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 E-book on Jewish National Fund's role in colonization of Palestine released
Press release, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 16 February 2010
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has published an e-book on the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that meets a need
for an affordable introduction to the activities of the JNF, an organization supported financially by the British taxpayer but
whose activities in Israel/ Palestine are politically-driven, and whose politics are nakedly racist. This little book reveals
how a British charity works openly for the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs and the establishment of fully segregated
Jewish-only communities and areas that exclude Arabs.
The book explains why, when the JNF Committee sought legal advice from England in 1905 as to the possibility of
registering as a charity, their legal advisors were unanimous that it would be impossible:
"We therefore conclude that the purpose of the Fund will be a political rather than a charitable
one and that limiting the Fund's use to strictly charitable purposes would run counter to the main purpose of the Fund ..."
The JNF initially failed to secure charitable status, being refused by the House of Lords in 1932,
but it now enjoys charitable status for activities that would be illegal if carried out in the
countries where it raises the funds, including the UK where the JNF enjoys the patronage of
Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leaders of the other two main political parties.
Edited by Mortaza Sahibzada, JNF: Colonising Palestine since 1901 is available for download
from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Ilan Pappe's introduction reveals through the open commitment of the JNF's founders to the expulsion, what is today
termed "ethnic cleansing," of the native Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish immigrants. Pappe discusses the
JNF's success in obtaining much of the land pillaged from the Palestinians by the Zionist militias through murder and
violence in 1948 and its effective control of much more through its role as an agent of the State of Israel in keeping
almost all the land surface of Israel for exclusively Jewish ownership at the expense of Israel's one million Palestinian
citizens. The author shows the JNF's audacity in presenting itself as a "green" movement as it plants trees with the
express aim of obliterating all traces of ethnically cleansed and destroyed Palestinian communities.
Abe Hayeem of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine analyses the intense politicization of Israeli architects and
their complicity in Zionist war crimes. While the JNF was intimately involved in the racially-driven confiscation of Palestinian
lands, architects also worked easily in the nightmare world of legally-designated "Present Absentees," i.e. Palestinians
still inside Israel after 1948 but whose land was slated for transfer to exclusively Jewish ownership. Bringing the story up
to date, Hayeem notes the JNF's involvement in illegal confiscation operation on behalf of the Israeli state, in collusion
with illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank, the intimidation of Palestinian land-owners by Jewish authorities, and the
complicity of the country's architects in racist schemes to oppress and dispossess Palestinians.
Uri Davis examines the British Park, proclaimed in a sign there as "a gift of the Jewish
National Fund of Great Britain." The British Park is built on the ethnically cleansed
Palestinian villages of Ajjur and Zakariyya, making the UK JNF complicit in war crimes and
unfit for charitable status on grounds of multiple violations of international humanitarian
law. Astonishingly, Prof. Davis alleges that the British Park is used to store some of
Israel's nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
Susannah Tarbush looks at Gordon Brown's decision to become a Patron of the JNF on
his arrival in 10 Downing St, shortly after the Israeli Knesset passed a racist law
confirming the apartheid nature of JNF-controlled lands in Israel, forbidding their transfer
to any non-Jew. She deals with the petition from Architects and Planners for Justice in
Palestine and the inevitable accusation from Israelis that the British architects who
criticized the JNF's involvement in human rights violations as "anti-Semitic."
Sonia Karkar criticizes Australian PM John Howard for allowing a JNF park to be named
after him in the Negev, where the Israeli system of apartheid takes the form of forcing
the local Bedouin Arabs off their land and into villages that the government they are
citizens of refuses to recognize or supply with basic services. The John Howard Park
shares the Negev with Government crop-spraying aircraft which destroy the Bedouin's crops.
Ben White, author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide, tackles the Kafka-esque mind-game of an Israeli park being
dedicated to Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, the non-Jewish property owners being categorized as "present
absentees," and the fruits of Zionist ethnic cleansing supposedly "perpetuating the message of equality and peace."
White shows how the attempt to associate the Zionist colonial venture with the US civil rights movement comes up
against the harsh reality of Israeli ethnic cleansing with the JNF center stage.
In similar vein, Raheli Mizrahi argues that the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments should take action against their local
JNF bodies and deny the Israelis the ideological cover provided by their appropriation of the symbols of the anti-colonial
struggle in South America. She touches on the sometimes cruel treatment of Arab, notably Yemeni, Jews in Israel.
The authors of the closing remarks section report on the intra-Zionist discussions at a London JNF fundraiser before their
vocal protest at the JNF's ongoing land theft and racism.
Seven appendices contain important documents relating to the struggle to end the impunity the JNF derives from official
support in many countries.
Click here to download the book.
Zionism for Dummies: By William James Martin
“... one sometimes hears that it is all about Arab/Palestinian „terrorism and suicide bombings and the ultimate goal of the
terrorists-Palestinians is to “push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive” and that their motives are those of anti
-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Those who hold this view see the conflict as one of the survival of the Jewish state amid a
sea of irrational hatred....” Click here to download and read the article.
 Divided by faith, united by war
Friday, 16 April 2010, the Independent
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Sara Pecanac was born a Muslim in Sarajevo,
but fled to Israel from Bosnia with her family during the war in 1994 with the help of Jerusalem Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem
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When Bosnian Muslim Sara Pechanec cried out for help as Serbian forces ransacked
Sarajevo in 1992, she could not have imagined that her saviours would be Israeli
Jews – who were themselves rescued from the Nazis by her own parents. Jerome Taylor hears her story.
It was an artillery shell in the middle of the night that plunged Sara Pechanec's
family head-first into the cruel realities of war. In the spring of 1992, Serbian
paramilitary forces began their notoriously brutal siege of Sarajevo as the Balkans
descended into an orgy of violence and ethnic cleansing.
Day after day the Serbian guns fired down on to their targets from the hills
surrounding the city, pummelling what was once one of the most religiously diverse
metropolises in Europe. It was only a matter of time before the Pechanec household took a direct hit.
"A shell landed on our house in the middle of the night and destroyed everything in
an instant," Mrs Pechanec, now 52, recalls. "All we had left was each other and hope. For the next six months we spent
our entire lives in an underground room just waiting to die."
As the Bosnian Muslim woman huddled in a dark cellar with her husband and 10-year-old daughter, she wondered how
she'd ever escape the maelstrom engulfing her city. Little did she know that an astonishingly brave decision by her
parents, half a century earlier, to give sanctuary to a family the last time war engulfed the Balkans would eventually lead
to her own remarkable rescue.
As video footage of the Sarajevo siege was beamed across the world on nightly news bulletins, a Jewish family in
Jerusalem watched the events unfold on their television set.
For the Kavilios, Sarajevo had always held a warm place in their hearts. Their children had grown up on stories of how it
was thanks to a kind-hearted Muslim family that Yosef Kavilio, the family patriarch, was able to escape the Nazi
occupation of Yugoslavia during the Second World War and bring his family to Jerusalem.
It was Mrs Pechanec's mother and father, Zejneba and Mustafa Hardaga, who had risked their lives to shelter Yosef
throughout 1941 and 1942, as Germany's Gestapo and the Croatian Ustasa regime joined forces in liquidating Jews,
Serbs, gypsies and political opponents.
The Hardagas became the first Muslims to be recognised as Righteous Among the Nations, the official title that Israel
bestows on non-Jews who took extraordinary risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Now, as the shells rained down on Sarajevo once more, it was time to return the favour. Mustafa had died long before
the tumultuous break-up of Yugoslavia, but an ailing 76-year-old Zejneba and her youngest daughter, Sara, were still
living within the shattered remains of Sarajevo.
Throughout December 1992, employees at Yad Vashem – Israel's official Holocaust memorial authority – vigorously
lobbied their government to organise a rescue. Using contacts in Sarajevo's small remaining Jewish community, the family
were eventually located in their cellar and desperately needed medicine was smuggled to Zejneba. Finally, on 5 February
1993, the family made their way out of the besieged city in a refugee convoy headed for the Croatian border which had
been organised by Jewish aid agencies.
"When my parents decided to help the Kavilio family during the Second World War, they never could have imagined that,
50 years later, they would need help from the same family to save them from a similar fate," recalls Mrs Pechanec, who
flew from her home in Israel to Britain this week to retell her family's story in a series of lectures to mark Holocaust
Memorial Day. "Fifty years later in exactly the same place – it's almost unimaginable."
Through a remarkable twist of fate, both the Kavilios and the Pechanec/Hardaga families now owe their lives to each other.
Even before the Second World War broke out, the two households had been firm friends in what was at the time one of
the most racially and religiously mixed areas of the world. A photograph in Yad Vashem's archives shows Tova, one of the
Kavilios' daughters, playing at the feet of Zejneba at the Hardagas' house in 1940. (When Zejneba finally escaped to
safety in Israel, it was Tova who greeted her on the runway). Mustafa and Yosef were also business partners, owning a
pipe factory on the outskirts of the city.
But the following year, spring 1941, German planes bombed Sarajevo, destroying the Kavilios' home and sending the
city's Jews fleeing into the hills. Yosef returned to the city to co-ordinate his family's escape and was immediately taken in
by the Hardegas, even though they lived opposite the Gestapo's headquarters and would have been shot on the spot if
they were found harbouring a Jew.
In the testimony he gave to Yad Vashem, Yosef described the family's remarkable kindness. "The women of the family
would hide their faces under a veil in the presence of strangers," he explained. "Never before had a strange man stayed
with them. They welcomed us with the words: 'Josef, you are our brother; and your children are like our children. Feel at
home and whatever we own is yours.'" The women never wore veils in front of Yosef again.
Eventually the Ustasa regime caught up with Yosef but he was spared being transported to Jasenovac concentration
camp because the winter snow had made the roads impassable. Instead he was put to work in a snow-clearing chain
gang. He escaped to return to the Hardaga household once more before joining his family in Italian-occupied Mostar. From
there they made their way to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem.
Sara Pechanec, who was born after the war in 1957, only found out about her family's bravery after her father's death.
But even then she wasn't surprised to find out that her father and mother had taken in a Jew.
"Our home was always very open to all sorts of people," she says in an accent flecked with both Balkan and Hebrew
tones. "It was a very democratic place. We were always taught that you can have all the money in the world but without
friends you will be very alone. My mother always told me, you might not be able to choose how pretty or rich you are, but
you can choose how good you want to be. That was the way she talked."
With such a strong bond between the two families it is perhaps no surprise that when Zejneba and her daughter finally
arrived in UN- controlled Croatia, the Israelis, in recognition of the role their family had played in helping the Kavilios five
decades before, asked them which country they wanted to relocate to. They both chose Israel.
Mrs Pechanec said: "My mother made it very clear. She said she wanted her biological children to be with their non
-biological children and by that she meant the Kavilios."
For Mrs Pechanec, now in Britain giving lectures on her experience, her journey to Israel has also provoked a spiritual
journey towards Judaism.
"In my heart I had always felt Jewish," she says. "We lived in the Jewish area of Sarajevo and I had always been
fascinated by our neighbours. In my mind we all worshipped the one, same God anyway."
Zejneba Hardaga died within a year of arriving in Israel but just before she passed away her daughter told her she
wanted to become a Jew. "That turned out to be one of the happiest days of my life. She just turned to me, smiled and
said: "If you want to do something, don't talk about it, do it." It was her way of giving me her blessing."
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 The Guardian:
Blair: Gaza's great betrayer
It's more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a
humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the historian
Avi Shlaim. Read the article online or download the file.
"Israel Commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza' ", The Independent, Wednesday
3 February by Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem. Click here to read it online or download it as a PDF file.
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's
legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions. This article was published on
Wednesday 7 January 2009. Click here to read it.
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Footnotes in Gaza – Book Review
By Robin Yassin-Kassab
Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel. Joe Sacco. Metropolitan Books, 2009.
Available at Amazon (UK)
This is not what you expect: an accomplished and self-reflective work of history enclosed within a layer of war reportage –
in comic book form. But Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza" is just that, an unusually effective treatment of Palestinian history  which may appeal to people who would never read a ‘normal book’ on the subject. The
writing, however, is at least as good as you’d expect from a high quality prose work. Here,
for instance, is page nine: “History can do without its footnotes. Footnotes are inessential at
best; at worst they trip up the greater narrative. From time to time, as bolder, more
streamlined editions appear, history shakes off some footnotes altogether. And you can see
why… History has its hands full. It can’t help producing pages by the hour, by the minute.
History chokes on fresh episodes and swallows whatever old ones it can.”
The pictures – aerial shots, action shots, urban still lifes, crafted but realist character studies
– work as hard as the words. Sacco depicts fear, humiliation and anger very well indeed,
and often achieves far more with one picture than he could in an entire newspaper column.
The cranes at work on a Jerusalem skyline are worth a paragraph or two of background. So
is the fact that almost every Palestinian male has a cigarette in his mouth. And when dealing
with historical process – the changing shape of the camps, for example – the pictures are more than useful.
The ‘footnotes’ focused on here are two massacres perpetrated by Israel in 1956. On
November 3rd, according to a UN report, 275 men were killed in the town and camp of Khan
Yunis. Homes were assaulted, men were separated from their families, were then lined up and shot against walls,
sometimes under the eyes of their parents, wives and children. One survivor interviewed by Sacco was protected from
death by his neighbours’ bodies. He lay in drying blood, his nostrils filled with cordite, until the Israelis had moved on.
On November 12th, according to UNRWA, another 111 men were killed in Rafah. This time the occupiers announced that
all military age men should assemble in a school yard. The men who didn’t obey, or didn’t hear the order, were killed in
their homes. Those who did obey were forced to run through the streets, beaten with clubs and shot at as they went.
Shoes and the fallen wounded and dead were left littering the ground. Those who helped the injured were shot. At the
school gate, progress was hindered by a trench and a roll of barbed wire, and a soldier with a heavy stick. His blows killed
several more Palestinians. The men were kept crouched and terrified all day, with no water or toilet facilities, as the
Israelis selected who to release, who to incarcerate, and who to kill.
The immediate context is the 1956 British-French-Israeli assault on Egypt, known in the West as the Suez crisis.
Israel’s aim, as well as pleasing the two crumbling empires and dealing an intimidatory blow to Abdul
Nasser, was to eliminate the incipient fedayeen guerilla movement in Gaza. The mid fifties had already been full
of deadly raids. Israeli forces met no resistance when they entered the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953, but
they shot and then collapsed houses on 42 cowering people, 38 of them women and children. In August 1955
Khan Yunis police station was attacked. Up to 72 Egyptians and Palestinians were killed. In April 1956, 50
civilians were killed by a barrage on Gaza city.
Sacco also shows us the clashes and curfews of the
Second Intifada, the period in which he was researching his book. “Footnotes in Gaza” is as much about the
process of writing history, and the importance of history, as about the history itself, so we see Sacco and his
helpers collecting, sifting, cross-checking and tabulating testimony from named eye-witnesses. Of course, half a
century on, eye-witness testimony can be problematic.
To bring this out, at one point Sacco draws contradictory versions of the same event. His attention to the inconsistencies,
and his careful reference to UN and Israeli sources, strengthen his case immeasurably.
Frequently Palestinians ask him why he’s bothering himself with the past when there is destruction and desperation all
round him in the present. His response is usually a shrugging of shoulders, but the text itself suggests a couple of
reasons. One is that the historical study depicts not only isolated atrocities against the Palestinian people, but the
Palestinian condition too, entire and connected. The repetition of detail in the massacre stories chimes with the repeated
brutality experienced by the Palestinians around Sacco as he pursues his investigations. One day Sacco asks a woman
why she chooses to live in such a dangerous area of Rafah, near Israel’s ‘Philadelphi Corridor’: “She says their home in
Block J was demolished two months ago. They then rented in the Tal el-Sultan neighbourhood, but the Israelis damaged
their new apartment and destroyed their car while demolishing the home of a neighbour. With so many people made
homeless by the demolitions, there was no other place to rent but back in Block J.” Sacco meets the woman in hospital,
after she has been shot by Israeli soldiers. Her sister has had her leg blown off. Her seven-year-old niece’s leg can’t be
operated on because it won’t stop bleeding.
So the circle turns, with the Palestinians trapped inside. With the wheel spinning so fast, will anyone remember this
particular family’s pain? How many legs have been shot or blown off since, after all? And this is the second reason for
focusing on the past, because Sacco is keenly aware of the indignities done by time and forgetfulness. “Palestinians,” he
writes in the foreword, “never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them.”
Here’s an illustration: one day a funeral procession passes under Sacco’s balcony. A boy of 12 or 13 has been murdered.
A single shot is fired into the air. The crowd surges and moves on. In a few minutes the street is again busy with car
noise and commerce. Was this boy, Sacco seems to ask, worth no more than a mere shot, a mere moment? By
remembering, he insists upon the dignity of the victims.
It is to be hoped that an Arabic translation is in the works, to serve the generation who grew up more comfortable with
images than paragraphs. And in the West, “Footnotes in Gaza” deserves a ‘Persepolis’-type success. “Persepolis” was
Marjane Satrapi’s best-selling account, in comic book form, of her Iranian childhood. It later became a block-busting film.
But the villain of Persepolis is the already-demonised Islamic Republic. “Footnotes in Gaza” will challenge Western readers
rather more profoundly.
Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of a novel called The Road from Damascus, published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, and co
-editor of www.pulsemedia.org. His personal blog is www.qunfuz.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
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The next NPSC meeting will be on Thursday 23
News from
Israeli onslaught against the indigenous population keeps coming at the reader, insistently, imperatively, and almost
overwhelming to the point of exhaustion. To
download a book review (a PDF file) of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, please click
here or on the icon
