By Israel Harel, Haaretz
Hanging on the wall was a box: “This is the sky-blue box (and) every penny inserted in it liberates the soil.” This box was in homes, classrooms, youth movement branches, and workplaces – in Israel and the Diaspora. Young and old recited a song, actually a prayer, that said thanks to the pennies placed in those boxes, “we will redeem the nation’s soil, from the North to the Negev.”
The Jewish National Fund owns 2.5 million dunam (625,000 acres) of land in Israel. They were bought – I must tell you today, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and the justices of the Supreme Court in its capacity as the High Court of Justice – “dunam by dunam, clod by clod” so they would become the “Jewish people’s eternal property,” in accordance with the principle established by modern Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. Now, 106 years later, along comes the attorney general of the Jewish state created by Herzl’s vision and declares that this era is over. Mazuz instructed the JNF this week, to allocate lands, without discrimination, to Jews and non-Jews alike. The State Prosecutor’s Office conveyed the attorney general’s instruction to the High Court in response to appeals various organizations submitted in 2004 on behalf of Arabs to whom the JNF had refused to sell lands. The State Prosecutor’s Office also instructed the Israel Lands Administration to cancel tenders where one standard condition is that the purchasers must be Jews, since the JNF owns the land.
In 1961, when the JNF’s lands were transferred to the ILA’s management, not ownership, nobody could have suspected that one day the Jewish state would proclaim the allocation of Jewish-owned land to Jews a discriminatory act. In a covenant signed by former prime minister Levi Eshkol, on Israel’s behalf, and Yaacov Tsur, representative of the World Zionist Movement, the JNF’s owner, it was stated that Israel would comply with the “JNF’s fundamental principle that the lands would remain in the nation’s possession.” Furthermore, the covenant specified, the “JNF would continue serving as an institution of the Zionist Organization in the Jewish public in Israel and the exile [Diaspora] … for the redemption of land.”
Earlier, in May 1954, the government authorized – the authorization was given official effect in the government gazette – the JNF memorandum whose central purpose was “to purchase lands … for the settlement of Jews.” Regarding this point, the covenant specifies that the “JNF lands shall be administered in compliance with this memorandum and the JNF’s articles of incorporation.” These articles were based on Herzl’s words: “The Jewish people will be not only the founder (of the JNF) but its constant, eternal owner. This will prevent any use incongruent with the founder’s goals.”
After Mazuz’s decision and judging from precedents in his rulings, it will not be hard to guess what the High Court will decide. This judicial establishment is intent on forcing Israel to gradually part with its definition as a Jewish state and become a state of all its citizens. The instruction to allocate the Jewish people’s lands to the very nation competing with it for this country’s ownership and sovereignty is part of the general moral degeneration to which we have succumbed in recent years. The memorandums Arab organizations have published over the past few months – the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee’s “Future Vision,” the Mossawa Center’s document, Adalah’s proposed constitution and the “Haifa Document,” published on Jerusalem Day, have not opened the eyes of our blinded judicial establishments, which are changing, right before our eyes, as our legislators sit idly by, Israel’s Jewish character and its Zionist objectives for which blood and money have been expended in huge quantities.
The Zionist movement – hopefully, it will not be declared a racist movement in Israel, too – must abrogate its covenant with the state and manage the JNF on its own. Article 17 allows this. If, in a Jewish state, a Zionist organization cannot earmark land for the exclusive use by Jews, it is hard, very hard, to define the meaning of “a national home for the Jewish people.”
Jerusalem Posts, It is not that simple and you know it.
It would however be most interesting if someone with JNF addressed this issue and provided first hand insight into just what if anything JNF can do and will try to do.
It would be even better if the Israeli government woke up and smelled the coffee or to be more accurate smelled the stench of the Nazi ovens burning Jews that lingers still.
That is what Hamas, Fatah, so many Palestinians and so many Arabs filled with the depraved and inhuman Jew hating beliefs of the radical Islamists dream of restoring so they can burn away all vestiges Jews in the Holy land to make it Judenrein for Muslims.
The fact that the majority of the world’s Muslims do not believe in such horrendous radical Islamic dreams should give Israel no comfort, for there are a very great many radical Islamists and Jew haters who do.
If Mazuz decides to give away land that our families have donated money to, we should demand our money back!
A reasonable government would favor allowing the JNF to purchase government land so as to sequester it for future Jewish generations – the opposite of what is now happening. This is no different from conservation groups in the United States that purchase large tracts of land or accept donations of large tracts in order to preserve it in its pristine state. Such arrangements include the prevention of all uses – even the cutting of hiking trails. Moreover, eminent domain is now used in the United States as a means of providing private companies with other people’s private land so as to generate more taxes for the government. There is no reason in the world that Jews should not be favored in land distribution so that the country cannot be purchased right from under it. It is a matter of survival. The Leftists, who see equal rights for Arabs as a major goal, will wind up selling their land to the highest bidders at some point. Saudi Arabia has already begun purchasing chunks and businesses. There is little doubt that the purchase of as little as 10 percent of crucial areas will cause a tipping point to be reached and populations would be forced to relocate due to daily harrassment. Such is the stream of events occurring now in Jaffa and Haifa. Blind principles produce blind adherents.
Ted,
This answers my first question by confirming my suspicion that it was not the JNF, but the Israeli goverment that has frustrated the original intent of the JNF land trust.
The following closing statement raises other questions however:
What can the JNF do about this edict from on high?
What covenant with the State is the Zionist movement advised to abrogate in order to manage the JNF on its own?
Will abrogation of such covenant allow for the result Israel Harel assumes?
Where would the JNF stand on this if the Zionist Movement could abrogate the covenant referred to?
Will the JNF allow the Zionist movement to administer the JNF lands?
Is not the government the one to be charged with turning things around to keep Israel from carving off pieces of itself to give to her enemies?
Just why has the government and the judiciary failed to see the obvious deleterious impact on Israel? \
What is article 17?
I know that Israel greeatly prides itself on its ethical, moral and judicial values, multiculturalism and principles of universal humanism that the Israeli government carries over to be concerned about the welfare of Palestinians and Arab Israelis as much as Israeli Jews, but the Israeli government along with the Israeli judiciary have carried these values to such insane lengths that they are being insanely suicidal.
It is encouraging that this issue has been raised in Ha’aretz as opposed to the JP. Perhaps it may well have been covered by the JP as well, in which case, all the better.
It would however be even more encouraging to know that Israel Harel, by his article has lit a fire under Israelis to demand that their government put Israel’s aspirations, ideals and needs to ensure Israel’s strength and security first and exclusively first. In so doing they ought to be demanding that the Israeli government put the interests, wellbeing and security of all Israelis first and foremost and exclusively first.
One can only hope. Hope dims however when considering that the Olmert government and Israeli judiciary, like past governments and judicial courts have continued this aforementioned skewed and perverse attitude and consequent policy vis a vis balancing interests between Israelis and Palestinians.
This attitude and resulting policies are becoming increasingly skewed and perverse that only results in Israel suffering self inflicted wounds at the hands of their government and judicial leaders.
Bearing witness to this continuing situation and turns out to be maddening and frustrating that no one seems able thus far to rouse MK’s in opposition to stop sitting on their hands and getting them to do something and rousing the Israeli electorate to take to the streets and marching on the Knesset to demand better, instead of continuing to sit and grumble in their homes and accept worse.
I guess it just seems apparent to me that the secular elite would rather give the land of Israel to non-Jews before they see it go to the religious Jews.
Israel’s fight with its external enemies too often overshadows and masks its internal fight with fellow Jews. As Israel’s demographics begin increasingly favoring the religious Jews, the secular elite (in all their flavors) view them as the greatest threat to their modern state and their power. (“We must be like all the other nations.”) Olmert has shown incredible craftiness in holding onto power recently, and all those who have worked with him to keep it demonstrate their ability to thwart the will of the people (or the religious majority), provided they control the proper mechanism of the government required to do so. They control these mechanisms now and plan on strengthening alliances with the extreme left wing of Israel and the international powers to maintain them. Therefore, they will always favor dismantling outposts (decidedly religious), internationalizing critical national security interests, and stripping the Judaic character of the diaspora programs (JNF, Conversion, Aliyah, etc.).
Israel’s power elite’s highest priority seems to be to defend the character of Israel from the religious Jews rather than the citizens of Israel from their sworn enemies. The secular Israeli elite are realizing that their atheist ideolology is doomed, but until the religious factions possess and use their full voice, the leadership of the Israeli left is the most dangerous enemy of the Jewish State of Israel.
Bill. This answers the questions we raised.