semitism.net

One curious fact about Israel is that only seven percent of the land is privately owned. Eighty percent is under government ownership, and the remaining thirteen percent belongs to an entity called Keren Kayemet le-Israel (in English, the Jewish National Fund or JNF).

To get a sense of how important the JNF is, however, consider this: the thirteen percent of land it owns houses seventy percent of the Israeli population.

The history of the Jewish National Fund is, in a sense, the history of modern Zionism. The fund was initiated in 1901 at the Fifth Zionist Congress. It was the “bank account” to which Jews worldwide contributed, whose proceeds went to purchase land in Palestine with the aim of founding a Jewish state there.

In the U.S., the JNF was rather like the Jewish March of Dimes. As told on the organization’s web site,

At the start of the 1920s, the world Jewish population numbered some 15 million people, scattered throughout 76 different countries. JNF reached out to every Jewish community, regardless of size or distance… JNF’s Blue Box stood in hundreds of thousands of Jewish homes, schools, synagogues, public buildings and businesses. JNF made it possible for every Jew–whether man, woman or child–to become a partner in the Zionist enterprise and be personally involved in the development of the land.

By 1928, the Jewish National Fund had acquired 50,000 acres and founded 50 Jewish communities

Its holdings increased greatly when Israel became a nation. The Forward discreetly reports that “some 60% of the fund’s 550,000 acres was purchased from the government in a special deal soon after the 1948 War of Independence.”

Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri is more direct. It is now well-documented that the Irgun (the pre-national Jewish militia, of which Avnery is a veteran) took advantage of the chaos of war to drive about 700,000 Arabs off their lands.

When the United Nations resolved in November 1947 to partition the country between a Jewish and an Arab State, less than 7% of the land belonged to Jews. Only a part of this area belonged to the KKL (Keren Kayemet le-Israel - the JNF), the rest to private Jewish owners in the towns and the agricultural colonies.

Logic would have dictated that with the founding of the State of Israel, the KKL transfer its lands to the State. After all, that was the idea of collecting the money.

But this did not happen. In fact, the very opposite took place: the new state transferred to the KKL millions of dunams of land expropriated from Arabs - the refugees who were not allowed to return (”absentees” in legal language), those who had remained in the country but were absent on a given day from their villages (”present absentees”), as well as Arabs who became citizens of Israel.

In 1960, the Israel Lands Administration was established to administer the 93% of land that is in the public domain - that is, either state-owned or Jewish National Fund-owned. The founding covenant between the Jewish National Fund and the State declares:

The Government of Israel and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael have resolved to end the duplication resulting from the administration of their lands by different agencies, to concentrate the administration, conservation and care of these lands in the hands of the State and to strengthen the hands of Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael in fulfilling its mission of redeeming land from desolation.

In order to maintain control over the disposition of the property, the Israel Lands Administration offers it to Jewish citizens on long-term lease, but not for purchase.

Nowhere in the covenant does it state that the land is to be leased only to Jews. However, as Bernard Avishai explained in January’s Harper’s,

Few outside observers have been able to penetrate the Lands Administration’s convoluted leasing arrangements with Jewish Agency mortgage companies, or with preferred contractors… Yet nobody doubts that when any new housing developments are completed, only people with “Jewish nationality” need apply.

Now, in what is being hailed by some as a landmark decision, Israel’s Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has announced that “all land managed by the Israel Lands Administration, including land owned by the Jewish National Fund, will be marketed without discrimination or limits including to non-Jews.”

New York’s Jewish Week gives the background for Mazuz’s decision:

Mazuz’s comment was prompted by petitions to Israel’s High Court of Justice from four human rights groups objecting to the decision by the Israel Lands Authority, a government body, to restrict the marketing of Jewish National Fund land to Jews.

The ILA acted after marketing leases last year on 43 plots in the primarily Jewish neighborhood of Karmiel. Six of the 17 families that won plots were Israeli Arabs.

But Jewish residents of the area objected, and the ILA froze the transaction. It cited a 1968 contract between the state and Jewish National Fund whereby Jewish National Fund-owned land would be sold only to Jewish citizens of Israel.

When the land was offered again for lease in September, the ILA said Israeli Arabs could not apply.

As noted, the ILA has never had a legal mandate to lease exclusively to Jews. It has maintained this exclusivity through procedural and bureaucratic measures. The Jewish National Fund - which, recall, owns the majority of habitable land in Israel - has no such compunction. The Fund’s position, quoted in Jewish Week, is that “selling and/or leasing land to Arabs would be a violation of the covenant established between Jewish National Fund and diaspora Jews who paid for the land” This argument conveniently ignores the Arab land transferred to the Jewish National Fund by the State after the 1948 war.

Haaretz confirms that the Attorney General’s decision was meant to head off a High Court ruling that might have eliminated sole Jewish proprietorship of Jewish National Fund holdings:

The revolutionary decision followed a discussion held in Mazuz’s office attended by senior members of the state prosecutor’s office and the legal advisers to the Jewish National Fund and the ILA. The ruling was made in preparation for the state’s response to High Court petitions filed on the matter.

The state prosecutor’s office believes it will not be able to defend before the High Court the policy of allocating JNF land to Jews only.

Faced with intervention by the Court, Mazuz is actually acting to protect the Jewish National Fund, not to challenge it. Haaretz quotes him thus:

In order to preserve the original designated purpose of the JNF, which is formally defined as an organization working “on behalf of the Jewish nation,” and in the name of the interests of the Diaspora Jews, it was decided that if any ILA tender for land owned by the JNF is won by a non-Jewish citizen, the ILA will transfer alternative land to the JNF.

In other words, if the State leases JNF land to an Arab, it will transfer an equivalent parcel of state-owned land to the JNF’s holdings. What is “equivalent”? From Jewish Week:

Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the government was considering a proposal to have Jewish National Fund and the Israel Lands Authority swap land “acre for acre…”

But a JNF spokeswoman in New York, Sarina Roffe, said her organization… would insist on a dollar-for-dollar swap, meaning that JNF would get considerably more land than it would be relinquishing.

It is interesting to compare the de facto policy of ethnic separation in Israel, which is just starting to come under fire, with the evolution of race relations in the United States. Researcher Wendy Plotkin has an excellent site on the history of racial and religious covenants in the U.S. and Canada.

In the 1930’s it was common for residents of white urban neighborhoods to enforce racial housing covenants, restricting the sale of property to negroes in “white areas”. This led to the creation of racially segregated neighborhoods in northern cities such as Boston, New York and Chicago, and in Washington, DC. Among the results were elevated racial tension, fear and violence.

Plotkin cites a 1948 paper by Robert C. Weaver of the American Council on Race Relations.

As long as a group is relegated and confined to a physically undesirable area (as any overcrowded neighborhood inevitably becomes), its occupants are all lumped together in the minds of most people. A curious train of reasoning is initiated: the occupants of such an area are all believed to be undesirable (as indeed some are, largely because of their bad housing), and then their perpetual and universal banishment to the ghetto is defended on the basis of the imputed ‘racial’ characteristics. Since there is little intergroup contact on the basis of normal activity, such attitudes grow stronger, and segregation gains positive acceptance. Any proposal to break down the segregated pattern is automatically opposed.

The same vicious circle seems to me to be at work in Israel. The more we separate ourselves from the Arabs, the less well we understand them. Relationships are replaced with stereotypes. The anger and violence that result from discrimination and its effects come to be seen as part of the “Arab character”. These assumptions make it seem inconceivable that Arabs and Jews could co-exist peacefully.

From Bernard Avishai:

This is where the demographic argument gets you… You say Jews and Arabs must be separated because even if Israel’s Arab citizens will make the most of what liberties Israel gives them, they could not possibly want to be absorbed into Israel. And after all of this, you suppose yourself a democracy because you represent the general will of the “Jewish majority.” But is the choice really apartheid or binationalism?

People who put things this way, presumably to maintain Zionist momentum, have actually lost touch with what Zionism was mostly about at its inception, the power and grace of Hebrew culture. They underestimate the capacity of Israel’s cities to absorb new generations, including Arab citizens and foreign workers, to something both fully democratic and patently Jewish…

Israel’s real challenge in the coming generation is not only to get back into a peace process, but to shore this up with a democratic revolution in civil rights; that is, to get Israeli Jews to “recognize Israel” (as a potentially inclusive, democratic state).

Wrapped up in the arcane issues of land use and civil rights are the whole histories of the Israeli and Palestinians peoples. Challenging the exclusivity of the Jewish National Fund raises questions like whether a Jewish state was justified in 1948; whether it is justified now; and whether the Palestinian “absentees” have a claim to the land from which they were displaced, i.e., in one form or another, a right of return. These are issues that will need to be addressed by both leaders and populace if the cease-fire is going to proceed to actual peace. Tuesday’s summit meeting was a small step on a long road.

Inherent in the Zionist enterprise is a conflict between ethnic separatism and democratic inclusivity. Israel has more or less finessed this question for fifty-odd years. I suspect that now, as in the American Civil Rights Movement, it will be non-violent activism by a minority that forces Israel to confront the contradiction; that the body politic will be paralyzed; and the courts will play a critical role in resolving the conflict in a way that could change Israeli society quite profoundly.