The recent revocation of the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status may be the most important Palestine solidarity victory in Canadian history. The grassroots win is a boost to the global Stop the JNF campaign and efforts to disrupt Canadian charity assistance to Israel.
On August 10 the federal government officially revoked the charitable status of an organization that’s had many prime ministers, ministers and senators attend their events. Days before the revocation was made official former PM Stephen Harper headlined JNF fundraisers in Windsor and London, Ontario. Held across the country, the organization’s galas draw thousands of well healed and connected individuals each year. JNF Canada has partnered with provincial governments and has raised over a quarter billion dollars since 2003.
After 57 years of making all Canadians subsidize its racism, support for West Bank colonies and the Israeli military, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) finally withdrew the JNF’s ability to give its donors tax receipts, which often amount to half (or more) of donations. Within a year the JNF must wind up its charitable operations and dispose of its $30 million in assets.
In its letter explaining the revocation, the CRA highlights a slew of issues with JNF’s operations. Alongside a multitude of accounting issues, the revenue agency criticizes JNF Canada’s assistance to its explicitly racist parent organization in Israel. The CRA letter notes, “Our review identified that the Organization’s resources appear to have been applied to JNF’s non-charitable projects in the Occupied Territories, and to supporting the Israeli armed forces, and not to activities furthering its charitable purposes. It is our position that the Organization has operated as a conduit for JNF [Israel], a non-qualified donee, in contravention of the Act.”
The revocation is the culmination of decades of demonstrations at JNF galas, countless email campaigns, substantial educational work and formal complaints to the CRA about the JNF. The campaign was effectively instigated in 1978 when Ismail Zayid discovered that Canada Park was built on the village he and his family were expelled from. JNF Canada raised $15 million ($120 million in today’s money) to build Canada Park on three peaceful West Bank villages (Beit Nuba, Imwas and Yalu) demolished by Israel after the 1967 war. Despite repeatedly attempting to return home, the 5,000 expelled Palestinians were not allowed back. A 1986 UN Special Committee reported to the secretary-general: “[We] consider it a matter of deep concern that these villagers have persistently been denied the right to return to their land on which Canada Park has been built by the JNF Canada and where the Israeli authorities are reportedly planning to plant a forest instead of allowing the reconstruction of the destroyed villages.”
JNF Canada, which subsequently raised millions of dollars to refurbish the park, replaced most traces of Palestinian history with signs devoted to Canadian donors such as the Metropolitan Toronto Police Department, City of Ottawa and former Ontario premier Bill Davis. Inaugurated by former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1975, the Diefenbaker Parkway bisects Canada Park.
The CRA cites Canada Park, which it labels the “organization’s flagship project”, in its rationale for revoking the JNF’s charitable status. The revocation letter also lists seven other ventures that the charity funded on land the Canadian government considers illegally occupied. The CRA also detail nine different JNF Canada initiatives supporting a foreign military in contravention of the rules for registered charities.
Established in 1910, JNF Canada contributed to an important pre-state land conflict. In the late 1920s JNF Canada helped raise $1 million ($17 million today) for the lands of Wadi al-Hawarith (or Hefer Plain). A 30,000 dunam (roughly 7,500 acres) stretch of coastal territory located halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv, the land was home to a Bedouin (mostly nomadic) community of more than 1,000. Without consulting the Palestinians living on the land, JNF acquired legal title to Wadi al-Hawarith from an absentee landlord in France.
For four years the tenants of Wadi al-Hawarith resisted British attempts to evict them. Historian Walid Khalidi explains: “The insistence of the people of Wadi al-Hawarith to remain on their land came from their conviction that the land belonged to them by virtue of their having lived on it for 350 years. For them, ownership of the land was an abstraction that at most signified the landlords’ right to a share of the crop.”
The conflict at Wadi al-Hawarith became a lightning rod for the growing Palestinian nationalist movement. In 1933 a general strike was organized in Nablus to support the tenants of Wadi al-Hawarith. Palestinians, especially those without title to their lands, resented the European influx into their homeland.
The JNF was established in 1901 to acquire land in historic Palestine for exclusively Jewish settlement. Alongside the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency, the JNF is a key institution of Zionism. By the time of Israel’s creation JNF had acquired 900,000 dunams of Palestinian land. It ‘purchased’ over two million more dunams of absentee land from the state after over 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1947-48.
Today JNF owns 13 percent of the country’s land and has significant influence over most of the rest. Systematically excluding Palestinian citizens of Israel from leasing its property, a 1998 UN report concluded JNF lands are “charteredto benefit Jews exclusively,” which has led to an “institutionalized form of discrimination.” In 2005, Israel’s high court came to similar conclusions and a 2012 US State Department report detailing “institutional and societal discrimination” in Israel said JNF “statutes prohibit sale or lease of land to non-Jews.”
JNF Canada has launched initiatives to ‘Judaize’ 1948 Israel. In the early 1980s JNF Canada helped finance an Israeli government campaign to “Judaize” the Galilee, the largely Arab northern region of Israel. “The government is building Jewish settlements on our land, surrounding us and turning our villages into ghettos,” Khateeb Raja, mayor of Deir Hanna, a Palestinian-Israeli town in the Galilee, told The Globe and Mail in 1981. Ishi Mimon told the paper that he planned to move his family to the newly settled “Galil Canada” area because “the Galilee should have a Jewish majority”.
JNF Canada’s representative in Israel, Akiva Einis, described the political objective of Galil Canada stating, “the government decided to stop the wholesale plunder (by Israeli Arabs) of state lands [conquered in the 1947/48 war]. … The settlements are all on mountain tops and look out over large areas of land. If an Arab squatter takes a plow onto land that is not his, the settlers lodge a complaint with the police.”
JNF Canada spent tens of millions of dollars ($35 million was the total fundraising target) on 14 Jewish settlements in Galil Canada. In the contested valley of Lotem a stone wall and monument was erected, reported the Globe, with “hundreds of small plaques etched with names and home towns of Canadians who have contributed money to the Galilee settlements.” Most of the donors to Galil Canada were Jewish, “but a Pentecostal congregation in Vancouver, the Glad Tidings Temple, has given $1-million.”
Tawfiz Daggash, Deir Hanna’s deputy mayor, denounced Canadian financial support for the settlements. “I want to say to the people of Canada that every dollar they contribute [to JNF] is helping the Israeli government in its attempt to destroy the Arab people here.”
The CRA’s decision to revoke the JNF’s charitable has already boosted the global Stop the JNF campaign. British-based legal advocacy group the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians cited Canada’s decision in a recent letter urging the UK attorney general to revoke the charitable status of the UK branch of the JNF. Some fifty countries grant the JNF charitable status and they raise around a quarter billion dollars a year in subsidized donations. JNF chapters losing their charitable status would deprive the parent organization of significant resources to advance its racist, colonial, policies.
And, while the JNF revocation is a big win for the campaign against Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession, hundreds of other registered charities raise over a quarter billion dollars a year for projects in Israel with many of these organizations violating existing CRA rules.
The day JNF’s loss of charitable status was made official, the Canada Gazette also announced the same for the Ne’eman Foundation. Raising $7.3 million in 2022, Ne’eman Foundation assists West Bank colonies and the Israeli military.
As with the JNF and Ne’eman Foundation, formal complaints have been submitted to the CRA regarding a dozen other Israel-focused charities, including the Canadian Zionist Cultural Association, Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, Mizrachi Canada and HESEG Foundation.
In recent months there’s been significant campaigning on Israel-focused charities. In June Gabor Maté, Yann Martel, Linda McQuaig, Roger Waters, Monia Mazigh, Desmond Cole, Libby Davies and others signed “Stop Subsidizing Genocide”. The public letter points out that “200+ registered Canadian charities funnel a quarter billion dollars a year to projects in Israel. Many of these groups finance projects that support the Israeli military, racist organizations and West Bank settlements in contravention of Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) rules.”
In another challenge NDP revenue critic Niki Ashton hosted a June 13 press conference at the parliamentary press gallery calling “on the Liberal government to investigate Canadian charities that allegedly funneled taxpayer money in support of Israeli military operations and illegal settlements in Palestine.” She also sponsored a parliamentary petition on the subject and sent a letter to Revenue Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau demanding the government investigate these charities funding. In a recent post on the matter Ashton declared, “not one cent of Canadian tax-dollars should be funding genocide.”
On International Day of Charity, September 5, protesters rallied at 20 CRA offices across the country to call on the Revenue Agency to stop subsidizing genocide.
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