the ministers of interior and finance.

In a related context, the Aqsa foundation for endowment and heritage said that the fire that burnt parts of the Qassam grave east of Haifa city was the result of an arson attack, holding fanatic Jews responsible for the attack that burnt 20 graves and a number of trees.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian