Culture, Global, Israel, Politics

Plan B: Privatizing Ethnic Cleansing

After losing a legal battle in a landmark decision from the Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) has been forced back to the drawing board to figure out how it can side-step the ban on state discrimination and continue to act as it always has – in a manner which is discriminatory against minority groups.

The new idea currently being considered by the Sharon government (according to The Jewish Week) is to have JNF sever all legal ties it has with the Israeli government and just become an independent entity. This way it would not be considered an agent of the state and would be free to continue discriminating.

The negotiations – which are being backed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Vice Premier Ehud Olmert, who is responsible for the Israel Lands Administration – have made considerable progress, and the agreement is likely to be signed in the coming months, according to sources involved in the talks.

In an interview with Jon Elmer, Uri Davis said of the JNF:

“The Jewish National Fund [..] projects itself as an environmentally friendly organization concerned with ecology and sustainable development. It plants forests and establishes recreation facilities open to all. Well, it is the case that JNF forests and facilities are open to all, but it is equally the case that that most – almost without exception all – of these forests are planted on the ruins of Palestinian Arab villages ethnically cleansed in the 1948-49 war.

To ethnically cleanse indigenous localities and reduce their population into the misery of statelessness and refugee existence is a war crime. It is not charitable, as the JNF would have you believe, it is a war crime. The forests of the Jewish National Fund are there to veil this criminality and, to my reading, the Jewish National Fund afforestation activity is an accomplice to the cover-up of war crimes.”

It makes me wonder why Mazuz stopped where he did. Allowing JNF to continue discriminating as a shell corporation makes me worry about the precedent it sets. Why shouldn’t the state set up shell corporations to manage the military occupation and other things it often takes heat for ? “Oh we didn’t bulldoze those Arab houses, an independent corporation, Shabbos Goy Demolition Ltd. did, go talk to them

Were Israel as committed to justice as to Jewishness, the Jewish National Fund should have been abolished for all the damage it has caused. Justice requires that the Attorney General enforce the clause of Israel’s declaration of Independence which proclaims that Israel “will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex”

The Jewish Week

33 thoughts on “Plan B: Privatizing Ethnic Cleansing

  1. and you have no problems with Muslim Wakf or the Christian organization who buy land in israel to sell exculsively to Christians? JNF isa private organization. Mazuz has no right to tell thwem what to do.Jewschool should link to IntifadaOnline.

  2. So if I recall you had problems when I used the phrase “ethnic cleansing” in reference to the disengagement. You are extremely one-sided with all your arguments, and it always surprises me that you side with the non-Jew.
    Anyway, you’re forgetting that Israel is a Jewish, racist state. There is nothing wrong with a racist state. And it’s the best one in the area with full citizen rights to non-Jews.
    I’m worried about calling you a disgusting name because of the new comments thingy, so you can just reread all the other names.

  3. alexbmn wrote: “and you have no problems with Muslim Wakf or the Christian organization who buy land in israel to sell exculsively to Christians?
    That’s a pretty big assumption isn’t it ?
    Of course I have a problem with bigotry, that’s the whole point of this thread!
    However I am not a muslim and this is Jewschool not Waqfschool. And as the saying goes, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”
    alexbmn continued: “JNF isa private organization.
    Not quite. It’s a quasi-govermental agency, and Mazuz recognized it as such. If it was truly private there would be no need for it to divest itself from the government to continue its discriminatory policies.
    velvel wrote: “and it always surprises me that you side with the non-Jew
    Wanting Israel to be righteous and not racist is not siding with or against any group of people, with the exception of racists. If you want to call me anti-racist, that’s fine with me. To me, when Israel or its shell corporations act in a bigoted way it reflects badly upon all Jews since Israel claims to be the state of the Jewish people. I don’t like being associated with racist policy and to be a good Jew means you don’t sit back and keep quiet about it.
    velvel continued: “Anyway, you’re forgetting that Israel is a Jewish, racist state. There is nothing wrong with a racist state. And it’s the best one in the area with full citizen rights to non-Jews.
    Wow you should work for the Israeli tourist bureau or something … “Come to Israel! The best racist state in the area!” oy

  4. How can Israel be the Jewish state without being racist? What exactly do you have against racism? I’m not talking about hatred, superiority or prejudice.

  5. Where do you get the idea the being Jewish isn’t about racism? Where in the Torah is it shown that Jews and non-Jews are the same on every level?

  6. valvel wrote: “ How can Israel be the Jewish state without being racist?
    Damn good question
    velvel continued: “What exactly do you have against racism? I’m not talking about hatred, superiority or prejudice.
    (with the mutual understanding that we’re talking about ethnic bigotry here since technically Jews and Arabs are not races) Racism is what drove the cossacks to go on pogroms. Racists killed my ancestors. Racism caused the holocaust. Racism caused the enslavement of africans by Europe and America. Racism probably caused more death and misery for people in the last few centuries than just about any other phenomena. How can you ask “What exactly do you have against racism” ?? And how can you claim “I’m not talking about hatred, superiority or prejudice.” when the topic is racism ? That’s the definition of the word!
    rac·ism – noun
    1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
    2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.

  7. velvel wrote: “ The State of Israel was specifically created to show preferential treatment for Jews.
    Really? why does the Israeli declaration of independence contain the quotation I included :
    “will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex”
    velvel continued: “ Where do you get the idea the being Jewish isn’t about racism?
    Well #1, I don’t know what the hell you were taught as a child, but that’s how I was brought up. #2, re-read the above quote

  8. I was taught Torah. You have a lot of sources from the words of man. We are Jewish because we are chosen by God. Do you believe you were chosen for anything?

  9. I don’t know how you want to twist the definitions, but I don’t believe in the superiority of races. Just different. And Judaism is both a religion and a race. I believe in general differences and that there needs to be a place where Jews get preferential treatment. Jews need a corner of the globe where we can get something garaunteed.

  10. No, no. Judaism is a religion and a nationality, not a race. The race part is based on rhetoric from a long time ago, when race was basically used as a synonym for nationality. Israel is by far the region’s most multiracial state. Actually, not just the region, the world entire. I don’t think there are ten countries in the world as diverse as Israel is. Zionism is a national movement for self-determination based on the common will of the Jewish people there to exercise self-determination rights. It is no different from British nationalism, American nationalism, or any other type of nationalism. I’d say it’s far more friendly; where was America 55 years into its existence? The Palestinian brand of nationalism is certainly not less exclusionary than Israel’s is.
    Look, Israel is a Jewish state. The JNF was set up to buy land for Jewish refugees and others who wanted to build up the land. And it acquired most of it legally by buying it from absentee landowners. This meant Palestinians got pushed off the land they were on, yes. It also meant that the region got a huge economic boom. It is not reasonable, historically or morally, to expect Israel to commit suicide by undermining its own basis for self-determination.

  11. Michael Brenner wrote: “And [the JNF] acquired most of it legally by buying it from absentee landowners
    Sorry, but that’s revisionist history – it’s simply not even close to being true that most was acquired by buying it
    “Arab rejection [of partition] was…based on the fact that, while the population of the Jewish state was to be [only half] Jewish with the Jews [b]owning less than 10% of the Jewish state land area[/b], the Jews were to be established as the ruling body – a settlement which no self-respecting people would accept without protest, to say the least…The action of the United Nations conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the right of all peoples to self-determination. By denying the Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds majority of the country, the right to decide for themselves, the United Nations had violated its own charter.”
    -Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
    “By the eve of statehood, the JNF had acquired a total of 936,000 dunums of land; another 800,000 dunums had been acquired by other Jewish organizations or individuals. These holdings amounted to some 8.6 percent of the total land of what would later be Israel
    http://www.meforum.org/article/370

  12. “How can Israel be the Jewish state without being racist? ”
    “Damn good question”
    Why is it a good question? Anyone can convert to Judaism regardless of race Brown, so why, may I ask, are you so preoccupied with the question of Israel’s racial make-up? There are a lot of different sorts of Jews. Israel reflects Judaism’s diversity pretty well. Are you upset that there are racists in Israel? I have news for you: there are places it is much, much worse. Why not spend your time delegitimizing Syria or France as nationalist projects? Why Israel, huh?

  13. JB,
    MBJWTWSNMC makes a good point. What makes you care about Jews so much or how they oppress Palestinians? What is your cause against the Jewish state?

  14. ” what is your cause against the JEWISHNESS of the Jewish state?
    We are what we do. It’s really not more complicated than that. Show me a Jew who spends most of their time looking under rocks for alleged (Brown knows this. Anyone with the time/background – I’d recommend J – can cite quotes proving the exact opposite of Brown’s points) atrocities and wrong doings of the Jewish people, I’ll show you someone who’s probably not in touch with the shadowy part of their Jewish identity. Projection is easy, ownership is much more difficult.

  15. john brown,
    if you are trying to reconcile the justice of the hebrew prophets with the jnf, you’re working apples and oranges. if you wanna get philosophical, ahad haam’s essay on the difference between justice and mercy is important. jews invented the first, and not perhaps the latter. so if you wanna beg for mercy, go to church, if you wanna beg for justice – get a job at the jnf and work to change it. the business of predicating your political ideology on a scant interpretation of the hebrew prophets is like saying you smoke herb because you think heschel could have.

  16. Uh, John, we’ve already discussed those stats in previous discussions on this very site in the past few weeks. Why is that you learn nothing even when your tired arguments are defeated?
    Serious question.

  17. Here John Brown goes again:
    By the eve of statehood, the JNF had acquired a total of 936,000 dunums of land; another 800,000 dunums had been acquired by other Jewish organizations or individuals. These holdings amounted to some 8.6 percent of the total land of what would later be Israel
    ——————————————
    First of all – I really LOVE the objectivity of your sources, dahling…
    Second – get the “land that would later be Israel” bit: yes, that’s right, the JNF did not own all the lands designated BY INTERNATIONAL LAW as the Jewish State before that State was created. So? That doesn’t mean that the rest was gotten by illegal “ethnic cleansing”.
    The international community – you know, the same legal authority against which lefties lovingly rub their hindquarters when the Geneva Accords get mentioned – well yeah, that same international legal authority brokered a partition plan that gave the Jews all that land (“all that land” = a fraction of Biblical Israel, less than 1/2 of the area originally promised to them – the rest having been peeled off to create Palest- er, Jordan).
    The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs attacked.
    Was there ethnic cleansing during the war – not wholesale slaughter, not mass rape, but refugees encouraged to leave? Yes. So? C’est le guerre. Next time they shouldn’t start wars. Once the war was over, Arabs in Israel were given full citizenship. No ethnic cleansing. No apartheid. Despite ongoing tensions.
    Does the JNF – as a quasi-governmental institution – have to be totally even-handed in administering lands acquired by Jews, for Jews? Nope – no more than the Jewish Agency has to start recruiting Palestinians for Aliyah.
    The history is still fresh. It is still very much us or them.
    What has kept the matter of Israel’s borders from resolution? What has kept Israel suspicious of its Arab citizen’s loyalties?
    Arab intransigence.
    Some lefties claim to represent “realpolitik”. This is the “real” realpolitik – this is the truth behind Benny Morris’s latest statements that things would have been better if the “transfer of populations” had been more thorough in 1948.
    This Jew is 100 percent guilt-free over the whole story. There is no such thing as a nation being antiseptically handed a country on a silver plate (well, except for the Palestinians in Oslo… ).
    Israel was given basic legitimacy by international law. It has also had to fight. It fought. It won. Sixty years and a peace/piece process later, it’s clear that for many Arabs it is still an all-or-nothing, us-or-them conflict. So? There is nothing healthier, more normal and “realistic” than choosing to defend Us, preferring your own Us over the attacking Them. This is why Israel was established – so that Jews could put their own interests first, like every other nation.
    Do the Jews have a unique moral calling? Yes. I see nothing in this story that has significantly violated that. I have studied the Torah and the Talmud, and I see no major moral codes that the story of Israeli statehood has violated.
    Most criticisms of Israel are based on impractical Christian notions of “turning the other cheek” that were never meant to apply in the geopolitical realm (judging by the behavior of Christian Europe) and have no parallel in Judaism. Critics of Israel set an impossibly high bar that is totally beyond the norms of geopolitics. As the saying goes, Israel is supposed to be the only truly Christian state.
    Our Torah describes in detail the wars fought to establish both previous Jewish kingdoms. Our sages have supplemented that with restrictions on what can morally be done today – when our enemies are not G-dless pagans, and the world’s moral compass has already been positively influenced by Jewish teachings.
    Israel has largely hewed to that moral code as it fights to establish itself. There have been no Israeli platoons gang-raping Muslim women (depend what websites you read, eh John?). There have been no mass graves, there was no massacre in Jenin – in fact, our own soldiers were lost because our army fights differently – sad but proud am I.
    But self-immolation is not part of the Jewish moral scheme – no matter how many times such martyrdom was forced on us.
    In the early 1900s a diplomat proposed a settlement of the Greek/Turkish conflict that involved the “ethnic cleansing” of millions of Greeks and Turks, who had lived in their villages for generations if not centuries.
    He received one of the first Nobel Peace Prizes.

  18. FWIW,
    Mazuz has become the latest champion of the Israeli constitution after Supreme Court Judge Barak. Every other week, he discovers a new knesset law that isn’t legal. The problem is that Israel doesn’t have a constitution, and the knesset is supposed to decide what is legal or not, not some PeaceNow founder.

  19. So is the JNF ethnic cleansing or is Sharon ethnic cleansing? When am I allowed to use the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to make my arguments seem important?

  20. Mind you, French ethnic cleansing has long followed a much more subtle strategy: they turn everyone into Gaulois! Hence the textbooks in the colonies. Hence Napoleon’s famous pronouncements. And so on.
    Brown, or the “Babylonian” — as he likes to call himself — usually responds that, well, we’re not interested in France here. The numbingly obvious point he’s trying to wriggle out of is the exceptionalism of the propagandistic vocabulary he — and Mobius, and Asaf, and Sam (?!) — adopt. Either “ethnic cleansing” is something quite unusual, or quite banal:
    – If it’s something quite unusual, and that’s what the phrase’s shock value communicates (why on Earth use it otherwise?), then the argument is that Israel is doing something dastardly that no other country does.
    In which case, yeah, you’ve got to argue that France and so on are angels, and Israel is the devil. Which is exactly the point of this particular propaganda. The corollary is showing that France, Sweden, Zambia, etc. are somehow better or different.
    – The disingenuous alternative is to say that, no, ethnic cleansing is just one of those ordinary terms that applies to every government: it’s perfectly banal, choruses friend Brown.
    I think that’s called “lying”.

  21. josh wrote: “The problem is that Israel doesn’t have a constitution
    Why doesn’t Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” have a constitution?
    “The abstention from formulating a constitution was no accident. The massive expropriation of lands and other properties from those Arabs who fled the country as a result of the War of Independence and of those who remained but were declared absent, as well as the confiscation of large tracts of land from Arab villages who did not flee, and the laws passed to legalize those acts – all this would have necessarily been declared unconstitutional, null and void, by the Supreme Court, being expressly discriminatory against one part of the citizenry, whereas a democratic constitution obliges the state to treat all of its citizens equally.” Israeli author, Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”

  22. ben-david • 02/03/05 05:29am
    Usually I turn to J to rip Brown a new one, but your post was wonderful. Alas, it’s a keeper.
    John, admit it, his post stung.

  23. “it’s just one irrelevant point”
    Truth be told, it’s just one “control-c, control-v” act after another. His ideas are rarely his own.
    In general, Jewish with healhty identities can trace their feelings back to warm childhood memories about all sorts of things…Israel, shabbos, sukah, etc. They don’t need to quote and reference why they feel feel Jews are unique, special, etc., etc. Jews without this luxury are often angry, jaded and feel excluded from the community. They often chanel their angst into politics, built upon the altar of Chomsky, Finkelstein, etc. BTW, ever read the background of these Jews…not unlike their fans. Interesting.

  24. ben-david wrote: “First of all – I really LOVE the objectivity of your sources, dahling…
    Do you have a specific problem with one or more of the sources I used?
    ben-david continued: “Second – get the “land that would later be Israel” bit: yes, that’s right, the JNF did not own all the lands designated BY INTERNATIONAL LAW as the Jewish State before that State was created. So?
    So… The reason I quoted that was because earlier Michael Brenner wrote: “And [the JNF] acquired most of it legally by buying it from absentee landowners”
    which, apparently, you agree is not the case.
    ben-david continued: “The international community – you know, the same legal authority against which lefties lovingly rub their hindquarters when the Geneva Accords get mentioned – well yeah, that same international legal authority brokered a partition plan that gave the Jews all that land
    As I quoted earlier from “Bitter Harvest” : The action of the United Nations conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the right of all peoples to self-determination. By denying the Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds majority of the country, the right to decide for themselves, the United Nations had violated its own charter.
    And Why did the UN recommend the plan partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state?
    “By this time [November 1947] the United States had emerged as the most aggressive proponent of partition…The United States got the General Assembly to delay a vote ‘to gain time to bring certain Latin American republics into line with its own views.’…Some delegates charged U.S. officials with ‘diplomatic intimidation.’ Without ‘terrific pressure’ from the United States on ‘governments which cannot afford to risk American reprisals,’ said an anonymous editorial writer, the resolution ‘would never have passed.'” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
    ben-david continued: “The Jews accepted the plan. The Arabs attacked.
    Well, the fact is – some accepted it and some didn’t.
    “While the Yishuv’s leadership formally accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution, large sections of Israel’s society – including…Ben-Gurion – were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.” Israeli historian, Benny Morris, in “Tikkun”, March/April 1998.
    Also, did the Arabs attack first or did the Jews?
    Before the end of the mandate and, therefore before any possible intervention by Arab states, the Jews, taking advantage of their superior military preparation and organization, had occupied…most of the Arab cities in Palestine before May 15, 1948. Tiberias was occupied on April 19, 1948, Haifa on April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the Arab quarters in the New City of Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8, Safad on May 10 and Acre on May 14, 1948…In contrast, the Palestine Arabs did not seize any of the territories reserved for the Jewish state under the partition resolution.”
    -British author, Henry Cattan, “Palestine, The Arabs and Israel.”
    “Menahem Begin, the Leader of the Irgun, tells how ‘in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, we were the first to pass from the defensive to the offensive…Arabs began to flee in terror…Hagana was carrying out successful attacks on other fronts, while all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter’…The Israelis now allege that the Palestine war began with the entry of the Arab armies into Palestine after 15 May 1948. But that was the second phase of the war; they overlook the massacres, expulsions and dispossessions which took place prior to that date and which necessitated Arab states’ intervention.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
    ben-david continued: “Was there ethnic cleansing during the war – not wholesale slaughter, not mass rape, but refugees encouraged to leave? Yes. So? C’est le guerre. Next time they shouldn’t start wars.
    The Palestinian civilians certainly didn’t start a war. And there certainly was some degree of wholesale slaughter, such as the attack on Deir Yassin and other towns, which caused palestinian civilians to flee for their lives.
    ben-david continued: “Does the JNF – as a quasi-governmental institution – have to be totally even-handed in administering lands acquired by Jews, for Jews? Nope
    Yes, clearly it does according to Mazuz.
    ben-david continued: “What has kept the matter of Israel’s borders from resolution? What has kept Israel suspicious of its Arab citizen’s loyalties? Arab intransigence
    I don’t know what you mean by intransigence. The official UN position (expressed in UNSC 242), and Palestinian position on the borders – for decades – has been that they would accept the 1967 green line as a border. I don’t see how that’s extreme or uncompromising as it represents a Palestinian sacrifice compared to the 1948 partition plan right off the bat. And what would it cost Israel? Nothing. It’s a net gain for Israel based on the original partition plan.

  25. Well I guess a cut-and-paste reference to the opinion of “an anonymous editorial writer” settles it!

  26. JB,
    the only group currently supporting the implementation of an Israeli constitution is the right-wing. The left and the Aharon Barak’s supreme court are viciously against the idea because it would actually hold everyone up to one standard, and might eclipse the supreme court itself, which I just found out today, was built higher than the knesset. I don’t think that it was by coincidence.

  27. Um, Israel has its Basic Laws, and a system of jurisprudence. Isn’t it dishonest to say that Israel doesn’t already have a constitution? Isn’t Israel a lot closer to have a constitution than, for instance, the United Kingdom?
    (As in: Theirs is unwritten. Israel’s is only partly formalized. The latter is way further ahead than the former.)

  28. josh wrote: “the only group currently supporting the implementation of an Israeli constitution is the right-wing.
    It seems that you are mistaken
    Public Opinion Poll Examining Positions of the Arab Population
    Regarding the Establishment of a Constitution for the State of Israel

    “75% of the [Israeli-Arab] public believes that the establishment of a constitution for the State of Israel is very important for them and for people like them.”

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