Ran HaCohen is back with his latest semi-annual installment of perspicacity, talking this time about the recent directive from a group of Israeli rabbis barring Jews from selling or renting homes to non-Jews. As I read it I thought, sure, that's reprehensible, but how is it any different from what the Jewish National Fund has been doing for years? But this being Ran HaCohen, he had that base covered:
Indeed, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) owns 13 percent of Israel’s lands and explicitly allots them to Jews only. The Fund was created long before the state of Israel, collecting money in order to purchase land for Jewish settlements in Palestine. […] The JNF’s discriminatory policy has been in place for decades and is now under consideration by Israel’s Supreme Court. Even last year, however, Israel signed a massive land-swap with the JNF, in which the JNF gives the state lands in the populated center of Israel, and gets in return mostly uninhabited lands in the north and the south – so that it can stop Arabs from settling them. The state of Israel uses the JNF as a subcontractor in order to bypass the principle of equality and to discriminate against non-Jews in their access to free lands – or, more often, to lands already inhabited by Arabs that Israel is determined to expel.
The JNF is the major dispossessor of the Bedouins in Israel’s southern areas: it is planting trees on thousands of acres of land containing Bedouin villages, in order to ethnically cleanse the area of any non-Jewish presence. The JNF is also behind the destruction of al-Arakib, a Bedouin village which has been destroyed at least seven times in the past months by JNF bulldozers.
13% may not sound high, but 80% of Israel's population lives on that land—and as HaCohen points out, Israel uses the JNF as a strategic partner in disposessing Palestinians. This is one of the lesser-known mechanisms of institutionalized racism in Israel, even among Israelis themselves, and it's good to see it getting more exposure. Thanks for raising the profile of this issue, bigoted yahoo rabbis!
Read the rest here.
SPEAKING OF LAND CONFISCATION: Take a look at this just-released cable from Wikileaks:
1. (S/NF) MFA Middle East Director (Assistant Secretary-equivalent) Patrice Paoli informed POL Minister Counselor June 18 that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told French officials in Paris June 15 that the Israelis have a "secret accord" with the USG to continue the "natural growth" of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
This would be why I so often use the phrase "kabuki theater" in reference to US pressure on Israel to stop settlement activity. While it was readily apparent from the facts on the ground, though, it's definitely useful to have it in black and white, so we can point to the hard evidence that Obama and the rest of his administration have been lying consistently about this. Thanks again, Wikileaks.
(This bombshell has so far only been reported prominently by the Jerusalem Post and Democracy Now!, according to Google News, though AFP did publish a story that buried it seven paragraphs deep and defused it with the title "Cables show US doubts on Mideast peace: WikiLeaks". But I'd expect that the outrage to come may force mainstream media outlets here to pay it more attention than they'd otherwise prefer.)
The Distant Ocean 