Jewish National Fund for Apartheid
Thursday, February 18, 2021 at 12:00PM 
Maale Adumim, Israel's largest settlement in the West Bank.Credit: Menaham Kahana / AFP
by Gideon Levy 18 February 2021 Haaretz
Meet the Zionism of 2021: “Redeeming” land by the Jewish National Fund in the West Bank, “redeeming land” in the Galilee too, otherwise the holy lands might fall into the hands of impure Israelis, those who are not Jews.
If anyone still had any doubts about the nationalist and racist – yes, racist – character of Zionism, even in its modern dress, then along came the chairman of the JNF, Avraham Duvdevani, and removed the last of these doubts.
Like many other Zionist texts, his interview with Kalman Liebskind on the Kan 11 public broadcasting station this week needs translation into a European language: just replace the word Arabs with Jews – and be shocked. When the text is in Hebrew and relates to Arabs, it seems it does not shock anyone in Israel. “Help, my neighbor is about to sell the land to a Jew,” the despicable European antisemite will say. “Help, my neighbor is about to sell the land to an Arab,” the pure and moral Zionist will say. That’s the way Zionism is, as one of its leaders told us.
The year is 2021, not 1921, the state has arisen and become a superpower, but nothing has changed in the real estate greediness of the desanctified movement. Let’s put aside the grotesque use of the term “redeeming land” – we grew up on it and the Blue Box, and we were already back then completely brainwashed – and let’s not ask from whom the land is being redeemed and for what. But how can an elected representative of the Zionist institutions speak about buying land in the Israeli Galilee, the Arab-Jewish Galilee, in a supposedly democratic country, to save them, lest they fall into the hands of the country’s Arab citizens.
The Galilee, Duvdevani, is not yours – it belongs to its residents, not all of whom were expelled by the forefathers of Zionism in 1948, so it remains the last region with an Arab majority. What’s wrong with that? It’s good. It’s their land, exactly the same way it’s your land, maybe even a little bit more so, because unlike you they have been its native inhabitants for generations.
On Fridays we would wear blue and white and put a coin into the Blue Box. It was meant even then for scrounging donations to buy land from its Arab owners. We believed that was redemption. We were so stupid, and so naïve. Today too most Jewish Israelis think that way. The fact is, it is possible to speak about redeeming land and not be considered to be Itamar Ben Gvir, but rather the mainstream of Zionism.
- ‘Keren Kayemeth who?’ How the Jewish National Fund-USA divorced its Israeli counterpart
- JNF plan to expand settlements could 'endanger its existence,' Jewish groups warn
- JNF deputy chair slams organization's plans to formalize settlement expansion
Duvdevani told how he was called into action: Someone in the Galilee recently informed on his neighbor who was about to sell land to Arabs. Here he entered the picture and redeemed the tormented land. “So tomorrow morning we won’t have to buy the land from Arabs,” said Duvdevani describing, without blinking an eye, the footsteps of the coming redemption. After that, Jewish developers will build a mall or parking lot on the land– and the redeemer will come to Zion.
The rot in the JNF can be smelled from far away. The fact that the Labor Party and Meretz are partners in this stinking nationalist enterprise testifies as much as 1,000 witnesses about the Zionist left.
A “public benefit corporation,” most of whose land is land that was stolen from its owners in the Nakba and was never returned to them; which covered over the ruins of hundreds of villages in forests, just to erase their memory from the face of the earth and block the possibility of their owners returning. A body which, throughout all the years, in practice sold lands only to Jews, and since 2009 even legalized this practice in an official decision; a body for which there is no occupation and no Green Line – just one state between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, in which you buy land only for members of one people; and which has now officially declared its partnership in the war crime called settlement too, after years of doing so via a front company.
On the tables of this company we all have our picnics in the heart of nature, a green company for the benefit of the public, which is nothing but an abominable racial company. It should have been liquidated a long time ago. Until then, it should be boycotted.