The JNF and the Charity Commission

The JNF, the Charity Commission and how ethnic cleansing became a “charitable purpose”

By Paul Kelemen

The Jewish National Fund since the early years of the twentieth century has been instrumental in dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and pursuing the sectarian goal of “establishing and developing a Jewish state for the benefit of the Jewish people.”[1]

The JNF’s activities and the story it tells of its aims, have evolved to meet the needs of the Zionist movement. In the face of growing public awareness of the Palestinian cause and of Israel’s apartheid system, the JNF UK, much like its parent body in Israel, presents its contribution to Zionist state building, not as seizing land to facilitate Israel’s Jewish population’s political and demographic dominance, a patently colonial project, but as “redeeming” the land, community development and environmental protection.

The relationship between the JNF Israel (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael in Hebrew) and its 21 branches abroad, among them the JNF UK,[2]  is much like that between the headquarters of a multinational corporation, in this case located in Israel, with its subsidiaries located abroad.  The JNF UK has a separate legal identity but its instant recognition and credibility rest entirely on its identification with the KKL. However, when the JNF UK faces questions over its connection to KKL projects in the West Bank, which violate international law and is contrary to British government’s stated policy, it denies any responsibility for the KKL’s involvement in settlement expansion and military related activities. On its website it insists that “JNF UK was, and remains, a completely separate entity to KKL or any other JNFs: JNF UK is not a ‘branch’ of KKL or any other JNFs.” [3]  It protests too much!

The statement is demonstrably untrue and has been rejected by a judge in the court of protection, in 2020.  The court upheld the Fundraising Regulator’s ruling that the KKL’s will writing service, had breached the code of conduct to provide independent financial advice to an elderly person suffering from dementia who had left her legacy to the JNF UK. The judge concluded that “there was neither sufficient nor meaningful separation between the KKL and JNF,” and pointed out that “five directors of KKL were also trustees of JNF[UK] including the chair of trustees… One person had been appointed as trustee of the JNF and KKL on the same day in April 2017.”[4]

The discussion below will refer to both organisations as JNF and use KKL and JNF UK only where it is necessary to indicate their distinct contributions to what is a joint enterprise with a common purpose.

A land for colonisers not refugees

From its foundation in 1901, the JNF has been tasked with raising the funds to purchase land in Palestine on behalf of the Zionist movement. The funds for it, in the early years were raised mostly from wealthy Jews. In eastern Europe, where most Jews lived, Zionism had little popular support until the Nazis seized power and set in motion the persecution of Jews. By the middle of 1939, the blue boxes that the JNF used as much for collecting contributions as for encouraging symbolic participation in the Zionist movement, raised more than any other funding sources.[5]

The building blocks of the Israeli state did not emerge from the mere fact of persecuted Jews seeking refuge in Palestine.  It was the Zionist movement that turned refugees fleeing into the agents of its colonising project by integrating them into Jewish-only agricultural cooperatives and trade unions committed to developing a separate, exclusively Jewish economy.  Land acquired by the JNF could be leased or owned solely by Jews. As early as 1930, a British Royal Commission investigating Palestinian hostility to Zionist settlement activity under London’s imperial rule, reported: “the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extra-territorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future.”[6]

Engineering ethnic cleansing: from land purchase to land theft

While the British were in control of Palestine, the Zionist movement’s land purchases were mainly from absentee landlords.  Once the JNF acquired a plot of land, the Palestinian tenant farmers that worked it, were expelled.  The British authorities by favouring the marketisation of land facilitated the first phase of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. By 1948, when the British withdrew, the size of Jewish owned land is variously estimated to have covered between 5.7% to 7% of all land in Palestine.[7].  Most of it came under Israeli control through military conquest during the Naqba and was well in excess of what the UN partition plan, under US pressure, had allotted to the Zionists.

The first Israeli government, led by Ben Gurion, transferred large swathes of land to the JNF, doubling the size of what it owned. As Salman Abu-Sitta, the Palestinian scholar, who has comprehensively documented the Zionist movement’s erasure of the Palestinian presence and the JNF’s role in it, explains in his most recent work: “The land of 372 depopulated Palestinians villages (5,687,342 donums) has been wholly or partially taken over by the JNF. The number of UN-registered refugees from these villages is 3,500,000 or 54 percent of the total number of UN-registered refugees living in exile.”[8] Transferring Palestinian land to the JNF, that had been seized by military force, was a subterfuge to disguise the Israeli state’s blatantly racist and antidemocratic land allocation in pursuit of the Zionist project.

Blocking Palestinian return

The Ben Gurion government’s transfer of Palestinians land to the JNF formed part of what it dubbed its “War on Return” policy, which was aimed to thwart the evicted Palestinians’ right of return that the UN had decreed. It was “a massive bureaucratic, military and ultimately legal campaign against Palestinian return, resettlement, and overall presence.”   The Israeli military forces, swept through villages still inhabited by Palestinians to check their registration documents at gunpoint, as part of “a deliberate effort to thin out as much of the Arab population as possible…”. [9]

It is through the ethnic cleansing of a largely unarmed population that the JNF became a major landowner. It currently owns 13% of Israel’s land but its power extends over almost all of it by virtue of nominating just under half the executive board members of the Israel Land Authority which collects the rent for the JNF.  The overall decision on land allocation and land use rests with the Land Council, that has a 13-member governing body of which 7 represent government ministries and 6 the JNF.  This ensures that the policies of the government prevail and explains why, in recent years, the JNF has become more involved in settlement expansion and military related projects. The JNF is as much an instrument of Israeli state power as the IDF.

Greenwashing colonisation

Israel claims to have over 80 national parks and more than 400 nature reserves. Some of these have been funded by JNF branches abroad.  For example, the JNF USA funded the  Coretta Scott King Forest, named after the American civil rights leader which the historian Joseph Massad describes as “an attempt to recontextualize the new Zionist territorial entity as one established against not via colonialism”. [10] The forest was planted over six destroyed Palestinian villages.  It is by no means the only deception that the JNF deploys.

The billboard at the entrance of the British Park informs visitors that the park is, “A Gift of the Jewish National Fund of Great Britian”. The JNF commentary for tourists explains that over some 10,000 acres of the Judean Plain, “you can see planted forests, natural woodland, archaeological sites, breathtaking landscapes and a variety of flora and fauna of Israel”.  A few remains from Jewish biblical history are mentioned but not the seven Palestinian villages that were destroyed in the Nakba and the remains of which the British Park now largely hides.[11]  With breathtaking hypocrisy, the JNF’s commentary remarks, “this region had been fairly safe from environmental depredation as it had been regarded as a ‘backwater,’ and so ignored.”[12] In the drive to consolidate the state’s territorial claim, the Palestinian connection to the land is deliberately erased.

Abu-Sitta estimates that the JNF has developed around a 100 forest and parks within Israel’s 1967 borders. “The land of 372 depopulated villages has been wholly or partially taken over by the JNF…” He adds that the number of the UN-registered refugees from these villages is 3.5 million (in 2021) or 54 per cent of the total number of refugees living in exile.[13] Since 1967, to seize more land, the JNF has also developed parks in the West Bank for the benefit of Jewish settlers. In 2014, an Israeli investigative journalist obtained a document from 2012, which showed that the KKL had funded 14 projects in settlements, six of them as “public grounds” or as “parks”.[14]  Canada Park, developed by JNF Canada, stands on the site of over 1,400 demolished Palestinian homes in the West Bank.[15]

The policy of developing forests and nature parks on the sites of ethnically cleansed villages to block the prospect of the Palestinians’ return is part of a wider demographic war, in which the other main element is the expansion of Jewish land settlement.  This aims through a combination of land confiscation, house demolitions, infrastructure neglect and economic strangulation to fragment and hollow out Palestinian communities with the ultimate goal of inducing their inhabitants to emigrate or concentrate in townships. It is in relation to the JNF’s long standing focus on the Naqab (Negev), where the harsh conditions have kept the Jewish Israeli presence sparse, and in the two regions, the Galilee and East Jerusalem, where there are still Palestinian population concentrations, that the JNF UK’s contribution to Israel’s pursuit of entrenching Jewish ethnic dominance has to be seen.

The JNF’s contribution to ethnic cleansing in the Naqab

The JNF UK defines its “mission and charitable purposes” through promoting projects which aim “to relieve poverty; advance health; advance Jewish beliefs and faith; advance community development… and environmental protection or improvement”. It goes on to say that the JNF UK’s current focus is on charitable projects in the Naqab which “is an impoverished area, lacking infrastructure and community cohesion.” [16]

The particular, “community cohesion” that the JNF has in mind for the Naqab is laid bare by the 2024 report to the UN of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It points out that the “demolition of Bedouin homes in the Negev increased by 400 per cent in 2024” and, under the heading, “Judaization and Segregation,” it adds: “Since the foundation of Israel, Israeli officials have highlighted their growing demographic concern, fearing that an increasing Palestinian population would challenge the Jewish majority”.  It adds: “Israeli land and housing policies for Palestinians in the Negev and Galilee mirror housing policies applied towards Palestinians in the West Bank, in particular in relation to the restrictive planning and zoning policies, the establishment of settlement ‘seeds’ to increase Jewish presence and prevent Palestinian expansion… at the same time as the promotion of Jewish villages, settlements and settlement blocks in a way that is intended to obstruct Palestinian geographical contiguity.”[17]

JNF as instrument of the West Bank’s colonisation

Since 1967, when the West Bank came under Israeli occupation, many of the lands that Israel confiscated on the pretext of security, for “military purposes,” it then gifted to settlers. However, by 1979, the then Begin government deemed Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land to be proceeding too slowly. It reinterpreted what Ottoman law had defined as state land to lay claim for Israel, the occupying power, a much larger area. Alongside this brazen landgrab in violation of international law, the JNF proceeded to purchase land under the guise of two companies called Himanuta and Himanuta West Bank. As the Israeli group of ex-soldiers, Breaking the Silence, explains: “One operates within the borders of Israel and East Jerusalem and the other registered in the Civil Administration, operates in the West Bank.”[18]

Land purchased in this way often starts up as a settler outpost, with immediate protection from the Israeli police and army, and is then legalised by the state. For example, Givat Eitam colony south of Bethlehem, which is on land that Himanuta acquired with JNF funds, was a small settlement which then expanded to accommodate 840 housing units and retroactively declared legal.[19]

The JNF has also acted as an intermediary in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and, particularly, in the neighbourhoods adjacent to the Old City, in Silwan and the Muslim Quarter. This has been imposed mainly on the basis of the Absentee Property Law, that stems from 1950, when Israel legalised its confiscation of the properties that it had seized during the Naqba. The so-called absentees were Palestinian inhabitants who had been forced to seek refuge in neighbouring Arab countries.  There are also the “present absentees,” those who are not allowed to return to their land despite still residing in Israel. They, too, had their land expropriated for the exclusive benefit of the state’s Jewish population.

The pretexts for land confiscations are often Israel’s security needs or the use of spurious documentation and fraudulent testimonies to deny Palestinians their rightful ownership – all devices to enable Jewish settlement expansion under the stewardship of the JNF and other state agencies.

The far right unleashed

In March 2026, the Israeli government approved 34 new settlements. This took the number that the current government has approved to 103, a 78 percent increase, the Times of Israel noted, in the three and a half years of its tenure.[20] Amnesty estimates the total number of official settlements at about 210. “Around 750,000 Israeli settlers currently live illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”[21]

The JNF, and the ILA, the two state institutions most directly involved in the management of land use, have been instrumental in this accelerated colonisation in the West Bank with the accompanying house demolitions, violent attacks, military checkpoints and roadblocks that cut off Palestinian communities from one another and obstruct people going about their daily lives. [22]

In 2020, Avraham Duvdevani, from the far right Jewish Home party, that advocates the annexation of the West Bank, moved from being the head of the World Zionist Organisation’s settlement division to become the chairman of the JNF. His successor in that post, Eyal Ostrinsky was portrayed by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (28 April 2026), as representing a more moderate line. It reported him as announcing that “under his leadership, JNF will no longer purchase land in the West Bank.”[23]

Ostrinsky’s promise of a JNF policy change on land purchase in the West Bank is likely to have been made with an eye on the decline in public support for Israel in the US, including among Jews. In any case, he does not have the decisive say.  Israeli government policy on land use is transmitted to the JNF and ILA through the Land Council.  In April 2026, Netanyahu appointed as the head of the Land Council, Yehuda Eliyahu, a close ally of Bezalel Smotrich on the far right of the settler movement. Eliyahu advocates the annexation of the West Bank and has called for Gaza’s Palestinian population to be expelled “down to the very last one”. [24]

Ostrinsky can reduce the JNF’s involvement in land confiscation without affecting its overall supportive role for the Jewish settlements.  The JNF has long diversified into a whole range of activities from military training to infrastructure projects, aimed at consolidating the Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its de facto annexation. This diversification into assisting military related activities is also reflected in projects that the JNF UK helps to fund.

The Charity Commission keeps accountability at bay

In a complaint submitted to the Charity Commission, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians highlighted that the JNF UK had transmitted between 2007-2023 over £3.33 million to organisations with links to the Israeli military and to armed settler groups. Among the recipients is a pre-military academy, Derech Eretz that offers on its website six months programmes “which provides guidance for admission to elite and combat army units”.[25]HaShomer HaChadash (The New Guardian), which offers pre-military “preparation for  the IDF for command and national missions,”[26] mainly in border areas and in the Naqab, received for this programme £1million from the JNF UK, between 2015 and 2018. [27]

The Commission also dismissed a complaint against the JNF UK’s contribution to the Benji Hilman Foundation’s Lone Soldiers programme that provides funding in order that IDF recruits from abroad, without immediate family in Israel, “will have a real home to call their own for the duration of their army service”.[28]

In these cases of the JNF UK funding military related training, the Commission found nothing untoward despite the fact that, in January 2025, it had published “an official warning” stating that “providing aid or military supplies to any foreign armed force is not a charitable purpose, and no charity can legally undertake such activity.”[29]

The Charity Commission has form when it comes to dismissing complaints against pro-Israel charities. In July 2025, the Guardian reported that two UK charities had donated £5.7million to a high school in an illegal Jewish settlement next to the Palestinian village of Khirbet Susya, south of Hebron, in the West Bank.  The donation to the school, the newspaper’s report notes, enabled the settlement to expand.[30] The Charity Commission, without setting out how these two charities’ projects could be deemed to have been compatible with the Commission’s thirteen “broad areas of potentially charitable purposes,” as these are laid out in the Charities Act (2011)[31], argued that it was outside its remit to take any action. “The commission can only operate within our legal framework, and the fact that a charity operates in the occupied Palestinian territories does not in itself constitute a criminal offence or breach of charity law.”[32]

A charity? 

The impunity that the Commission extends to the JNF and other Zionist charities has all the hallmarks of a regulatory body that is keenly aware of the vested interests that it should not cross.  The British state’s close collaboration with Israel operates on several levels and through a variety of networks ranging from informal contacts among security agencies, business leaders and lobby groups such as the Labour Friends of Israel and its Conservative party equivalent. At various times prime ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, have been the JNF UK’s honorary patrons, though now only Blair has the brass neck to have stayed on.

With some US arm twisting, the Zionist movement was issued, in 1947, “the international birth certificate for a Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land.”[33] It was in a period when the historical tide was turning decisively against colonisation and the expulsion of indigenous peoples. In the face of anti-colonial movements asserting their right to reclaim control of the resources that had been plundered by the imperial powers, the JNF moved to the forefront of the campaign to recast the theft of Palestinian land as a benign mission to help impoverished communities and improve the environment through parks and nature reserves. These can hide most of the destroyed Palestinian villages but not erase the resistance that has since developed nor disguise the radicalisation of settler colonial politics that has led Israel to perpetrate the genocide now unfolding in Gaza and to extend it, incrementally, to the West Bank. This is the “charitable purpose” that dare not speak its aim. It is for those who support the Palestinian cause to call it out.[34]

Endnotes

[1] The Origin and History of JNF UK

[2] https://www.kkl-jnf.org/about-kkl-jnf/kkl-jnf-offices-worldwide/

[3] The Origin and History of JNF UK

[4] KKL EXECUTOR & TRUSTEE COMPANY LIMITED v.LYNSEY JANE HARRISON

[5] B. Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory (Berkeley, 1983) p.75

[6] Immigration, Land Settlement and Development in Palestine (Hope Simpson) Report, Cmd 3686, p.54

[7] G.Forman & A.Kedar 2004 ‘From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”: the legal dispossession of the Palestinians displaced by Israel in the wake of 1948’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2004, 22, p.81n; Kimmerling, ibid.p.77)

[8] S.Abu-Sitta, Atlas of Palestine, Land Theft by the Jewish National Fund, London, 2024, p.12 See, Annie O’Gara, ‘Mapping the Crime: Abu Sitta’s Atlas Exposes Geography of Dispossession,’ https://www.palestinechronicle.com/mapping-the-crime-abu-sittas-atlas-exposes-geography-of-dispossession/

[9] S. Robinson, Citizen Strangers, Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State,  California, 2013, p.75

[10] J.Massad, quoted in Ben White,  Coretta Scott King and the Jewish National Fund, The Electronic Intifada 15 May 2007

[11]  Stop the JNF, Introduction to the British Park

[12] British Park – Scenic trails in Israel’s Heartland

[13] Abu-Sitta, op.cit. p.12

[14] Noam Sheizaf, The Jewish National Fund’s list of projects in the settlements, +972, 4 May 2014

[15]  IJV Canada, Campaign update: No more tax breaks for apartheid!, 5 Sep 2024

[16] JNF’s Mission and Charitable Purposes

[17] UN, The Question of Palestine, 14 Aug 2025

[18] Breaking the Silence, A Progressive Jewish Response to the Discriminatory Policies of KKL–JNF, pdf p.4

[19] Badil Press Release, Suffocating Bethlehem: the new Givat Eitam Colony, 2019

[20] Jeremy Sharon, Government approves a record 34 new settlements, as it acts to deepen hold on West Bank, Times of Israel, 9 Apr 2026

[21] Amnesty International, Israel escalates illegal annexation in West Bank amid global inaction, 26 Feb 2026

[22] Jason Burke & Sufia Taha, ‘They lock us in like sheep’: new Israeli checkpoints and barriers raise fears in the West Bank, Guardian, 15 Mar 2025

[23] Judy Maltz,  JNF to Cut Back Most of Its Funding of Programs at West Bank Settler Farm Outposts, Haaretz, 28 Apr 2026

[24] Nadav Rapaport, Israel appoints settler who backs annexation to head powerful land authority, Middle East Eye, 5 May 2026

[25]  Derech Eretz, Pre-Military programs

[26] HaShomer’s Pre-Military program – Beit Midrash for Judaism and Zionism

[27]  Rivkah Brown, Revealed: A British Charity Gave Over £1m to ‘Israel’s Largest Militia’, Novara Media 6 Dec 2023

[28] “A place our lone soldiers can call home“, Benji Hillman

[29] The Charity Commission, Charity issued with Official Warning over support for foreign military, 9 Jan 2025

[30] ICJP, JNF UK subject of complaint and request for Charity Commission investigation, due to multi-million pound funding links with Israeli military, 6 Mar 2025

[31] Charity Commission, Guidance: Charitable Purposes, 16 Sep 2013

[32] Haroon Siddique, Two UK charities donate millions to Israeli settlement in occupied West Bank, Guardian, 18 July 2025

[33] R.Khalidi, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, London, 2020, p.71

[34] Stop the JNF, About.