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February 20th, 2021 
Awake Goy Last weekend, the Jewish National Fund, which exists to “redeem” the land of Israel for Jews, moved forward on a plan to buy Palestinian lands that surround illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank so as to expand the settlements, give them green spaces and room to develop.
The move has been hammered by liberal Zionist organizations, the Reform Jewish movement, one of the JNF’s own board members,and even the State Department as a threat to the “two-state solution.” Americans for Peace Now says the policy will lead to “perpetual occupation and annexation.” The JNF says what’s the big deal, it has always operated in the West Bank! “Throughout the years and till this very day, KKL-JNF [Keren Kayemet Le’Israel] has been operating in all parts of the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria [biblical term for West Bank],” the JNF said.
Yossi Alpher, an Israeli political analyst at Americans for Peace Now, says the move could potentially expose Americans on the JNF board to criminal prosecution by the International Criminal Court, which ruled two weeks ago that it has jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, including illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli army officers have been warned that they could be prosecuted by the ICC– why not Americans. Alpher:
[T]he entire world indeed considers the settlements to be illegal.
Worse, since 2014 the Netanyahu government has encouraged the establishment of settler ‘farms’ on disputed land in West Bank Area C, the 60 percent of the territory that ostensibly is not part of Palestinian autonomy. Recently, too, the Jewish National Fund – Keren Kayemet Le’Israel moved to authorize purchase of land in the West Bank from private Palestinian owners, for the purpose of settlement expansion.
From the ICC’s standpoint, all this settlement expansion in occupied territory constitutes a ‘perfect storm’ of illegality against which Israel has no obvious defense. Non-Israelis serving on the JNF’s board should also be forewarned about those ICC international arrest warrants.
The JNF-KKL board appears to be all Israelis. But one of that organization’s partners is the Jewish National Fund of the U.S. It itself is active in the occupied territories. And the organization “transfers large sums of money to their Israeli counterpart on a regular basis,” writes J Street, which is enraged by the possible new policy.
J Street and Americans for Peace Now want the JNF to abandon the new plan; but the JNF of the U.S. has been an active partner in colonizing the West Bank for many years. Abraham Duvdevani, the new global chairman of the Jewish National Fund, explained on Israeli TV that the JNF has been buying up Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank since right after it was conquered.
In 1968, a Labor Prime Minister asked the JNF to buy up West Bank land, he said.
[T]hat’s how it’s been done for 100 years…. for settlement purposes.
The new policy is aimed at bolstering Jewish settlements.
There is a great deal of land around existing settlements [in the West Bank] that we want to purchase in order to enable the expansion of the settlements… so they can have parks and green breathing space.
Duvdevani said the point is to keep the land Jewish-owned, not Palestinian-owned.
We deal with land redemption, so that tomorrow morning we won’t need to purchase land in the Galilee from Arabs who bought it from Jews today.
Land “redemption.” This is really an apartheid policy, whichever side of the Green Line it takes place on, funded by “millions of tax-deductible dollars from Americans” (as J Street notes).
On that JNF U.S. board, you will see a lot of privileged American Jews. And not just Ron Lauder. Real estate kings. A guy who started an organic condiments line. A physicist at Stanford. A speech pathologist in Brooklyn. A supermarket director in Reno. The Boca Raton businessman who wants American Jews to move to Israel…
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