JNF eBook Vol 4 - JNF eBook Series

JNF eBook Vol 4
injustices embedded in all environments – from the Scottish heather moorlands, which I was
studying to the urban industrial slums in India. I decided to leave scientific research and
worked as a community worker in the environment of the post-industrial public housing
estates in which the urban working class were warehoused and which became the dumping
ground for many of the lowest paid unemployed, sick, drug addicted and most vulnerable.
My next step as an environmentalist was working with Friends of the Earth Scotland,
supporting community action in pollution-affected communities. In 2006, stepping back into
academia, I had the opportunity to carry out research with the survivors of the Bhopal disaster
who were still, over 20 years later, struggling for justice. And then in 2010, I was invited to
participate in a fact-finding tour of JNF lands in Israel.
What I saw in Israel corresponded with my experiences of environmental injustice. We visited
Ein Hod where the Palestinian inhabitants had been driven out in 1948 and whose homes were
now taken over and ‘modernized’ by middle class white European Jews – and also the
resurrected Ayn Hawd nearby, the result of a sustained campaign by former residents. We
saw Ajjur – or at least all that was left of it - in the middle of British Park xxv and later met a
90-year-old former resident in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, who recalled her
expulsion in the Zionist invasion of 1948 as if it were yesterday. We also saw the scattered
remnants of Imwas in Canada Park, xxvi through which Jewish mountain-bikers keep fit, and
met a group of former residents, now refugees in Ramallah, who are organizing a campaign
for their right to return.
When we saw the village of Al Araqib it constituted piles of twisted construction materials on
top of children’s toys, kitchen utensils and furniture. It had been destroyed only six months
previously – and its residents’ attempts to rebuild destroyed again and again – to make way
for the JNF’s Destiny Forest in the Naqab desert. We were welcomed by the Bedouin
Palestinians – Israeli citizens - who had been dispossessed of their homes, fields, olive trees,
angry yet dignified, sitting amongst the wreckage of their homes.
2.7 Conclusion – A Just Environmentalism
A socially just understanding of the environment must end injustice and enable oppressed
groups to construct their environment from their local resources with a fair share of the earth’s
global resources. This precludes colonial dispossession, and the JNF, which exists for this
purpose, has no place in an environmental movement. Environmentalists need to recognize
the environmental injustices perpetrated by the Jewish National Fund, deliberately, as part of
a systematic project of ethnic cleansing, apartheid segregation and colonial dispossession.
These are environmental injustices perpetrated by the JNF – destroying the environment of
Palestinians, denying their right to construct their environment, imposing an alien
environment for a ‘master race.’ The Rio Declaration on the Environment and Development
was signed in 1992 at the first Earth Summit. Despite Israel’s attempt to remove it, principle
23 declares: “The environment and natural resources of people under oppression, domination
and occupation shall be protected.” Israel has been dispossessing Palestinian resources since
1948 and the JNF has been its constant ally.
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