Each year, in preparation for Hanukkah, many Jews across the United States purchase candles to light their menorahs. For those in areas where Walmart has squeezed out competitors, the limited options of Hanukkah candles to choose from will include Rite Lite, which the superstore stocks from New York to California and sells online. These candles are advertised as benefiting the Jewish National Fund, whose work is described as including “water resource management, tree planting and the preservation of Israel’s green spaces,” according to the candles’ packaging.
But the Jewish National Fund (JNF) is not some benevolent environmental steward. It is in fact the largest private landowner in Israel, and it has been systematically discriminating against Arabs in its dealings for decades, according to both the Israeli attorney general and human rights organizations.
JNF was founded in 1901 as a Zionist organization, collecting donations from around the world to purchase land for a Jewish state in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, JNF became a quasi-governmental organization, with formerly Palestinian lands annexed by the Israeli government transferred to JNF to manage. Between purchases and annexations, JNF reported that it owned $2 billion worth of land in 2014, per The Forward. According to the Yale School of the Environment, JNF holds 13 percent of all Israeli territory, making it the single largest private landowner in the country.
Under Israeli law, JNF lands cannot be sold, only leased via the Israel Land Administration (ILA), a state body, in terms ranging from 49 to 98 years, as explained in a report to the United Nations by the Habitat International Coalition and the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Furthermore, from at least 1960 to 2005, regulations restricted bidding on leases for JNF lands exclusively to “Jewish nationals,” systematically excluding Arab Israelis, who also identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel and make up 20 percent of the population. According to a transcript from Adalah’s challenge to this discriminatory practice in Israel’s Supreme Court in 2004, JNF argued:
As a........