GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 www.gush-shalom.org/
Dunam After Dunam
by Uri Avnery
5.2.05
What would we say if an American institution, holding a seventh of all the land in the United States, adopted statutes
that allowed it to sell or rent land only to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
We would not believe it. And it is, indeed, impossible.
But that's the way things are in Israel. This us now the subject of a stormy public debate.
These are the facts: The Jewish National Fund (in Hebrew Keren Kayemet le-Israel - KKL) holds 13% of all the land in
Israel. Its statutes explicitly prohibit the sale or rental of land to non-Jews. This means that every Jew in the world,
living anywhere from Timbuktu to Kamchatka, can get land from the KKL, without even coming to Israel, while an Arab
citizen of Israel, whose forefathers have lived here for hundreds - or even thousands - of years, cannot acquire a house
or an apartment on its land.
The debate arose after a recent ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court which proscribed discrimination between citizens in
the distribution of land. On the strength of this, the KKL has been sued. Now the Attorney General has decided that the
Government cannot discriminate against Arab citizens, even while distributing land belonging to the KKL.
This is all very nice, but there is a "but". The best legal brains looked for a way out: How to keep the discrimination
alive in spite of the court's decision? No Problem. The Attorney General simply proposes that for every dunam (1000
square meters, a Turkish measure still applied in Israel) that the KKL will have to distribute - God forbid - to Arabs,
the government will compensate it with another dunam somewhere else. The alternative land will be in the "peripheral"
areas, the Negev and the Galilee, where it is much more profitable. And for good measure, the government will guarantee
that the annual revenues of the KKL will reach half a billion Shekels. Thus the cake will be divided but remain whole.
The KKL, by the way, appoints almost half the directors of the "Israel Land Authority", the government body that is in
charge of all state-owned land in Israel.
In this situation, 20% of the citizens of Israel are denied the right to buy a home in large parts of the country,
while this right is enjoyed by Jews living in Brooklyn and Odessa.
How did this state of affairs come about?
Like many other bad things here, it started quite innocently.
More than a hundred years ago, when the Zionist movement was created, the need arose to buy land for Jewish immigrants
in Palestine. The KKL was set up for this purpose. In every Zionist home around the world a blue collection box was hung
up. In every classroom in Jewish schools, children were urged to drop their coins into the box. In Jewish schools in
this country, KKL-trustees were appointed, whose job was to encourage donations, for example by organizing fund-raising
competitions between classes and between schools. The blue box became a symbol of the Zionist movement, perhaps the most
prominent. I, too, put my coins into the box that was passed along the benches every Friday in my classroom in the
Ahad-Ha'am elementary school in Tel-Aviv.
With the money thus collected, a lot of land was acquired, on which Kibbutzim and Moshavim were set up. That was the
height of Zionist idealism. The "Redemption of the Land" and "Hebrew Labor" were the cornerstones of the Zionist dream.
And, indeed, what could be more beautiful? Children all over the world dropped their pennies into the blue box. The
land of Israel was bought with good money. On this land the pioneers, sons of merchants and usurers, tilled the field in
the sweat of their brows.
All over the world, Jewish children were singing: "I shall tell you, girl, / And you too, boy, / How in the land of
Israel / The land is redeemed. // A dunam here, a dunam there, / Clod after clod, / The land of the people is being
bought, / From the North to the Negev. // On the wall there hangs a box, / A blue box, / Every penny in the box /
Redeems land…"
However, this beautiful story had a dark side, which was not registered in Zionist consciousness.
The land was indeed bought, often at exorbitant prices, but from rich absentee owners, who did not live on it or
cultivate it. When the late Ottoman Empire was bankrupt and in dire need of money, it sold huge tracts to rich Arab
merchants in Jaffa, Beirut and other cities, who bought them as an investment. The Arab Felaheen (farmers), who had
tilled the land for many generations, were mere tenants. When the KKL bought the land, the Felaheen were driven out,
often with the help of the Turkish, and later the British police.
In spite of all this effort, when the United Nations resolved in November 1947 to partition the country between a
Jewish and an Arab State, less than 7% of the land belonged to Jews. Only a part of this area belonged to the KKL, the
rest to private Jewish owners in the towns and the agricultural "colonies".
Logic would have dictated that with the founding of the State of Israel, the KKL transfer its lands to the State. After
all, that was the idea of collecting the money.
But this did not happen. In fact, the very opposite took place: the new state transferred to the KKL millions of dunams
of land expropriated from Arabs - the refugees who were not allowed to return ("absentees" in legal language), those who
had remained in the country but were absent on a given day from their villages ("present absentees"), as well as Arabs
who became citizens of Israel.
It is important to keep this in mind, since it disproves the big lie that hovers over the whole debate: that the KKL
land was bought with the money of the Jewish people. The greater part of the present KKL land was not bought at all, but
conquered in war and transferred to the KKL.
Why transferred? Why did the sovereign state transfer lands gratis to a non-state body? Only one reason comes to mind:
so as to continue with the discrimination against the Arab citizens.
In an official brief, the KKL argues that it does not owe loyalty to the principles of the State of Israel, as put down
in the 1948 Declaration of Independence (equality between all citizens, regardless of religion and race), but to "The
Jewish People". This means that "The Jewish People", which is not a political body, is being presented as an independent
entity superior to the State of Israel.
The KKL does not act, of course, for "the Jewish People". It is an instrument of the Israeli Jewish community against
the Israeli Arab community. It has become an instrument for institutionalized discrimination. The Attorney General's
sleight of hand, designed to satisfy the demand of the Israeli Supreme Court for equality between all citizens, while
still allowing a body based on discrimination to keep hold of 13% of the land in the state, does not change the
situation in principle.
The KKL is not unique. Discrimination reigns in many fields. In the last few days alone, the following facts happened
to come to light:
* The chiefs of the Treasury Ministry are pondering how to pay allowances to big Jewish families, without paying them to
big Arab families. (There are two communities in Israel with a soaring birth-rate: the Jewish orthodox and the Muslim
Arab, especially Bedouin.) * The Ministry of the Interior is pushing a law that allows all foreigners who marry Israelis
to acquire Israeli citizenship, even if they are not Jewish - but explicitly excludes Arabs. This denies thousands of
young Arabs, citizens of Israel, the right to set up a family in Israel, if the bride or bridegroom is a resident of the
Palestinian territories, even if he or she is a relative. * The Ministry of Education confirmed what until now has been
an open secret: that the appointment of every teacher and principal in an Arab school in Israel is subject to the
approval of the General Security Service (Shin-Bet). But the ministry is progressing with the times: Until now, the
Shin-Bet representative was automatically the vice-chairman of the appointments committee. From now on, he will only be
a simple committee member.
It would be nice if we could say that these phenomena, and the many others of the sort, are inspired by the right-wing.
But the truth is that most of them came into being when the Zionist left was in control, and continue now with the
support of the left-wing whose representatives serve in the Sharon government.
This is not the state that we promised ourselves in the Declaration of Independence. We have a tough struggle ahead of
us, until Israel becomes a democratic, liberal, secular, pluralist and egalitarian state.
A step in this direction would be the abolition of the KKL and the transfer of its lands to the state.
ENDS