Seeing the Forest and the Trees: The Untold Story of the Jewish National Fund, by Uri Blau, in Haaretz

"A Jew purchased an apartment in Carmiel, on Jewish National Fund ‏(JNF‏) land. No problem. Twenty years go by and Mohammed who lives in Dir al-Assad ... comes to buy an apartment.”

This may sound like the some sort of ethnic joke, but that’s how JNF world chairman, Effie Stenzler, a member of the Labor Party, chose to speak recently before the members of his board.

"The Jew sells him the apartment for a tidy sum,” Stenzler continues. “He goes to the Israel Lands Administration ‏(ILA‏) and says, ‘I’m Mohammed. I want you to register this apartment in the Tabu [Government Lands Registry Office] in my name.’ They say to him, ‘Wait a minute − you’re an Arab, we can’t do that because it’s written that JNF doesn’t sell to Arabs, doesn’t lease to Arabs.’ And then there was the trick that worked until 2004, and according to this trick the ILA, without telling anyone ... took land registered in the name of JNF, transferred it to another building and then registered that building in JNF’s name ... But then an Arab came to that building and then they had to do it again ...”

The tale of “Mohammed and the Apartment” is quoted from the minutes of the JNF board meeting in July. The organization claims that the quote “is part of a description of a very complicated bureaucratic problem created by the ILA in regard to the registration of apartments. After discussions with the attorney general and the court, the solution to the problem was found and JNF has been acting accordingly.”

Thus, JNF transfers to the ILA property on which there are buildings where Arabs have purchased apartments, and receive other land in return. Specifically, the records of that July meeting show that each year, three or four such property exchanges are carried out, and that some 25 have been made since the arrangement was formulated in 2008.
Lately, JNF has been busy dealing with numerous legal and personal disputes.

Founded 110 years ago following a decision by the fifth Zionist Congress, with the aim of acquiring lands for Jews in Palestine, the organization has in recent times been identified more with forests and forestation − to the point where many see it as a “green” organization.

Hundreds of pages of court records, a flood of correspondence between lawyers and arguments involving JNF board members have been devoted in the last two years to deciding who will control this body, which oversees 13 percent of state lands ‏(2.5 million dunams, or 625,000 acres‏) and is not subject to oversight by the state comptroller or the treasury.

Battling over ‘treasure’

Following a delay that was agreed upon last Thursday among all parties involved, the JNF General Assembly ‏(whose composition is identical to that of the Zionist General Council, with 192 members‏) will on January 4, 2012 elect 37 members of the organization’s board, from which the chairman will be selected. After that, perhaps, the legal sagas that have overshadowed JNF’s operations for the past year and a half will come to an end, and it will become clear whether chairman Stenzler ‏(who has served for the past five and a half years‏) will be reelected or if he will be replaced by former Laborite Prof. Shimon Sheetrit, now affiliated with Ehud Barak’s Atzmaut faction.

In an earlier legal round between the two in October, Stenzler earned a victory − on points, at least − when Judge Avraham Yaakov of the Petah Tikva District Court ruled that Sheetrit and other Atzmaut representatives, including Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Shalom Simhon, had to resign from their faction-related positions in the World Zionist Congress ‏(the body above JNF‏) because they had originally been appointed to these positions as representatives of Labor.

For his part, Sheetrit has been concerned that Stenzler’s reelection as JNF chair is assured, and that he, Sheetrit, will not be eligible to run at all.

In any event, to understand what sort of “treasure” this battle has revolved around, it is instructive to return to the July 2010 and February 2011 JNF board meetings, at which David Lazarus, director of the organization’s financial division, spoke of JNF’s general financial situation. In recent years, JNF has had an annual budget of NIS 650 million; half of that is designated to pay salaries, administrative expenses and so on, and the rest is for other activities. The data indicate that even though in 2009 there was a decrease in donations to JNF ‏(NIS 96 million, compared to NIS 112 million the previous year‏), its financial situation was excellent, since its income far exceeds its expenditures.

Thus, for instance, in 2009, JNF had income totaling NIS 1.133 billion, the vast majority from land holdings, compared to NIS 972 million in 2008 − meaning a surplus in the organization’s coffers of hundreds of millions of shekels per year. The total value of JNF lands is estimated at NIS 6.2 billion; the ILA administers more than half of these properties; its subsidiary, Himanuta, administers the rest.

“The income and moderate expenses have created what JNF calls a ‘budget reserve.’ The reserve should amount to something like NIS 2 billion,” said Avraham Duvdevani, then co-chairman and currently chairman of the WZO, said in September 2010. “This is a well-kept secret,” he told the members of the JNF board, “and it must be preserved with maximum secrecy, otherwise the government will covet this money and we have experience with this already from the past.” ‏(The secret leaked out shortly afterward nonetheless, and was reported upon by Shuki Sadeh in a January 2011 report in TheMarker‏).

Board member Moshe Yogev proposed at that meeting that JNF “take [the reserve], before it’s taken from us, to build the fence with Egypt.”

Among the organization’s fears were the ability to fulfill future financial commitments: In 2008, these commitments totaled NIS 1.971 billion, and a year later they had crossed the NIS 2-billion mark. Stenzler sought to reassure the board and promised to guard the coffers.

“The subject of the reserve is something that needs to be closely watched, that’s true,” he said, “but we also must remember that we promised employees their pension rights with what we called a ‘floating charge’ ‏(shi’abud tzaf‏). This ensures both the JNF’s future and the future of the workers’ pensions, because this is insured and secure money.”

Indeed, it appears that JNF has trouble parting with funds that have accumulated in its coffers, even if these are assets that belong to Holocaust victims and their descendants.

‘JNF foot-dragging’

“I am writing to request that you personally intervene immediately and put an end to JNF’s foot-dragging in regard to complying with the directives of the Law on Holocaust Victims’ Assets.”

These words were written by Yaron Jacobs, head of the Company for the Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets ‏(known by the Hebrew name Hashava‏), in January to Stenzler, whose organization holds tens of millions of shekels worth of such assets. Later in the letter, Jacobs’ language was more pointed: Since 2006, he wrote, “Hashava has systematically maintained contact with JNF on various matters with the aim of upholding the law and obtaining the Holocaust victims’ assets currently held by JNF ... Unfortunately, despite the pleasant atmosphere at most of the meetings ... satisfactory progress was not made in solving these problems and in returning all of the assets to the company.”

Jacobs stressed also that “JNF is holding a lot of funds that belong to victims, in a manner that runs counter to the law’s instructions. This situation is intolerable and requires an immediate solution.”

Unfortunately, he added, “JNF is not in any hurry. The restoration of the assets is occurring very slowly, with various obstacles being placed in the company’s way, in an appropriate manner.”

By contrast, he explained, for the victims’ descendants, time is racing by, as many of them are elderly themselves. Jacobs also explained that assets for which descendants are not found are supposed to be used to help Holocaust survivors, and “if we are unable to obtain the assets in the near future, there will no longer be anyone to help.”
Jacobs was complaining about the failure to transfer NIS 67 million, equivalent to the value of 57 plots of land belonging to victims, which JNF transferred to the ILA in the past. He noted that some in the JNF wanted to transfer the value of the lands according to their worth at the time of purchase − i.e., before the founding of the state − and not according to their present value, which is 10 times higher. He said the company finds itself receiving from the JNF “offers that are low and inexplicable.”

Jacobs also wrote that the JNF had a debt of NIS 12 million to the company, and that “on this subject too all kinds of unworthy ‘compromise’ or bargaining proposals have been made.”

His letter said that JNF had been seeking to charge handling fees for the transferred funds, and to receive from the company and victims’ descendants a commitment not to sue JNF for assets that it would be transferring.

Stenzler reported on the letter at the JNF board meeting in February, according to the minutes. “So far, JNF has transferred NIS 99 million to Hashava,” he said. “In addition, JNF has transferred another 141 plots of land to the company.”

Stenzler noted that Hashava had a new director general at that time, and that the latter had sent a letter “in which he says that JNF still has to transfer funds and so on, in a tone that I didn’t like very much, to put it mildly, because JNF, the members of the board − we were the first ones to say that the funds should be transferred. Moreover, all of the directors general who dealt with him always noted the fact that JNF was ready to go above and beyond the letter of the law with them ... Therefore I did not like the style of this letter.”

The fact that only about half of JNF’s annual budget is designated for its activities did not deter board member Nissan Chilik from cynically remarking, “We have to understand [Hashava]: They need the money because they waste four times as much in administration than they actually return.”

However, not everyone present liked this attitude. Board member Reuven Shalom proposed “making a distinction between what we need to give, and their [Hashava’s conduct. We need to give what the Holocaust survivors deserve, and they need to behave properly.”

Chilik: “But they should have used more delicate language.”

Shalom: “We are not a commercial body or something like that. We are a body of the Jewish people ... the approach has to be a ‘public’ one.”

Avraham Roth, a founder of Hashava and its chairman until 2008, says JNF was among the first to cooperate with the company, and he describes the transfer of funds and assets on its part since then as “reasonable.” When asked if its conduct went beyond the letter of the law, as Stenzler said, he says: “No, in accordance with it.”

Still, Roth adds, “The fact that things still aren’t settled with the JNF six years after the law was passed is quite unbelievable. It’s inconceivable that the JNF is still holding property of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. The survivors are dying, the heirs are getting to the end of their lives, and they have all the time in the world.”

A source that is knowledgeable about the issue says Jacobs’ letter in January appears to have “done the job,” because in recent months the parties have returned to negotiations and “significant progress toward a solution” has begun.

JNF says in response that, “As soon as the matter [concerning Hashava] reached the desk of the JNF chairman, Effie Stenzler personally got involved in handling it, in full cooperation with the company and with the company director general, Yaron Jacobs. JNF was a leader in this realm, and deserves a medal for the way it acted with the company ... when, for example, it transferred close to NIS 100 million in funds and property for survivors and over 100 assets worth a lot of money. This massive process is now nearing its end.”

On transparency

Stenzler declared firmly at the September 2010 meeting: “It is incumbent upon us for the organization to be completely transparent,”

However, it seems that when it comes to internal organizational affairs as well, this transparency is not always total. For example, at the February meeting, board member Yigal Yasinov, who is considered Stenzler’s rival, said: “I do not regularly receive emails ... [or regular] mail. I didn’t even receive an invitation to the last board meeting, I didn’t get the agenda for today’s meeting and I know there are other letters that didn’t go out ... I want to get all the material from the past four months, because I did not receive it. I did not receive protocols, or any other mail at all. Invitations to ceremonies I do receive ... I get only mail which is unimportant, all the junk mail.”

It seems that Stenzler himself is not always keen on media transparency − as regards, for example, one of the more sensitive JNF activities: planting trees on lands in the south, whose ownership is a matter of dispute with the Bedouin population. This mostly concerns land in the area of Al-Arakib, a village north of Be’er Sheva that has been destroyed numerous times in clashes with police and property inspectors, because its inhabitants refuse to be evicted and claim ownership of the land.

In May, after telling the board about the extensive media coverage of the affair abroad and the number of emails he receives as a result, Stenzler added: “I must thank the spokespeople, our media people, our public relations people, who are doing everything to see that this matter doesn’t develop in the local media ... In the media in Israel it hasn’t [yet] made any waves, thank goodness.”

About the matter itself, he said: “This is an area that we are taking so that others, neither Jews nor non-Jews, will take it − not Bedouin or anyone else.”

In August last year, according to minutes of a meeting, he explained: “We have learned from our experience in recent years that wherever there is a tree planted it is almost impossible to seize control of the land ... Not for nothing did the ILA agree to increase the budget, because it understands that JNF helps to keep property.”

At the same meeting, board member Yitzhak Krichevsky offered another idea for how to deal with the problem: “Go to Sinai and see how Egypt took over the Bedouin,” he suggested. “There is no democracy there. We’re playing in the courts, with democracy. Go to Sinai. You won’t see a single Bedouin around there.”

But there are other voices making themselves heard in JNF as well. At the meeting in May, board member Alon Tal said that the affair is “a very serious public relations failure by the JNF ... The pictures of JNF foresters and other pictures that were publicized of tractors demolishing buildings are what stick with people, and the JNF appears to be a partner to a crime. Our representatives abroad didn’t know how to answer these charges and lost the battle over our reputation in Australia, the United States and other places.”

Another member, Or Karsin, spoke in even stronger terms: “I will say what I think, even if it might sound like Don Quixote,” she said, explaining that she didn’t feel right that “people are being put up against trees ... Placing trees in a position of war versus an Israeli population, citizens of the State of Israel, is a very serious thing, and it is very difficult to see these pictures and hear these voices.”

JNF said in response that this article has been based on “a collection of partial documents and partial truths that present a distorted and false picture. In regard to Al-Arakib, JNF is acting solely in accordance with the court decisions, and what the chairman meant by his remarks is that it is good that the media in Israel is not influenced by the world campaign that is fed by lies against Israel and against JNF, and that the media in Israel is behaving responsibly, and sees and knows that not a single tree was planted in the area in question.”

Read More: http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/seeing-the-forest-and-the-trees-the-untold-story-of-the-jewish-national-fund-1.400530

Troubling questions for Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the congregants of Anshe Sholom, and all of us who give to JNF

Many of you in Chicago and around the US know our old friend Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the Orthodox rabbi who leads Anshei Sholom, the shul where Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff (and possibly the next Mayor of Chicago), and his family belong.

Rabbi Lopatin, who has been recognized as one of the top 25 pulpit rabbis in the US, announced that he is making aliyah with his family next year and bringing with him some 100 congregant families to Israel, to create a new “pluralistic, diverse and environmentally sound community” in the northern Negev near Beer Sheva.

But Rebecca Manski’s report - and the work of environmental justice pioneer Devorah Brous - uncovers facts that raise deeply troubling questions for Rabbi Lopatin and the hundreds of congregants he plans to lead to the Promised Land - and all of us who give to the JNF:

• The Israeli government tacitly and extra-legally encouraged Jewish settlers—just like those in the OR Movement today—to construct private homes and out-buildings on state land in the Negev and elsewhere in Israel, and offered them annual subsidies to engage in cultivation.


• American-Israeli planning scholars such as Daniel Orenstein—a former JNF-America board member—consider the OR Movement an illegal settlement movement dedicated to staking out lands for Jews in order to offset the presence of Arabs on Israeli lands.


• Thanks to OR Negev’s extra-legal settlement activity, a scattering of new settlements now form a triangle in the region around the Negev’s urban center, Beersheva.


• In 2009, the OR Movement was the third largest recipient of funds from JNF-US.


• Today the settlements established through the southern wing of the movement, OR Negev, are the basis of JNF’s Blueprint Negev, a plan to establish dozens of new Jewish-only communities in the Negev and attract 250,000 Jews.


• While the Israeli government uses tainted law to render Bedouin villages and land claims “illegal,” forcing Bedouin Israelis from their lands into crime-infested urban towns with no jobs, it retroactively legalizes OR’s illegal settlements exclusively for Jews.


• Contrary to JNF’s claim that it has nothing to do with the destruction of Bedouin villages and the expulsion of Bedouin families from their homes, in fact, JNF-Israel, by law, nominates ten of the Israel Land Administration’s (ILA) twenty-two directors. When the ILA opts to destroy an "unrecognised village," JNF is deeply involved.


• The Jewish National Fund forest to be planted on the new ruins of al-‘Araqib is part of a larger effort to green the image of the Negev, in order to encourage more Jewish immigration to the south of the country.


• When the American wing of the JNF raises money for an "Ambassador's Forest" to replace the Negev Bedouin village of al-'Araqib, the line between demolition, and “greening,” is blurred.

Dear Rabbi Lopatin and our friends at Anshe Sholom, how can you justify being party to this injustice? Is your conscience not troubled?

Did the prophet Isaiah not teach that “Zion shall be redeemed with justice?” (1: 27 - 28)

Does God not command us to “faithfully observe all My laws and all My regulations, lest the land to which I bring you to settle spew you out?” (Leviticus, 20:22)

Did the prophet Ezekiel not warn: “You stand upon your sword, you carry out disgusting deeds...and shall you possess the land?” (33: 23 – 26).

To learn more about Devorah and Rebecca’s distressing Negev discoveries, read “Blueprint Negev.”

Greenwashing the Blueprint: Devorah Brous, JNF and the Negev - A Personal Preface, by Rebecca Manski

JNF Romance

A Jewish National Fund tree-planting certificate has been hanging on my grandparents' bedroom wall since long before I was born. A farmer with his plow is etched on yellowing parchment. The certificate hangs in a rogues gallery which relates a classic Jewish American storyline. There are images of my great-great-grandmother, murdered in the Holocaust. There is the visa signed by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who saved my grandfather's life. There is a photograph of my great-grandfather in his Dorchester deli, shaking hands with Robert Kennedy, his eyes sparkling. There are awards from the Zionist Organization of America, from the time my grandfather was President of the New England chapter. The journey from Lithuania, to the United States, to Israel, all hangs against my grandmother's choice of pink vinyl wallpaper.

The Jewish National Fund certificate captured my imagination, and reminded me of the socialist images I had seen tacked on the walls of my Jerusalem kindergarden the year before our family left Jerusalem in 1982. I was proud that my grandfather had contributed his modest earnings as a sock salesman directly to the JNF, to plant ten pine trees in the Land of Israel. Looking at that rogues gallery in this Jewish suburb outside Boston, I could picture Israel, and the JNF forests, and the times I hiked proudly under a canopy of JNF pines.

Things changed. At twenty-five, I found myself hopping off a bus, not to take shade in a JNF pine forest, but to wait on that hot and treeless desert roadside for a field worker with the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages. I found myself speaking for countless hours, strategizing with Devorah Brous, an impassioned ally of the Bedouin, Founder of the environmental justice NGO Bustan.

Making the JNF-Bedouin connection

Throughout fifteen years of organizing in the region, Brous introduced many thousands of people to the greenwashing of Bedouin displacement in the Negev. Visitors on one of her 'Negev Unplugged Tours', saw Bedouin citizens of Israel denied access to electricity and other public amenities living 'unplugged' from the State. Many of those destined to go their own course and become researchers, filmmakers, or activists focused on Negev Bedouin issues - first visited an unrecognized Bedouin village with Brous.

Cultural roots, possibility and perhaps even, in a certain sense, destiny brought Brous from New Jersey to the Negev in 1991. She ventured into the Last Frontier only to find that -- even as the government and the JNF viewed the Negev as a vast wilderness awaiting Jewish settlement -- it was being despoiled, treated as a lawless dumping ground for Tel Aviv's municipal waste, multiple mining operations, dozens of chemical factories and Israel's principle nuclear facility. She saw that the indigenous Bedouin had been concentrated into a small triangle of land, denied access to their ancestral grazing grounds and the fields in which they once sowed barley and wheat their main means of sustenance. She saw that some 80% percent of the Negev consists of closed military zones and is off-limits for residential or agricultural use by civilians. And after several unflinching years of study in Israel, she learned that from the 1950s-70s the government displaced the Bedouin of the Negev into a sliver of land less than 2% of their former range, and the process of land confiscation was far from over.

Building a Clinic, Building a Movement

Out of Brous' outrage came the Negev environmental justice organization Bustan. In 2003, Bustan launched a sustainable clinic-building project in the village of Wadi Na'am, bringing unprecedented international attention to the interrelated problems of the unrecognized villages and environmental injustice in the Negev. I volunteered at Wadi-Na'am, spending days up to the elbows in buckets of adobe plaster; and the first sparks of a friendship with the woman behind this amazing project ignited over the campfire at night.

One day in 2006, Devorah led fifty people from the world-over on one of her Negev Unplugged Tours to the regional capital, Beer Sheva. She pointed at the Le Corbusier-inspired poured concrete buildings, which are the pride of Beer Sheva's Ben Gurion University, surrounded by green lawns and trees. Instead of building homes and structures with natural and local materials appropriate for the desert climate, and instead of planting native species which naturally conserve the region's scarce water resources, you see palm trees surrounding all that cement, soaking up all the heat. This, she informed the tour, is the legendary 'blooming of the desert:' Palms more suited to Florida, and pines more suited to Oregon. The palms planted in the Negev soak up 30-gallons more water than a native palm, daily.”

Brous' silvery blue eyes searched the landscape, “Is that the kind of water-intensive development promoted by the JNF, which calls itself an environmental organization?” At that time, we could only guess. There was no Blueprint to the Blueprint Negev, no plans to examine.

A Greenwashed Blueprint

On a blustery winter day in 2009, I visited the New York offices of the Jewish National Fund. I had been invited by Molly Golden of JNFuture, the fund's youth outreach division, to attend a Blueprint Negev presentation entitled, “It's Not a Mirage, It's Our Vision.” A JNF spokeswoman had assured me that an actual, tangible blueprint of the development plan -- which had, over the course of three months of back-and-forth communication, evaded me -- would be made available at the event.

I walked through the arched entryway doors towards the mahogany hall where JNF members mingled over crackers, sipping wine from settlement vineyards. As I went, I glanced at the staircase adorned with staid oil portraits of benefactors, doves, olive branches and the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. Black-and-white snapshots of early twentieth century Jewish pioneers were interspersed with kodacolor images of grinning teens posing at Masada in Teva sandals and cargo pants.

Now, at the JNFuture presentation, I saw with my own eyes: After at least four years of project development, pressure from a small cohort of Jewish community leaders had truly led the JNF to green its public relations priorities. The JNFuture powerpoint prominently featured discussion of a new goat milk marketing project in the Bedouin village of Hura, a park in cooperation with the Bedouin township of Segev Shalom, and cooperation with the Abu Basma Regional Council of legal Bedouin villages.[1] The aforementioned cohort featured environmental planning expert and former JNF Board Member Daniel Orenstein, David Lehrer of the JNF-funded Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, Yeela Livnat of the Council for Unrecognized Villages, Rabbi David Seidenberg, and various Jewish environmental advocates in the United States.

In an email to these peers, Brous argued that the most well-intentioned advocacy efforts could have unintended consequences: “I won't mince words: In the absence of full transparency around Blueprint Negev, this amelioration (greenwashing) is dangerous.” Brous warned against “Encouraging the JNF to present a more green 'image'" in the absence of any effort to address what she called the root issue: “discriminatory allocation of already scarce resources the Negev.” Later, Brous added: “The JNF's engagement in a campaign to fund symbolic projects in partnership with Bedouin is nothing short of dangerous in the context of the JNF-KKL's political and strategic objectives.”

This concern haunted my reception of the JNFuture presentation in New York. When Sim Herring, a fundraiser for a modern orthodox Jewish school, asked what I thought of the latest presentation on the Blueprint Negev, I told him honestly that I still wanted to see a Blueprint and was concerned that the JNF 's modifications were just greenwashing.

To this, Herring replied, “You know there is a great organization that deals with those issues. I first encountered this problem while volunteering on a clinic-building project in a Bedouin village
called....Wadi Na'am, I believe?” I felt an ironic smile involuntarily spread across my face. “In fact it's the organization that deserves most of the credit for introducing those issues to the JNF,” Herring emphasized. “Without it, the JNF would not have made these changes. Have you heard of Bustan?”

[1] “It's Not a Mirage, It's Our Vision Presentation to JNFuture membership (March 3, 2009)

Read "Blueprint Negev": An expose of JNF's role in the displacement of the Negev Bedouin, by Rebecca Manski

Blueprint Negev, by Rebecca Manski (An expose of JNF's role in the displacement of the Negev Bedouin)

Picking up a passenger by the hot, treeless roadside, Bedouin advocate ‘Ali Abu Subayh wheels his Fiat around onto a path, spitting rocks and coating the windows with dust, headed toward an “unrecognized village” in southern Israel. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the Israeli government displaced the Bedouin of the Negev desert into a sliver of land less than 2 percent the size of their former range. The government built seven townships for the Bedouin, and simultaneously declared all existing Negev Bedouin villages to be illegal. Today, Abu Subayh and 80,000 other Bedouin citizens of Israel born in one of these 45 “unrecognized” villages are threatened with further displacement. More than once, Abu Subayh, a field worker with the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages, has himself returned home to find a piece of paper flapping on the post at the entrance to the goat pen—a demolition order.

Al-‘Araqib is unique among these villages. Like many other unrecognized villages, it was demolished in 1951, and its residents were “temporarily” relocated. Unlike others, however, al-‘Araqib’s old stone ruins remained in place over the decades. Over the years, the original residents returned to work the land and maintain its productivity. And in the 1990s, the residents returned to al-‘Araqib family by family, and reestablished the village. But in late July, al-‘Araqib was destroyed again by the Israeli government to make way for a Jewish National Fund (JNF) forest. The JNF, a non-profit corporation with quasi-state powers, was not directly involved in the removal of al-'Araqib; that is the domain of the Israel Land Authority (ILA), the government agency responsible for managing 93% of the land of Israel. However, since by law the JNF nominates ten of the ILA's twenty-two directors, when the ILA opts to destroy an "unrecognised village", the JNF is deeply involved. So too, when the American wing of the JNF raises money for an "Ambassador's Forest" -- through the auspices of at least twenty-eight offices throughout the country, governed by over eighteen Vice Presidents and ten Assistant Vice Presidents -- to replace the village of al-'Araqib, the line between demolition, and greening, is blurred. The Ambassor's Forest is just one of the tree plantations that Israel has rooted for decades with donations from Jews and other sympathizers of the Zionist project around the world.

Due to funding shortages and international pressure, government threats to remove unrecognized Bedouin villages have generally been carried out home by home, rather than village by village. In the absence of money for all-out Jewish settlement, the government has found it difficult to follow through with the planned removal of entire Bedouin villages, when only rubble will be left behind. But it has been easier to justify replacing tin shacks with trees. The destruction of an entire village of 500 people, all at once—to make way for a JNF tree plantation—therefore sets an important precedent for twenty-first century Israeli policy toward the Bedouin.

Making the Desert Blue (and Green)

The Jewish National Fund forest to be planted on the new ruins of al-‘Araqib is part of a larger effort to green the image of the Negev, in order to encourage more Jewish immigration to the south of the country.

The Negev is not the first place the average Israeli dreams of when she contemplates the prospects for a better life. Long treated as a lawless “dumping ground,” the Negev hosts dozens of chemical factories, multiple mining operations, Tel Aviv’s excess waste and the nation’s principal nuclear facility at Dimona. Along with the pollution of the desert, a lack of government investment in either Jewish or Bedouin towns has undermined lingering romantic notions about living in Israel’s “last wilderness.” But the JNF insists that it can transform the image of the desert and boost its desirability through its Blueprint Negev campaign.

Introduced in 2005, around the time of the removal of Gaza’s Jewish settlements, Blueprint Negev aimed to establish a beachhead of 25 towns on Israel’s southern tip and become a symbol of national renewal, under the slogan, “It’s not a mirage, it’s a dream becoming a reality.” Via Blueprint Negev, the JNF intends to attract new immigrants to the desert with the promise of water, bluing it with rivers, lakes and swimming pools, then greening it with golf courses and lawns.

But in this perennial Middle East hot spot, such dreams have a tendency to vaporize. Just as the government effort to concentrate the Bedouin population in the townships has been put on hold due to persistent budget shortfalls, so too the plan to build settlements for Jews in the region has been deferred. Within a year and a half of the virtual launch of Blueprint Negev, world Zionist resources were directed to the Lebanon war and more attention went to securing Israel’s borders than to expanding Jewish development in a desert region with a tenuous Jewish majority. Within days after the first Katyusha rockets blasted kibbutz orchards near the Lebanese border and Israeli warplanes commenced relentless bombardments, which eventually killed close to 3,000 Lebanese, the JNF had focused its energies upon the north of the country, launching Operation Northern Renewal.

Not much later, in 2008, attention shifted south again as the Israeli army invaded Gaza in response to the Qassam rockets launched into the Negev, and the JNF introduced Operation Security Blanket. Instead of building up new Blueprint Negev settlements, the JNF allocated millions for a rocket-proof indoor playground replete with a jungle gym, video game arcade, disco, merry-go-round, swing sets, therapy rooms, barbecue pit and, according to the JNF, “rooms that double as bomb shelters.”

As publicity and funding was diverted from north to south again, the JNF relied upon a settler group, the OR Movement, to push Blueprint Negev forward on the grassroots level. The JNF aimed to build twenty-five settlements by 2010, but by 2009, only seven small ones had been established, three of them by OR's Negev branch prior to joining forces with the JNF. Neither the JNF nor the OR Movement is directly involved in the removal of any Bedouin village. Their role in the settlement of Israel has been to create models for Jewish habitation, to replace.

From Barren to Luxurious

The publicity push for Blueprint Negev intensified in early 2006, when Israeli President Shimon Peres lauded its first planned development town as a new beacon for Americans “who want to make aliyah and live in style.” Soon, he told the Israeli public, there would be a haven for wealthy young Americans in Israel’s Negev desert. There would be homes with central air conditioning and other Western amenities, a lavish community center with gym facilities and an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

American Jewish leaders continue to promote Peres’ vision for the Negev. It will be “pure Zionism,” says Daniel Mattio, the chairman of the Chicago Israel Philanthropic Fund, which was created in 2008 to speed the rate of Jewish settlement in the Negev. It will be “a fresh new community with fresh new attitudes,” “a type of utopia,” “pluralistic and diverse,” dedicated to “sustainable living,” says Rabbi Asher Lopatin, who leads the Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago (where he was rabbi of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel) and co-founded the Fund. There will be an organic farm, a bed-and-breakfast and an art gallery, says the JNF. There will shops, synagogues and a think tank devoted to religious diversity. There will be eco-tourism. Planners say the community will retain an American sensibility even after the Americans have been outnumbered.

The place they have in mind is Carmit, one of 14 new settlements planned by the JNF as part of the revised Blueprint Negev. Today Carmit is little more than an access road, earth-moving machines and a few mounds of pebbles surrounded by Bedouin villages in all directions.

Mattio and Lopatin originally planned to move to the desert outpost in the summer of 2010, when the first houses were scheduled to be completed. They were prepared to bring with them 100 American families, who would be followed by 100 Israeli families, and eventually be joined by 2,400 more. The idea was to inspire hundreds of thousands of “Anglo-Jews” and Israelis to make their way to new desert developments like Carmit. A former JNF America president, Estée Lauder scion Ronald Lauder, billed Blueprint Negev as an opportunity for Americans to “make aliyah the pioneering way.” But several years after Peres promoted Carmit as an affluent haven for Anglo Jews in the desert, the first houses have yet to be constructed.

In fact, Blueprint Negev is less a concrete development plan than a public relations and fundraising campaign seeking to inspire American Jewish investment in Jewish settlement of the Negev. It appeals to American Jewish romance surrounding the re-rooting of the Jewish people in its desert origins, and deep nostalgia for Israel’s halcyon days, the blooming of a modern Jewish state in a wild terrain.

Twenty-First Century Pioneers

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, alloyed the JNF and the settlers with such sentiments when he laid out his vision for the modernization of the young country before an assembly of Zionist pioneers in 1954. “For those who make the desert bloom,” he said, “there is room for hundreds, thousands and even millions.” This vision—linking water, population and desert development—is the basis of the JNF’s oldest, and also its latest, efforts in a region comprising over half of the territory of Israel. For its part, the American branch of the JNF has long viewed control over water resources as essential to the survival of Israel, working in close cooperation with international irrigation experts to channel water to outposts and JNF forests in all regions of the country.

One modern-day outpost looks out over one of the only fully forested regions in the Negev, planted by the JNF. The settlement of Sansana survives the difficult desert conditions through complete access to water and other manifestations of state support. In late 2009, Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak approved expansion of the illegal outpost into a state-sanctioned settlement, and ordered construction of 440 housing units on the Israeli side of the separation barrier being built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Pending that construction, Sansana retains a frontier feel, replete with hilltop caravans and lookout towers. Its early settlers have taken on the personae of pioneers in a pristine and empty wilderness.

In 2000, as the second intifada exploded, a cadre of five childhood friends who had just finished their military service mobilized 15 families to move to the then-failing settlement of Sansana. Two years later, having successfully reestablished a Jewish presence in the settlement, they founded the OR Movement to settle the Negev and the Galilee; from 2002 on, they established five communities in the Negev and are currently initiating four more, including Carmit. In 2005, OR Negev achieved notoriety for helping the settlers who had been evacuated from Gaza relocate to these new Negev settlements.

That same year, JNF-America head Russell Robinson was meeting with potential Blueprint Negev partners at the King David Hotel, entertaining their proposals for securing Israel’s demographic-territorial claim to the Negev. “I can’t begin to tell you about all the strange ideas people had,” he said. “One man was certain it was all about windmills.”

“Two young men in sandals, cutoffs and T-shirts,” walked in, Robinson recalled. “They looked like something that had come out of a kibbutz hall meeting.” These were the representatives of the OR Movement. “They had chutzpah. They didn’t know how to take no for an answer. All day, people had been telling me, ‘You can't do this, you can't do that.’ These men said, ‘We can.’”

Though run by Israelis, OR Negev employs American homesteading rhetoric, drawing on the romantic imagery of a lawless frontier and taking up the mantle of manifest destiny. The choice catchphrase of its chief executive officer, Roni Flamer, is: “Go south, young man!” In 2009, the OR Movement was the third largest recipient of JNF-USA funds. Today the settlements established through the southern wing of the movement, OR Negev, are the basis of Blueprint Negev. The group recruits settlers through what it calls “the only comprehensive population information center in Israel.”

OR says it seeks to reinforce the eternal bond between the People of Israel and their land. Progressive American-Israeli planning scholars such as Daniel Orenstein—a former JNF-America board member—consider OR an illegal settlement movement dedicated to staking out lands for Jews in order to offset the presence of Arabs on Israeli lands. Noam Dolgin of the Green Zionist Alliance positions himself as neutral: “We support many organizations that engage in projects linking the sustainable to the strategic.... I support [OR’s] right to have an opinion that we need to expand into the Negev. I don’t necessarily agree with their approach. There’s a process in place and there would be less controversy if organizations of all kinds, including OR, would adhere to it.”

But while OR Negev once operated on the fringes of the formal planning process—in violation of official Negev development plans that prohibited sprawl into the desert’s last open spaces—today it operates under the sponsorship (and overt political protection) of the JNF. Thanks to OR Negev’s extra-legal settlement activity, a scattering of new settlements now form a triangle in the region around the Negev’s urban center, Beersheva.

Retroactive Approval

OR Negev’s success at seeing its once illegal settlements retroactively legalized is best understood by going back to the roots of JNF-America settlement ideology.

The American Zionist settlement movement—like the homestead movement in North America—has long pointed to its physical and financial investment in the land in order to plant evidence of ownership. Initially, that investment was often communal, and embodied by the kibbutz. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, many influential American Jews—chief among them Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis—voiced opposition to the socialist orientation of the kibbutz and sought to export to Israel an American homesteading model based on private land ownership.

According to the American homesteading principle of “sweat equity,” settlers could expropriate territory through their sustained presence and labor. JNF-America advocated the homestead as a capitalist alternative to the kibbutz, merging the baalebat (bourgeoisie) and chalutz (pioneer) to form a modern settler-entrepreneur who would test himself physically and economically in the harsh elements. Most Zionist thinkers envisioned the entirety of Palestine prior to Jewish immigration and investment as an empty, scorched land—and, more than any other region of Palestine, the Negev desert was seen as a wasteland awaiting Zionist modernization.

From its inception in 1948, the state classified all lands lacking a legal title, as “waste lands” or mawat, an Arabic term according to which the Ottomans classified “waste lands” as state property. Israel appropriated this classification, aware that hardly a single Bedouin village had legally registered its lands under the Ottomans. Thereafter, hardly a single indigenous Bedouin citizen received government approval to initiate any significant agricultural enterprise of his own. A criminal stigma began to pervade Bedouin self-subsistence efforts, now considered an “invasion” of national domain.

As Bedouin agricultural lands were retroactively deemed illegal, successful Jewish homesteads were retroactively recognized. The government tacitly and extra-legally encouraged Jewish settlers—just like those in the OR Movement today—to construct private homes and out-buildings on state land, and offered them annual subsidies to engage in cultivation.

Manifest Responsibility

Brandeis, the first director of JNF-America, the organization’s funding capital, referred to Zionists as “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers.” He believed Jews in America could play a decisive role in the restoration of the fallen biblical kingdom. The pilgrims and their descendants had referred to New England as “New Israel” and presumed that the ten lost tribes of Israel were to be found among the native peoples of North America—a conceit that cast biblical legitimacy over the conquest of the New World. Centuries after the Puritans, JNF-America drew on their rhetoric to justify what it viewed as the return of the natives of the Land of Israel.

“The United States had its manifest destiny in the West,” Lauder wrote in 2004. “Russia looked to its frozen tundra to the East. Many countries have had vast areas of what many considered to be uninhabitable land at one time, which eventually became some of the most important parts of their developed societies. For Israel, that land is the Negev.” Russell Robinson, asked if the JNF and OR use the phrase “manifest destiny” as part of an overarching strategy, said: “Words are sometimes used in different ways for different people, and we’re talking to Americans. You try to bring them to you with vision and with romance: Here God is, allowing you to participate in the creation process. I think that manifest destiny is part of our responsibility. Call it manifest responsibility.”

Today, several Blueprint Negev settlements run micro-tourism enterprises on the frontier, staking out a Jewish presence as they invite Zionist devotees from all over the world—potential immigrants—to lay claim to the status of both the “native” and the “pioneer.” In recent years the JNF has recruited American students to journey to Negev Jewish communities for an “alternative” spring break, where they volunteer on an agricultural settlement, visit Blueprint Negev projects and even listen to Bedouin storytelling. In addition to paying their own way, participants are required to raise $975 for Blueprint Negev. At one tourist village, visitors can view themselves as pioneers as they sleep in teepee structures like the conical tents used by both the early Zionist pioneers in temporary camps along the frontier, and the early Israeli boy scouts who wore desert kaffiyas with their uniform. Alternately, visitors can play the role of the Indian, as Jewish settlers lead them through Indian ceremonies and offer them “wigwams” at the end of the night.

“The Wild South”

A man sits astride a weary horse with gentle eyes; in his right hand, he holds a lasso, in his left, the reins. “Yes, there are cowboys in Israel,” the Israeli Tourism Ministry advertised in a 2007 edition of the New York Times Magazine. Like an American cowboy, the Israeli’s hat is worn and floppy, his red plaid shirt is rolled up informally at the sleeves, he has a full beard and his eyes squint in the sun. The bottom of the page reads, in capital-lettered fine print: “NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU.”

“This land is ours,” said Robinson. “There is no controversy, no argument, no discussion. But if we don't take care of it, it can become desert; it can be taken from us.” JNF-America’s president sees the “reclamation” of the Negev as fundamental to ensuring the state’s survival. Meanwhile, the Or Movement defines “taking care of” the land in terms of staking Jewish belonging and ownership.

The relationship between Bedouin and Jews in the Negev has never been tenser. In recent years, the “last frontier” has to come to be referred to as the “wild South,” as Jewish squatters on state lands have used vigilante tactics in response to what they call Bedouin trespassing. The flashpoint in this twenty-first century conflict came in early February 2007, when Shai Dromi, a Jewish rancher developing an illegal settlement on the Green Line (the boundary between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories) in the Negev desert, killed Khalid al-Atrash, a Bedouin man attempting to steal his sheep. Within a few weeks of the killing, amidst a flurry of pro-Dromi protests spreading all the way from the desert to Jerusalem, the incident reached the Knesset, where a “self-defense bill” to legalize Dromi’s actions—inspired by Texas law—passed all of its readings and became law. “What happened to Dromi could have happened to us,” a settler told a local newspaper. “If we have to go to war, we’ll go to war.” Another area farmer offered his preferred solution: “Every person wakes up in the morning, goes and shoots a Bedouin. There are 100,000 people shooting Bedouins. What are you going to do, punish them all?” Small Jewish militias sprout in the Negev each day, he said.

For such settlers the Zionist mantra of “making the desert bloom” does not only mean seeding the Land of Israel with Jewish development. It does not even mean combating desertification, realizing the potential of a land supposedly laid to waste by its non-Jewish inhabitants. It means eradicating Bedouin invaders on their terrain.

These settlers are not the first to interpret Ben Gurion’s vision thus. Indeed, after masses of Palestinians were expelled from their lands during the 1948 war, the head of the JNF, Josef Weitz, strongly objected that, unlike in the north of the country, not all Negev Bedouin returnees following the war were evicted. He lamented that their pastures were not universally “plowed over so that no trace of them remains,” making way for Jewish farmers to cultivate ready-made fields.

Orenstein suggests that with the OR-JNF alliance, the JNF’s environmental “land reclamation” efforts in the Negev have begun to lose their distinction from the OR Movement’s goal of “reclaiming land for Jews.” Others, such as Devorah Brous, the founder of the Bedouin-Jewish environmental justice NGO Bustan, argue that the JNF’s approach to “land reclamation” was always double-edged.

“Greenwashing”

The JNF, after all, literally planted the borders of the Jewish state. As Hebrew University geographer Ilan Solomon explains, the JNF tree line follows the Green Line, demarcating the border so distinctly that it is visible from space.

All over the country in the years following the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel, the JNF planted pine forests on the sites of Arab villages whose inhabitants had left or were expelled from their homes. Today, as the JNF continues to advertise itself as “the caretaker of the land of Israel on behalf of its owners—Jewish people everywhere,” Palestinian-Bedouin citizens of Israel are seen as, at best, guests in the country’s national parks.

More recently, the JNF has planted forests expressly in order to limit Bedouin “incursion” into open spaces and restrict Bedouin herding. To that end, after the “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005, the JNF set settlers from Gaza to work planting 500 acres of olive trees in a ring around the affluent Jewish suburb of Omer. Soon to be accompanied by a golf course and hotel, another planned 2,000 acres of olive trees will render it one of the largest urban greenspaces in Israel. Omer Local Council chairman Pini Badash explained that the planting project aims “to assert control over the land within Omer’s municipal boundaries” and limit Bedouin grazing. After guiding a tour to the Bedouin village of Tarrabin, on the outskirts of lush Omer, Brous offered her own interpretation: “Planting as a means of demarcating Jewish versus Arab space is a tangible form of greenwashing. We have seen similar planting schemes throughout the country over the years, but this is the first time the JNF and planning authorities have asserted themselves so bluntly, without a more romantic spin to the public."

Because the JNF is not the institution that directly slates Bedouin villages for demolition, and because of the JNF's historical image as treeplanting organization, it has managed to evade concerted scrutiny. Until now.

In the past, few Israeli environmentalists or civil rights advocates focused their energies specifically on the link between JNF-KKL projects and the uprooting of Arabs. In the south of the country, Brous devoted fifteen years to exposing the ongoing greenwashing of Bedouin displacement in the Negev. She was the first analyst and organizer to take note of, and write about, the JNF's Blueprint Negev. Her analysis helped catalyze several emerging efforts, including the new international campaign launched by the US-based Jewish Alliance for Change with the unprecedented cross-Atlantic collaboration of nearly 40 organizations in Israel and the U.S. And on the ground, Bedouin organizers have increasingly incorporated an environmental justice analysis into their international advocacy efforts during a series of protests in front of the JNF offices in the Negev late this summer.

Bedouin “Blindspot”

On JNF-America’s six-day “environmental mission” to Israel in May, the itinerary featured a visit to an OR Negev settlement to “learn what life is like as a true modern-day pioneer.” OR Negev settlers established the Jewish outpost of Givot Bar on the lands claimed by al-‘Araqib residents in 2004. Just a few years later the JNF replaced Givot Bar’s caravans with permanent houses and heralded the budding Forman-Axelband Family Forest project, planned for the remaining area.

While the American Jewish delegates were speaking with OR Negev settlers, Nouri al-‘Uqbi received visitors of his own in al-‘Araqib. Al-‘Uqbi, perhaps the most tenacious Bedouin advocate anywhere, has been non-violently resisting removal since 2006, awaiting the monthly demolition of his makeshift dwelling, and continually re-pitching a protest tent next to the stone foundations upon which he was born.

Had the Americans on the “environmental mission” come just three months later, they might have noticed an unusually large number of police in the area. They might have spotted a few dozen Bedouin and Israeli protesters camped nearby. More likely, the itinerary would have been changed well in advance of the moment when bulldozers rolled in to demolish the village of al-‘Araqib.

Rebecca Manski is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She worked as a Communications Consultant for NGOs in Israel/Palestine between 2003-2008. A version of this article first appeared in Middle East Report 256 (Fall 2010)."

Read Greenwashing the Blueprint: Devorah Brous, JNF and the Negev - A Personal Preface to this essay.