How the Jewish National Fund abets U.S.-sanctioned settlers
Zvi Bar Yosef (middle) and his youth volunteers following anti-settlement activists, on 23 September 2024
Shanyat Turani-Chowdhury writes in Mondoweiss on 21 January 2025:
For more than a century, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) has raised money in the United States and around the world to acquire land for Jewish-only settlements in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In recent years, more than $1 million of that money has flowed towards people and projects that have since been sanctioned by the United States government for their violence against Palestinians, according to Israeli financial documents reviewed by Mondoweiss.
Budget documents obtained by the Israeli watchdog group Peace Now through a public records request and shared with Mondoweiss shed light on how the JNF supports violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
A registered 501(c)(3) in the United States with 40 offices around the world and its international headquarters based in Jerusalem, the Jewish National Fund owns approximately 15 percent of the land in historic Palestine, including large areas of the occupied West Bank — and this, despite the fact that settlements on occupied lands are illegal under international law.
The organization’s ties to several sanctions targets came to the fore after former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration announced its first round of financial penalties last February, which have since spread to 33 Israeli settlers or organizations. Budget documents obtained by the Israeli watchdog group Peace Now through a public records request and shared with Mondoweiss shed additional light on how the nonprofit organization disbursed those funds — as advocates denounce the organization’s complicity in extremist Israeli settler violence
‘The very definition of ethnic cleansing’
Founded in 1901, the JNF’s stated goal is to “ensure a strong, secure, and prosperous future for the land and people of Israel.” The methods it uses to meet this goal include supporting the immigration of diaspora Jews to Israel and promoting Zionist education abroad. In its appeal for financial support, JNF makes clear its expansionist aims: “Israel’s population cannot remain concentrated on a vulnerable coastal plain, and a vibrant north and south should be attractive new frontiers for Israeli families,” its website reads.