Three JNF donation boxes painted with red
What does planting a tree in Israel actually mean?

JNF is not an environmental group.

JNF is not a social club.
JNF is an instrument of colonization.

Land redemption: for Jews only

“The loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.”

Most people only know the JNF as an organization that plants trees in Israel. However, it's much more than that. The Jewish National Fund (Hebrew: Keren Kayemet Leyisrael) is a non-profit founded in 1901 to acquire land for Jewish settlement in Palestine. As the colonization arm of the World Zionist Organization, its mandate was to raise funds from Jews in the Diaspora and use them to purchase land in Palestine. Today, KKL-JNF controls 19% of Israel's land, most of which is stolen, depopulated Palestinian land that Israel sold to the JNF after 19481

Although today the JNF is known as an environmental group that develops and maintains many of Israel's forests and parks, JNF's leadership has been remarkably consistent and explicit in articulating their true mission since the beginning: to "redeem" the land of Palestine for Jews, and only Jews. Zionist institutions refer to land redemption as “the purchase, reclamation and settlement of land”2 — with no regard for that land’s existing inhabitants.

According to the JNF’s charter, JNF land can only be sold or rented to Jews.3 The land is owned by the JNF and not Israel, allowing Israel to avoid international intervention that may consider those policies discriminatory, illegal, or compromising Israel’s appearance as a democracy.

Footnotes

  1. Salman Abu Sitta, Atlas of Palestine Land Theft by the Jewish National Fund, 2024, 9. ↩

  2. Greenwood, Naftali. n.d. “The Redeemers of the Land.” Jewish Virtual Library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-redeemers-of-the-land-quot. ↩

  3. Human Rights Watch. n.d. “Off the Map: Land and Housing Rights Violations in Israel’s Unrecognized Bedouin Villages: IV. Discrimination in Land Allocation and Access.” https://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/4.htm. ↩

“Afforestation is one of the things we do, it's become KKL's brand but ... Herzl founded KKL 120 years ago during the Fifth [Zionist] Congress for the purpose of land redemption ... That's KKL's job. That's its DNA.”

Avraham Duvdevani
JNF Global Chairman
2021 TV interview

 1

Footnotes

  1. כאן חדשות [@kann_news]. 2021. “קק"ל החליטה שהיא תתחיל לרכוש שטחים גם ביו"ש. היו"ר אברהם דובדבני ל-@KalmanLiebskind: ‘יכולים לקנות כל קרקע בשטח C, אך לא נוכל לבנות עליה בלי אישור הממשלה. אנחנו נמצאים פה ולא באוגנדה בגלל האדמה הזאת’ #עצם_העניין https://t.co/plJHI7PZEj.” Tweet. Twitter. https://x.com/kann_news/status/1361540814497808385.

    Watch video & read English translation
  • Top: "Redeem the land through the Jewish National Fund"
  • Middle: quote from JNF president Menachem Ussishkin, "don't say let us redeem tomorrow, lest we miss the opportunity"
  • Bottom: "A land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of olive-trees and honey" (Deuteronomy 8:8)

Hidden ruins: covering up history

“Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together... and there is no other way but transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain”

Yosef Weitz
JNF Director of Land and Forestry
Diary entry from December 1940

 1

Footnotes

  1. Davis, Uri, and Norton Mezvinsk. “Documents from Israel, 1967-1973 : Readings for a Critique of Zionism,” n.d, 21

In the war of 1948 Israel killed 15,000 Palestinian Arabs, displaced 750,000 Palestinian Arabs, and seized their land. This is called the War of Independence by Israelis, and the Nakba, meaning “disaster,” by Palestinians. As part of Plan Dalet — Israel’s strategy for the war — Israel depopulated hundreds of Palestinian villages and demolished them to prevent Palestinians from returning.1

Footnotes

  1. Khalidi, Walid. 1988. “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 18 (1): 4–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2537591.

    Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Repr. Oxford: Oneworld Publ. ↩

The ruins of at least 91 Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and demolished by the Israeli army lay underneath JNF's parks and forests.

At least 85,588 people exiled from their homes by violence or the threat of violence and never allowed to return.

At least 4 massacres were committed by Israeli soldiers at villages that were turned into JNF parks and forests.

Like Palestinian refugees from all over the land Israel claimed in 1948, refugees from JNF's land were scattered across the region. They have not been allowed to return or received any compensation.

Some ended up in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West bank. Some, called present absentees by Israeli law, have remained within Israel. Some ended up in Gaza where their families are now — if they haven't been killed — being starved and displaced once more by Israel.

JNF's stated purpose is "land redemption", to claim as much of Israel as possible exclusively for Jews. JNF parks and forests exist to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that has been ongoing since before 1948.

View data

Destroyed Palestinian villages covered by JNF parks

“A large part of the Jewish National Fund's parks are on land that had Arab villages in the past, and the forests are there to camouflage it.”

Ecological Damage

The JNF is most well known for its environmental project of afforestation, which it calls “making the desert bloom.”1 In reality, these projects are quite harmful to the environment. JNF’s afforestation projects replace Palestine’s biodiverse vegetation of olive, carob, and pistachio trees with a monoculture of non-native species, primarily pine trees.2 Pine trees are poorly suited to the environment: they require a lot of water and are prone to pests, diseases, and forest fires in arid conditions.3 Pine needles also acidify the soil and make it uninhabitable for native plant species. Drought conditions in recent years have worsened the wildfires: in 2010, a 3-day wildfire burned more than 12,000 acres of forest on Mount Carmel,4 and in 2016 a wave of wildfires across Israel and the West Bank left 1,600 people homeless and destroyed almost 5,000 acres of forest.5

Footnotes

  1. “Healing a Degraded Land.” n.d. KKL-JNF. Accessed December 26, 2024. https://www.kkl-jnf.org/sustainability_and_environment/combating-desertification/healing-degraded-land/.

    “Giving to Israel and Making the Desert Bloom.” n.d. JNF-USA. Accessed December 26, 2024. https://www.jnf.org/jnf-blog/post/blog/giving-to-israel-and-making-the-desert-bloom.

    “1,000 Strong in Israel: JNFuture Goes Hands-on to Make the Desert Bloom.” n.d. JNF-USA. Accessed December 26, 2024. https://www.jnf.org/jnf-blog/post/blog/1-000-strong-in-israel-jnfuture-goes-hands-on-to-make-the-desert-bloom. ↩

  2. Aziza, Sarah. Forest Against the Trees. The Baffler, September 2023. ↩

  3. Greenwashing by the Jewish National Fund, Israel ↩

  4. Deadly Forest Fire in Northern Israel. Earth Observatory, NASA.gov ↩

  5. November 2016 Israel fires, Wikipedia. ↩

Mount Carmel forest fire, 2010 (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

JNF has primarily planted pine trees, a non-native species poorly suited to the environment. 

Why the JNF? Why now?

Israel is openly committing genocide in Gaza.

One of Israel’s biggest tools in defending itself from accusations of genocide has been decontextualization of October 7th and the assault on Gaza since then. Israel’s narrative depends on the idea that Zionism is an appropriate solution to Jewish existential fear.

There is a larger context that we must acknowledge, which is that of the existence of Palestine before the Zionist dream of Israel. Palestinians have been subjected to over 100 years of ongoing displacement and dispossession to make room for a Jewish settler colony.1 Much of this history has been obstructed and denied—however, JNF has continuously and openly demonstrated that the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine has always been intentional. From Ussishkin to Bar-Ilan to Weitz to Duvdevani, JNF’s leaders have been clear and consistent in pursuing their goal of “land redemption”: calculated, legalized land theft.2

Zionism has always required ethnic cleansing. The JNF originally directly stated its intention of ethnic cleansing, has enacted it through policy, and currently disguises it in the language of environmentalism.3 Meanwhile, settler organization leaders, Israeli government officials4, and Israeli military leaders openly state that they wish to ethnically cleanse and settle in Gaza. There is no room for denial—the current genocide, as well as breaches of international law and on going ethnic cleansing in the form of West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements and land grabs, represent the brutal acceleration of Zionism.

Footnotes

  1. Khalidi, Rashid Ismail. 2020. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. ↩

  2. Salman Abu Sitta, Atlas of Palestine Land Theft by the Jewish National Fund, 2024.

    Salman Abu Sitta, Financing Racism and Apartheid, 2005. ↩

  3. Masalha, Nur. 2001. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882 - 1948. 4. print. Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies. ↩

  4. McKernan, Bethan. 2024. “Israeli Ministers Attend Conference Calling for ‘Voluntary Migration’ of Palestinians.” The Guardian, January 29, 2024, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/29/israeli-ministers-attend-conference-calling-for-voluntary-migration-of-palestinians.

    Reiff, Ben. 2024. “Turning Zeitoun into Shivat Zion: Israeli Summit Envisions Gaza Resettlement.” +972 Magazine. January 30, 2024. https://www.972mag.com/israeli-summit-gaza-resettlement-transfer/. ↩

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