Professor Stephen Toope
President & Vice-Chancellor UBC
6328 Memorial Road
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Dear Professor Toope :
Re: UBC Sponsorship of Jewish National Fund (JNF)
NEGEV Dinner (April 2006)
The undersigned members of the UBC community have serious concerns regarding the recent UBC corporate sponsorship of the JNF dinner held in April 2006 in Vancouver The dinner raised money for JNF activities in the Negev desert and in the rest of Israel.
In our view, the values of UBC and the JNF are diametrically opposed and simply cannot be reconciled.
The UBC vision and purpose statements speak to universality, human rights, and a just set of laws which should govern human behaviour. The Jewish National Fund is an organization that excludes non-Jews, particularly indigenous Bedouin and Palestinian people from use of large tracts of JNF land holdings in Israel.
We request that the university stop supporting JNF events and advise the university and larger communities of its decision.
1. UBC VALUES: A Just Set of Laws and Limits
UBC vision and purpose statements, including TREK 2010 statements, set out the importance for the university of global citizenship, the values of civil society such as equality and the dignity of peoples, and the importance of a positive and healthy relationship between human beings.
The Trek 2010 vision statement expresses hope that UBC students will acknowledge their obligations as global citizens striving to serve a sustainable future for all.
At the November 2006 UBC Annual General Meeting, you thanked participants for “working with us to create a world where there are a just set of laws and limits so widely accepted and valued that we might truly operate without borders.”
It is our respectful submission that “a just set of laws and limits” requires the elimination of restrictive covenants for land use and ownership based on racial, national and ethic considerations. This has been the law in Canada since Wren V. Drummond (1945).O.R.778. This case, decided in the Ontario courts, held that a restrictive covenant providing that “land not be sold to Jews” was void as contrary to public policy. Three years later, the Supreme Court of Canada in the Noble case came to this same practical conclusion; i.e., that restrictive covenants against Jews were void, but they were ruled void for uncertainty.
In any event, such restrictive covenants were rendered illegal by separate legislation adopted by many Canadian provinces in the 1950's and this illegality was further cemented in provincial human rights legislation in the 70's and 80's. There is no doubt that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would also prohibit restrictive covenants if such were in existence on public lands.
Clearly the vision statement and the general values of UBC would never support such restrictive covenants on land in Canada or anywhere else. Imagine UBC's reaction to an organization that supported a restrictive covenant against Jewish ownership of land and requested UBC corporate sponsorship.
2. The Jewish National Fund Supports Restrictive Covenants based on Ethnicity/Nationality
The Jewish National Fund owns about 13 percent of the land in the state of Israel and, as its website candidly states, “its loyalty is to the Jewish people” not to all citizens of Israel. In fact, there is the equivalent of a restrictive covenant on all JNF lands against non-Jews; i.e., 20 percent of the Israeli population.
The JNF restrictive covenants against these Palestinian citizens, Muslims and Christians, apply to land once owned by and illegally confiscated from these very Palestinian citizens.
The JNF was formed in 1901, specifically to buy land in Palestine for the settlement of Jews.
In 1948, when Israel was established, Palestinian Jews owned approximately 8 ½ percent of the land and the JNF was the majority Jewish landowner. The British mandatory government owned approximately 5 percent in a formal sense and the rest of the land was cultivated, or owned, by Palestinian Arabs.
Between 1948 and 1953, the JNF acquired approximately 1,600,000 dunam from the newly formed Israeli state. These lands belonged to Palestinian Arabs who either became refugees outside Israel during the Israel/Arab war or those who were internally displaced inside Israel and who also had their lands confiscated.
Later in the 1950's and 60's by legislative expropriation, 93 percent of all lands in Israel came to be owned by the state-run Israeli Land Administration (80 percent) and the JNF (13 percent). All these lands were administered by the Israeli Land Administration (ILA) and could not be sold to any individual; however, the ILA leased lands, but only to Jews. Palestinian Arabs were not eligible for such leases.
In 2000, restrictions that prevent Palestinian/ Arab leasing of the Israeli Land Administration and JNF lands, were challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court (Qaadan v. Katzir). Further court action in 2004 and the recommendations of the Gadish Commission, a government commission on land administration, weakened, at least in theory, the restrictive covenants on state-administered lands including JNF land.
The JNF opposed these moves of potential access for non-Jews. The chairman of the JNF, Yehiel Leket, told the American Jewish newspaper The Forward (February 2005 Edition at Tab 4), “his organization is in talks to sever its official relationship with the state in order to protect its mission of protecting the land for Jews.
'The state is obliged to treat all citizens equally, but we are not the state'.”
These public comments reflect the official documents of the Jewish National Fund and its submission to the Supreme Court in Israel in December 2004, which laid out the theoretical and legal basis for the JNF's restrictive covenant on its land; i.e., that the JNF is permitted and, indeed, mandated to market it's land solely to Jews and not to other citizens of Israel.
“As a land owner, the JNF is not a public body that acts on behalf of all the citizens of the state. Its loyalty is to the Jewish people and its responsibility is to it alone. As the owner of JNF land, the JNF does not have to act with equality to all the citizens of the state.”
Eventually in 2005, the Israeli government agreed to exchange lands with the JNF whereby the JNF would receive lands in the Negev and the Galilee, and the JNF was able to continue to restrict tendering of its land to Jews.
3. The JNF Negev Dinner raises money for the development of Jewish- only settlements in the Negev (as well as other JNF projects in Israel), thus contributing to the dispossession of the indigenous Bedouin population in the Negev
The indigenous Bedouin Arabs are a unique community of the Palestinian people that have lived in the Negev for centuries. In 1948, they constituted the vast majority of the population of the Negev. The Israeli authorities have refused to recognize the Bedouin's traditional land ownership rights and have dispossessed them of these lands. Today, the 160,000 Bedouin are the most disadvantaged citizens in Israel. Almost half of the Bedouin communities of indigenous citizens live in seven government-planned townships or concentrations. The remainder live in 45 villages that the state of Israel still refuses to recognize. These villages do not appear on any official maps of Israel and, without recognition, are denied basic services such as running water, electricity, garbage collection, etc.
Land is expropriated from the Bedouin so that it can be freed for establishing Jewish settlements in the Negev. This is part of a wider Israeli policy of “redeeming the lands” and the Jewish National Fund plays an important role in this policy. The Jewish National Fund is given the task of holding in its possession “the land of the Jewish people”; thus, public land, next to Bedouin communities in the Negev is often transferred to the JNF where, according to its constitution, it can only be used by Jews (see the Arab Association for Human Rights, The Unrecognized Villages in the Negev Update: 2003, Submission to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, at Tab 6)
4. The Jewish National Fund purports to have, as its goal, the “greening of Israel”.
For Palestinian Israelis the Jewish National Fund theme of making the desert bloom is a transparent code for seeding Jewish settlements and transplanting Arab villages.
The “green” language used by the JNF appears to be progressive and to carry humanistic connotations. The JNF projects a commitment to sustainable development, soil conservation, forestation, river section rehabilitation, etc. At the same time, however, JNF forests, parks and recreational facilities are mostly developed over the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli army mostly, but not exclusively, in the 1948 war.
In fact, moreover, JNF Canada, the organizer of the April 2006 dinner sponsored by UBC was instrumental in building “Canada Park”, a park built in 1977 on three Palestinian villages in the occupied Palestinian Territories. These villages were demolished in 1967 and the JNF Park was built on top of these ethnically cleansed villages, and, as Yuval Yoaz points out, the Palestinian past in Canada Park is “forgotten in JNF signs”.
5. There are many Israelis both Jewish and non-Jewish who oppose the discriminatory practices of the JNF
Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli peace activist has openly called for the abolition of the JNF because of its discriminatory practices. (See Uri Avnery, Dunam after Dunam Israeli Horizons, Spring 2005 at Tab 9) Israeli Professor Uri Davis urged the Canadian government to strip the JNF of its tax-exempt status in his recent Canadian speaking tour. (See Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel and the Jewish National Fund at Tab 10)
Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel has been a major advocate for equal rights to land for the Palestinian national minority in Israel and has opposed the JNF discriminatory practices.
This is a small example of the progressive opposition in Israel to the practices of the JNF.
CONCLUSION
The above facts, we submit, demonstrate that UBC's corporate sponsorship of a JNF activity is contrary to the stated values of the UBC community. Such a corporate sponsorship denigrates and insults members of our community, in particular Palestinians, Muslims and Christians and others who would be excluded by the JNF policy, but also Jews, including several of the undersigned, who support democratic values of religious, political and ethnic equality and fair treatment for all. As such, it is offensive to all members of the community who respect human rights, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and equality between peoples.
We respectfully request a written response to this letter expressing assurances that UBC will commit to no further sponsorships or support of the Jewish National Fund, and will advise the university and larger community of its decision.
We also respectfully request a meeting with you to discuss this matter. Please contact Paul Tetrault who has been mandated to act as the contact person for the signatories.
Yours truly,
Paul Tetrault and eleven other faculty and alumni of UBC
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