Miriam Felton-Dansky asks: Mission Accomplished? Questioning the JNF

By Miriam Felton-Dansky

In 1995, a registered nurse named Aadal Kaadan – along with his wife, Iman, an elementary school teacher, and their three daughters – decided to leave the Israeli-Arab village of Baka el-Gharbiyyah for more land and a better lifestyle in Katzir, a small Jewish town near Carmiel. Though the Kaadans were willing to pay the price of $15,000, their application was denied, because the dunams in question belonged to the Jewish National Fund in Israel, the Keren Kayemet Leyisrael (KKL), whose mandate is to purchase and protect land for the Jewish people. So even though the land was administered by the Israel Land Authority (ILA – also known as the Israel Land Administration) – Israel’s official land-management agent – its ownership by the KKL meant that the ILA would not sell it to the Kaadans, who are not Jews.

Many were troubled by the fact that Israeli citizens were barred from purchasing land because of their ethnicity – since Israel regards itself as a democracy with equality for all citizens. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, along with Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On, launched a suit on behalf of the Kaadans, and a legal battle ensued, the crux of which was whether the ILA could discriminate in its land sales if the official owner of the land was the JNF. In 2000, the Israeli Supreme Court, referring to the promise in Israel's Declaration of Independence that all citizens of the Jewish state will be equal, ruled that the ILA could not facilitate the discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel by refusing to sell even JNF land to Arab citizens. The case was finally settled in 2005, when a ruling by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz determined that no ILA-managed land, including that owned by the JNF, could be marketed exclusively to Jews. The Kaadans bought their plot at the 1995 price and moved to Katzir.

Although he ruled that the ILA could not discriminate, Mazuz exempted the JNF from this stricture, ruling that the land in question would be officially transferred to the ILA’s holdings and that in exchange, the ILA would transfer an equivalent amount of land to the JNF in a less populated area. The agreement settled the issue, but it raised many others. In the JNF’s view, a sale to the Kaadans would violate its original covenant, which is meant to benefit Jews only. In reality, though, the JNF’s original mandate – acquiring land to establish a Jewish homeland – is long since fulfilled, making the continued adherence to its covenantproblematic. In the name of working toward its original mission, the JNF is actually pursuing a very specific vision of the Jewish state that may not bein the best interest of today's Israel.

Subscribe to Israel Horizons to read the rest of the article.