A Scottish charity’s income for illegal settlements has skyrocketed
JVL Introduction
This is the Keren Kayemeth Lelsrael-Jewish National Fund’s introductory statement on its website
“Since its establishment in 1901, KKL-JNF has been developing the Land of Israel, strengthening the bond between the Jewish people and its homeland.”
This development has included settlements in occupied Palestinian lands which are illegal under international law. Even so the JNF currently has charitable status in many countries, although in 2024 Canada removed that status (See Victory! Independent Jewish Voices Canada). Charitable status carries considerable advantage, for example, in the UK it means that the tax office effectively increases the value of most donations by 25% (or more for those on higher rates); in the USA, taxpayers can reduce their tax bill by the relevant percentage for charitable donations.
There is a huge question as to why charities around the world that raise funds to support this organisation that carries out or supports initiatives that are illegal still retain their charitable status. For all the motherhood and apple pie aims for the UK branch of the charity, the KKL-JNF was created to acquire land for Jewish settlement long before the State of Israel came into being and continues with that work – and for Jewish settlement only. However, this article asks a specific question, which is what is the reason for a 1,750% increase in income at a time when settler attacks and ethnic cleansing have risen exponentially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A spokesperson from the Office of the Scottish Charity Register said: “OSCR received several concerns about the KKL (Scotland) Charitable Trust (SC037850) in 2025. “We assessed these concerns in line with our published policies and have concluded that this charity is operating according to its charitable purposes.”
There has been a campaign to stop the JNF and you can read more about that here. Clearly there is more work to do but the decision in Canada can give us some hope.
LL
This article was originally published by The National on Sun 22 Mar 2026. Read the original here.
https://archive.ph/WFIGx
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The basic issue with the regulation of such Charities in both Scotland (OSCR) and England and Wales (the Charity Commission) is that although ethnic cleansing , racial discrimination and so on are illegal in UK, they are not, by definition, illegal in the Jewish State. Any charity dispensing its funds abroad, must act in accordance with the law in the states in which it operates, and is not obliged to apply UK (or ‘international’) law abroad.
My guess is that this framework was not set up to deal with situations such as an expansionist, racist state, but, rather, envisaged a situation of alleviating poverty, providing education or humanitarian relief.
Nonetheless, this has become a convenient loophole for Zionist charities with clever legal advisors.
It’s shocking that large amounts of UK taxpayers money is given to such awful ‘charities’, including various ‘Friends of the IDF’ charities.
Every settlement helped by the JNF only allows Jewish members. That is of no concern to the charity regulators. Jewish Agency leases sate that the land must never be rented or sold to non-Jews. Imagine such racial tests being enforced by the authorities in any British community. But if it’s legal in the territory where the charity operates and meets their charitable objectives, they are good for taxpayer money and the other, considerable, fiscal privileges of being a charity.
Until the Stop the JNF campaigns understand this and find a way to deal with it – or the political will is created to change the framework in some way – we appear to be stuck.
As with other so-called but self-interested ‘charities’, it is obvious that this ‘charity’ supporting colonial settlement by outsiders within the homeland of indigenous people who are being violently displaced and murdered is a sham and worse. The claim that Palestine is the homeland of Jewish people is false; it has not been so for over a thousand years. At the time of Jesus, the land was divided provinces within the Roman Empire. A succession of predominatly Muslim empires followed, accounting for the Muslim religion of most of the indigenous people – who are presently being forced out.
Har Homa looks ugly and scars the otherwise beautiful landscape. Signing the Oslo Accords has caused nothing but problems for Palestinians, and given the current increase in settler violence, Oslo should be put in the dustbin of history along with political Zionism and the Labour Party.