Livni, the Jewish National Fund and Israeli war crimes
Friday, December 11, 2009 London
Tzipi Livni, current leader of Israel ’s Kadima party, will be a star of the JNF 13 December conference, Creating A New Future For Israel in the Negev. Livni was constantly on our screens during last year’s bombing of Gaza , a chief apologist of the slaughter. Shamelessly, she had said: “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza .”[1]
Livni’s brutality has a tradition. Her parents were prominent members of the terrorist organisation Irgun – responsible for the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem . Ninety-one people were killed: including 41 Arabs, 28 British, and 17 Jews. The Irgun announced that it would mourn Jewish victims, not, British ones [2]; there was not even mention of the Arab dead.
In this one action the Zionists had killed more Jewish people than all the rockets ever fired from Gaza to Sderot. But during last year’s onslaught Livni’s concern was for Sderot: “It is unbearable. Children cannot go to school, and the residents cannot live their lives” [3]
The JNF conference that Livni will grace is part and parcel of the ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouin people. Discriminatory laws and practices have forced tens of thousands to live under constant threat of seeing their homes demolished and their communities torn apart.[4] Hundreds of Bedouin and Israeli Jews have protested the state’s refusal to recognise Bedouin villages, depriving them of water, and the JNF’s theft of Bedouin land. [5]
The JNF calls itself “ Israel 's leading humanitarian and environmental Charity”. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and leader of the opposition, David Cameron both sponsor the JNF. Both refuse to condemn either JNF’s role in ethnic cleansing [6] or Israeli war crimes in Gaza and in general.
The JNF has charitable status in over 50 countries, including in Britain . But it is a para-statal organisation whose aims are far from charitable. With the Israeli government’s Lands Administration, JNF controls 93% of the land in Israel , for Jewish people only, till the end of time.
The JNF plays a central role in the ongoing colonization of Palestine , Israeli apartheid and violent occupation – crimes against humanity. The immediate aim of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), working with the Palestinian BDS Committee and others, is to expose the JNF, and end its charitable status. [7]
Jewish and other organisations will protest Livni and the conference, and call for the principle of universal jurisdiction to apply, and that for her role in the onslaught on Lebanon in 2006 as well as Gaza in 2008/9, she is indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
1. Ha’aretz, 5 January 2009, www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052302.html
2. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126929
3. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3403164,00.html
4. www.hrw.org/en/node/62284/section/2
5. http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/press_releases/1254607624
6. For background, Tony Greenstein, Comment is Free, Guardian, 25 March 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/25/israelsroyalwelcome
7. See the Call for an International Campaign against the JNF, www.ijsn.net/390/