#jnf

Harris has been a staunch supporter of Israel for years. In 2017 she addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference and reminded attendees that the first resolution she co-sponsored as a senator was aimed at combating “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations. “Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations,” she told the crowd. In 2018 she gave an off-the-record speech to the organization, but eventually released her comments. In that speech she claimed that she raised money for the Jewish National Fund as a Girl Scout. “Having grown up in the Bay area, I fondly remember those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she told the audience. “Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.”

For those unfamiliar with the Jewish National Fund (JNF), they're a Zionist organization that has been instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

See Stop the JNF for more information on their history, the way they operate, and their decades-long campaign of greenwashing (i.e. destroying native plants, crops, and agriculture under the banner of 'making the desert bloom').

Continuing, the Mondoweiss article goes:

“The vast majority of people understand the importance of the State of Israel,” she added later. “Both in terms of its history and its present in terms of being a source of inspiration on so many issues, which I hope we will talk about, and also what it means in terms of the values of the United States and those values that are shared values with Israel, and the importance of fighting to make sure that we protect and respect a friend, one of the best friends we could possibly have.” While running for President in 2019, Harris was praised by the lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) for running to the right of Obama on the Iran deal. On the campaign trail Harris told Kat Wellman, a voter affiliated with DMFI, that she would reenter the agreement but “strengthen it” by “extending the sunset provisions, including ballistic missile testing, and also increasing oversight.” “I was very impressed with her. I thought she gave an excellent speech, she gave a very detailed, responsive answer to my question,” Wellman told a local paper after the exchange. “I’m pro-Israel, so I was I was very concerned and all about making sure we limit nuclear missiles in any country that could possibly destroy us all. I thought her answer was very good.” Harris has condemned the BDS movement and claimed that is “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, she voted against an anti-BDS bill in 2019 citing First Amendment concerns.

In the 12th Apr 26 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include

Israeli surgery and weddings continue despite rocket sirens.

Sheba Medical Center rises to number 7 in the world rankings.

Did the BBC or CNN show the 80,000 Muslims praying on Temple Mount?

Over 100 orbiting satellites are powered by Israeli engines.

There are 3,300 pre-launch orders for an Israeli personal aircraft.

Israeli history was made in an NBA basketball game.

A gem of a find from the Kingdom of Judah.

Read More: Good News From Israel

The Torah / Bible says in Leviticus 26:4-5: "I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. Your threshing shall overtake the vintage, and the vintage shall overtake the sowing...".

This newsletter is full of examples of how bountiful Israel has become. Even in wartime there are weddings in shelters, huge donations to support the less fortunate, dozens of medical breakthroughs, the 7th best hospital in the world, and 80,000 Muslims allowed to pray peacefully on the holiest Jewish site. 

Israel has become the most powerful nation in the Middle East. It is reaping the benefits of alliances with India and Taiwan, and sharing its bountiful water technology with Somaliland. Israel is a leading light in the development of Artificial Intelligence. Its battle-proven defense systems have just been purchased by the US, Germany and Greece, providing Israeli defense companies with billions of dollars of orders in the pipeline.  20,000 Californians are sharing in the bounty from jobs created by Israeli-founded companies, and investment in Israeli startups is at record levels.

Meanwhile a new Israeli TV series has been plucked by Apple TV, and Israeli sporting successes just keep flowing. No wonder that thousands of new immigrants have come to share the bounty. Finally, one Israeli couple has had an extremely bountiful crop - one baby born every year for 21 years.

There are other reasons why environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those orchards, as well as over Palestinian villages, most notoriously by the Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan ‘Turning the Desert Green’, boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of them non-native to the region. In publicity materials, the JNF bills itself as just another green NGO, concerned with forest and water management, parks and recreation. It also happens to be the largest private landowner in the state of Israel, and despite a number of complicated legal challenges, it still refuses to lease or sell land to non-Jews.

...

The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call ‘green colonialism’. But the phenomenon is hardly new, nor is it unique to Israel. There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of wilderness being turned into conservation parks – and then that designation being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral territories to hunt and fish, or simply to live. It has happened again and again. A contemporary version of this phenomenon is the carbon offset. Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organisations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context.

...

But this only scratches the surface of what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of ‘othering’ – what is described in Orientalism as ‘disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region’. And once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction. What does this have to do with climate change? Perhaps everything.

We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.

When a tree is not just a tree! A true insult to the value of trees in the Jewish faith.

Thanks to Voices from the Holy Land Online Film Salon, I just finished watching MY TREE (2021) by Director Jason Sherman.

This is a powerful film that I encourage anyone interested in Israel/Palestine to watch.

Be sure to watch to the end and have your blood pressure medication close by!

To get free access to the film MY TREE (1:42:00) follow the following steps by Voices from the Holy Land Online Film Salon:

1 - Register here for the Sunday, July 16, 2023 online ZOOM discussion about the film: Tinyurl.com/VFHL-July2023

2 – Once you register, you will get a confirmation email from Zoom with two links, 1) to the July 16 meeting and 2) a link to watch the film at your convenience. (Save this confirmation letter as the meeting link is unique to your email and you must have this to participate in the discussion about the film with the director and other commentators.)

3 - Watch the film at your convenience before the event. Then, if you can, join us with your thoughts and questions for our speakers at the Q&A Discussion on Sunday July 16, 2023 at 3 pm ET / 12 noon PT.