End JNF complicity in displacing Israel's Negev Bedouin!
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 11:43PM
We, residents of the Negev, human rights activists, social organizations in Israel, Jewish and other allies in the United States and around the world, issue this call to the leadership of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Israel and the U.S.:
JNF must no longer serve as an accomplice to the discriminatory policy of the Government of Israel and the Israel Land Administration (ILA) designed to expel and dispossess the Negev Bedouin from their land.
Join our urgent call to the leadership of JNF to:
1. Stop funding and participating in the forestation and development of any area that is the site of an existing or demolished Bedouin village. Stop all development of lands for which Bedouin have made legal claims of ownership until their cases have been fully adjudicated in Israeli courts or a mutually agreeable just settlement is reached.
2. Submit JNF’s development plans for the Negev to independent scrutiny by environmental, human rights and social justice organizations to work toward truly sustainable development of the Negev for ALL its inhabitants, Jews and Arabs alike.
3. Fund projects for Israel’s Bedouin citizens and communities at levels that are proportional to the size of this population in the Negev—nearly 30%—recognizing the contribution of the Bedouin to the flourishing of the Negev.
4. Join with human rights organizations in Israel to allow the Bedouin to live on their traditional lands, as they have for many generations.
Please use this link to add your name to the protest message which will be emailed right now to JNF’s top 3 leaders in the US: Chairman Ronald Lauder, President Stanley M. Chesley and CEO Russell Robinson - and KKL-JNF's top 2 leaders in Israel: KKL-JNF World Chairman Efi Stenzler and Deputy Chair Menachem Leibovic.
Background: JNF is engaged in intensive forestation and development in the Negev designed to ensure a Jewish majority in the region. To achieve this, it plants trees on large tracts of land containing Bedouin villages, many with ongoing legal claims of ownership, requiring massive dispossession of Arab Bedouin from their lands in order to open up space for the Jewish population.
The destruction of the entire villages of Al-Arakib and Twail Abu Jarwal and the expulsion of hundreds of men, women and children to make way for JNF forests and Jewish-only settlements are but a few of many examples.
JNF has filed with Israel’s Interior Ministry a publicly available plan for forestation which completely ignores the existence of “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in areas it intends to blanket with trees. Detailed objections to the JNF plan have been submitted to Israel’s Ministry of Interior by Israeli human rights organizations.
On Jan. 16 and 17, 2011, the Israeli government sent bulldozers and Israeli riot police to demolish the Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib for the 9th time, shooting the residents with rubber bullets, beating them with batons, injuring 11 people, 5 of whom were hospitalized. The police arrested 11 Israeli human rights activists who attempted to help the residents rebuild their village.
Israel Lands Administration Development Director Shlomo Zeizer said "We are making an effort to find a FINAL SOLUTION to what's happening in Al-Arakib," and "We are preparing the ground for planting," clearly implicating the JNF, which has now built a new camp in Al-Arakib (under Israel Police protection) for its bulldozers to plant a forest there, prevent the return of the Bedouin forever and cover up all traces of Bedouin life in the demolished village. These shocking statements were printed only in the Hebrew edition of YNET's 1/16/11 report, and omitted from the English edition.
The Open Letter has been signed by a big tent of 36 ideologically diverse Israeli and American Jewish organizations – 28 NGOs, human rights organizations and social movements from the Negev and Israel and 8 American Jewish organizations:
From Israel:
■ Al-Arakib Village Committee ■ Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality ■ Rabbis for Human Rights, Israel ■ Shatil – Leading Social Change, An Initiative of the New Israel Fund ■ The Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages ■ Physicians for Human Rights – Israel ■ Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel ■ The Association for Support and Defense of Bedouin Rights in Israel ■ Hit’habrut-Tarabut – Arab-Jewish Movement for Social and Political Change ■ AJEEC – Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development ■ The Local Committee – Alsira Village ■ Al-Arakib People’s Committee ■ Women’s Coalition for Peace ■ Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel ■ Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel ■ Recognition Forum ■ Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights ■ Laqiya Womens’ Association ■ Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Campaign ■ Gush Shalom ■ The Israeli Committee against House Demolition ■ Social TV ■ Alternative Information Center ■ Fighters for Peace ■ Public Committee Against Torture in Israel ■ New Profile – Movement for the Civil-ization of Israeli Society ■ Yesh Gvul ■ Amnesty Israel
From the US:
■ Jewish Alliance for Change ■ Rabbis for Human Rights-North America ■ Meretz USA ■ Shalom Center ■ Jewish Voice for Peace ■ The Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring ■ Tikkun Community ■ Network of Spiritual Progressives
Please use this link to email your protest message right now to JNF’s top 3 leaders in the US and JNF-KKL's top 2 world leaders in Israel.
Petition Text
End JNF complicity in displacing Israel's Negev Bedouin!
Messrs. Lauder, Chesley and Robinson,
As residents of the Negev, human rights activists, social organizations in Israel, Jewish and other allies in the United States and around the world, we issue this call to you, the leadership of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
In 2005, JNF-USA, together with JNF-Israel, the Or Movement, Ayalim and the government of Israel, launched a program for developing the Negev, announcing that it will be placing the Negev at the center of its activities in Israel. JNF has since become the major contributor to various development projects in the region. The program set an ambitious demographic target: between the years 2005-2010 the Jewish population of the Negev was to be increased by 500,000. When this goal was not met, a more modest target was set: to increase the Jewish population of the Negev by 250,000 by 2013. But neither of the two targets were formulated in democratic consultation with the current residents of the Negev.
To implement its plan, JNF is using two complementary strategies:
-Bringing Jews to the Negev in order to achieve demographic superiority over the Arab population.
-Intensive forestation measures which require massive dispossession of Arab Bedouin from their lands, in order to “open up space” for the Jewish population.
The first strategy has yielded few results. By contrast, the forestation efforts of the JNF have been more successful. JNF is planting trees on thousands of acres of land – much of it not empty, but containing Bedouin villages, many with ongoing legal claims of Bedouin ownership.
Two of many examples illustrate the systematic pattern of JNF action:
First, the village of Twail Abu Jarwal, located in the heart of Givoth Goral (“Destiny Hills”), was destroyed some fifty times over the past four years to make room for a JNF forest already underway.
Second, the village of Al-Arakib, north of Beer Sheba, which recently made headlines, is situated in the heart of the “Ambassadors Forest,” an area in which the JNF conducted massive forestation until mid-May 2010. Since the end of July 2010, the village has been destroyed eight times – once during the month of the Ramadan fast.
In this case, too, JNF is cooperating with the government of Israel as it dispossesses the people of the Al-Touri tribe living there—the same Bedouin tribe originally expelled from the site during the 1950’s—by completely afforesting the area so that they can no longer return to their lands.
Following repeated home demolitions, hundreds of villagers, men, women and children, are currently living in makeshift open tents and huts, exposed to the extreme heat of the day, and the soon approaching winter.
JNF has completed all its work surrounding the village of Al-Arakib and is awaiting its final evacuation. At the same time, Awjan, an area of small hamlets and agricultural farms in the southern part of Givoth Goral, may be the next target for dispossession and expulsion.
JNF has filed a publicly available plan for forestation which completely ignores the existence of Awjan and other “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the area to be blanketed with trees. Detailed objections to the JNF plan have been submitted to Israel’s Ministry of Interior by human rights organizations.
The JNF website showcases a number of projects for the Bedouin population, and invites people to make a contribution to them. But the facts suggest that these projects are far outweighed by JNF's attempts to whitewash its complicity in the dispossession, or to gain the confidence of the Bedouin community, the poorest and most neglected in Israel. Projects like Wadi Atir and Nahal Grar, or a few other small projects intended for the Bedouin population, are in no way proportional to the actual size of the Bedouin population of the Negev or to the huge sums and resources that the JNF is investing in the region.
The Bedouin, the indigenous inhabitants of the Negev, comprising nearly 30% of the region’s population, are being forced to pay the price of JNF activities in the Negev. That the JNF does not itself engage in the government’s demolition and expulsion activity, or decide the legal status of villages, is no defense. The JNF must not serve as an accomplice to the discriminatory policy of the Government of Israel and the Israel Land Administration (ILA) – the dispossession of the Bedouin from their land.
We call on you, the JNF leadership, to:
1. Stop funding and participating in the forestation and development of any area that is the site of an existing or demolished Bedouin village. Stop all development of lands for which Bedouin have made legal claims of ownership until their cases have been fully adjudicated in Israeli courts or a mutually agreeable just settlement is reached.
2. Submit JNF’s development plans for the Negev to independent scrutiny by environmental, human rights and social justice organizations to work toward truly sustainable development of the Negev for ALL its inhabitants, Jews and Arabs alike.
3. Fund projects for Israel’s Bedouin citizens and communities at levels that are proportional to the size of this population in the Negev—nearly 30%—recognizing the contribution of the Bedouin to the flourishing of the Negev.
4. Join with human rights organizations in Israel to allow the Bedouin to live on their traditional lands, as they have for many generations.
Bedouin villages should be able to find their place in a Negev that also includes forests and tourist sites, within the framework of true environmental planning, involving the Bedouin in determining their own future.
By ensuring that all Israelis can feel confident that their basic rights and culture will be treated with respect by the society in which they live, the State of Israel can build a foundation for trust and partnership with its non-Jewish minorities.
The time has come to end JNF’s role as an accessory to acts of robbery and looting, green-washed by false notions of sustainability. True sustainability is not about one national or ethnic group living at the expense of another. It does not mean doing injustice to one for the benefit of another; nor does it involve the exploitation of the limited resources of indigenous peoples living in the State of Israel. Rather, sustainability is about sharing resources equitably; otherwise, it becomes a fig leaf for entrenching ethnic discrimination.
If you, the leaders of the JNF, fail to heed this call to take a moral stand, you will share responsibility for the betrayal of Israel’s commitment to the values of equality and justice enshrined in its Declaration of Independence, to which the state is obligated by the international conventions it has signed.
If you fail to chart a new course for JNF, you become party to the State of Israel in a war against its own citizens—the loyal Bedouin Arab population of the Negev—risking a conflagration that may not easily be extinguished.
We call on you, the leadership of the JNF, to end your complicity in the destruction of Bedouin villages in the Negev and in the dispossession of Israel’s Bedouin community.
Signed by 28 NGOs, human rights organizations and social movements from the Negev and Israel and by 8 American Jewish organizations.
From Israel:
■ Al-Arakib Village Committee ■ Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality ■ Rabbis for Human Rights, Israel ■ Shatil – Leading Social Change, An Initiative of the New Israel Fund ■ The Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages ■ Physicians for Human Rights – Israel ■ Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel ■ The Association for Support and Defense of Bedouin Rights in Israel ■ Hit’habrut-Tarabut – Arab-Jewish Movement for Social and Political Change ■ AJEEC – Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development ■ The Local Committee – Alsira Village ■ Al-Arakib People’s Committee ■ Women’s Coalition for Peace ■ Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel ■ Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel ■ Recognition Forum ■ Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights ■ Laqiya Womens’ Association ■ Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Campaign ■ Gush Shalom ■ The Israeli Committee against House Demolition ■ Social TV ■ Alternative Information Center ■ Fighters for Peace ■ Public Committee Against Torture in Israel ■ New Profile – Movement for the Civil-ization of Israel Society ■ Yesh Gvul ■ Amnesty Israel
From the US:
■ Jewish Alliance for Change ■ Rabbis for Human Rights-North America ■ Meretz USA ■ Shalom Center ■ Jewish Voice for Peace ■ The Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring ■ Tikkun Community ■ Network of Spiritual Progressives
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