Monday, April 7

Israel's royal welcome

Tony Greenstein

March 25, 2008 10:00 AM
On April 7, Prince Philip will be hosting a dinner at
Windsor Castle organised by the Jewish National Fund.
They will be marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment
of the Israeli state. However this is not a private dinner.
Nor is the JNF an ordinary organisation.
The JNF was established in 1901 as the
land settlement wing of the World Zionist Organisation.
It became one of the primary instruments involved in
planning for the dispossession and expulsion of the
Palestinians. Up until 1948 it purchased land for
settlement, often from absentee landlords, and
then evicted the peasants from that land.
Unlike the normal practice under colonial rule, the
Palestinians were not re-employed as wage labourers
but excluded from the land altogether. This was the
concept of Jewish land. But even by 1947 less than 7%
of the land of Palestine had been bought up.
The JNF played a crucial role in planning for the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine. In the years leading up to the
establishment of the state of Israel, the JNF was a key
voice in establishing a consensus in the Zionist leadership
for "transfer". Although not discussed openly, among the
Zionist leaders it was accepted that a Jewish state could
only come into being if the Arabs were transferred out of
the state. Palestine was a land where barely one-third of
the inhabitants were Jewish, and even in the area allotted
by the United Nations to a Jewish state, barely half of the
inhabitants were Jewish. As the head of its Land Settlement
Department, Joseff Weitz, wrote in his diary in 1940:
The only solution is to transfer
the Arabs from here to neighbouring
countries. Not a single village or
a single tribe must be let off.
[Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine, page 62]
Weitz later formed, with the authority of David
Ben Gurion, a Transfer Committee. And between
1947 and 1949 an opportunity arose to put these ideas
into practice. As Tom Segev recalled in Ha'aretz, a meeting
was held in Haifa on March 27, 1948, concerning the fate of
the Bedouin of Arab al-Ghawarina in the Haifa area. "They
must be removed from there, so that they, too, will not add
to our troubles," Yosef Weitz, of the Keren Kayemeth
(Jewish National Fund), wrote in his personal diary.
The JNF occupies a unique position in Israel. It is nominally
an independent organisation but in reality it is a
contracted-out section of the state, controlled by
unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, carrying
out functions that the state itself cannot be seen to do
openly. The JNF functions as an ideological outpost of
the Greater Israel movement and when the
Israeli army razed to the ground the Palestinian
villages of the Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba villages
in 1967 and expelled their inhabitants, the JNF took
over the construction of the Canada National Park
on the ruins.
The JNF's position was formalised by the 1953 KKL Law
whereby its memorandum of association had to be approved
by the minister of justice. In November 1961 a covenant
was signed between the state of Israel and the JNF which
accorded the latter effective control of the land allocation
policies of the state of Israel, which together with the
Israeli Lands Administration, controlled 93% of Israeli
land. According to Article 3a of its constitution, the JNF
was established "for the purpose of settling Jews on
such lands and properties" as it could obtain.
The British royal family have a constitutional role greater
than their private prejudices. They are seen as the
representatives of British society and their invitation to
the JNF will inevitably be seen as giving a royal seal of
approval to the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe.
Britain's role in arming the Zionist militias who fell like
wolves on largely defenceless villagers, while suppressing
the 1936 Palestinian national uprising, is infamous enough
without the monarchy celebrating the consequences of
Britain's perfidy.
Not that the association between royalty and the most
barbaric aspects of colonialism is anything new. Today's
royals may hold gala dinners in celebration of the
abolition of the slave trade and Wilberforce, but when
slavery was a going concern, its most ardent supporters
were royalty. Elizabeth I went into business as a partner
of slave trader John Hawkins, Charles II was a major
shareholder in the Royal African Company and William
IV, then Duke of Clarence, spoke out strongly against
the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation in
the House of Lords.
With the solitary exception of Princess Diana and her
campaign against landmines, the royals have been
associated with the most atavistic and bloody aspects
of British imperial rule. From the Indian Mutiny and
the Amritsar massacre to the Hola death camp in Kenya,
the royals have always been associated with militarism
and empire. Prince Harry's role in Afghanistan is a
continuation of this inglorious history.
In 1995 an Arab couple, the Kadans, tried to buy an
apartment in Katzir. For 10 years the JNF and the
Israeli Lands Authority tried to prevent the leasing of
"Jewish" land to non-Jews. Eventually the supreme
court ruled that state land could not be sold to Jews only.
This caused huge embarrassment among Jews worldwide.
How could Jews protest against anti-Semitism when
condoning blatantly racist practices in Israel? America's
Reform movement, to which most Jews adhere,
condemned the practice unequivocally.
The JNF itself, though, was anything but embarrassed.
It began a campaign to reverse the court's decision and
last summer a JNF Bill was introduced into the Knesset,
where it was passed on the first reading by 64-16 votes.
Under the headline "KKL-JNF - Trustee for the Jewish
People on its Land" it noted that:
A survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals
that over 70% of the Jewish population in
Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land
to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the
definition of Israel as a Jewish state,
rather than as the state of all its citizens.
The implications are quite clear. If Israel is a
Jewish state then it cannot be a state of its own
citizens, still less a democratic state.
This prompted Israel's liberal newspaper,
Ha'aretz
, to publish an outspoken editorial, "
A racist Jewish state", in which it wrote:

"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."
Even the staid old Jewish Chronicle
ran a debate: "Is it racist to set aside
Israeli land for Jews only?"
Yet this is part of a wider debate about the
"demographic problem", which is shorthand for
there being too many Arabs. Academics such as
Professor Arnon Sofer, of Haifa University, are
quite blatant about this "problem":
"You should remember that on the
same day as the Israel Defense Forces
is investing efforts and succeeding in
eliminating one terrorist or another,
on that very same day, as on every day
of the year, within the territories of
western Israel, about 400 children are
being born, some of whom will become
new suicide terrorists."
The JNF sits on the opposite side of the fence from
those who wish to see Israel as a state of all its citizens
as opposed to just its Jewish ones. It is bad enough that
our prime minister, Gordon Brown, is a patron of the
JNF. But for the royal family to have as their guests
those who are dedicated to maintaining Israel as a
state of only a part of its citizens is a disgrace.
A letter from Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt Davies, private
secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh, seeks to excuse
the royal hosting of the JNF by stating that "the proceeds
from the dinner are going to a number of charities, one
of which will be the Israeli Youth Award for Young
People, which is the Israeli branch of the Duke of
Edinburgh's Award. This charity plays a significant
part in attempting to bridge the gap between young
people of all faiths and backgrounds, in amongst other
places, Israel and Jordan."
So, according to this logic, the royal family will be
hosting a dinner for an organisation which explicitly
discriminates against Palestinians and non-Jews because
the proceeds will be going to a charity which apparently
does the complete opposite. You couldn't make it up.
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