The parallels between a northern Arkansas group that is seeking to forbid Jews and people of color from buying on their adjacent tracts of land and Zionism are more significant than you might think.
The Forward has been running a series of articles about a group in northern Arkansas that owns adjacent tracts of land that Jews and non-whites are forbidden to purchase or live on. On Thursday, the attorney general of Arkansas said this was legal. The details are complicated — mostly focused on the fact that there’s been no purchase or sale or business transaction yet, so nothing formally violating the law — but the significance of this story for thinking about Israel and Zionism is not.
The Arkansas group is called Return to the Land, and it is part of a larger national movement. Focusing on people’s proof of “ancestral heritage,” it seeks, according to its mission statement, to “put land [in the United States] BACK [my emphasis] under the control of Europeans.”
The parallels between this movement and Zionism are striking. Both movements claim that they are movements of return; hence the “back to control of Europeans.” Both movements style themselves as the original owners/stewards of the land, with no reference to its previous indigenous inhabitants. Both movements focus on some proof of lineal descent.
Even more striking than the question of ownership of land is the question of whom the land can be sold to. While I would imagine anyone reading these articles in the Forward would be horrified by this Arkansas movement, what exactly do supporters of Israel think the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which many of us raised money for when we were children, is? It owns 13 percent of the land within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, and in the last few years, it has sought to purchase land in the West Bank.
More important, the JNF has refused to sell the land it owns to Palestinians. That is not some sub rosa practice, never talked about openly; it is part of its charter and part of the claims it has made in court. The JNF has argued, “The loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.”
The Israeli courts have litigated this question for decades, and as far as I can understand, the legal or informal settlement they’ve reached is that if the JNF is required to sell land to Palestinians, the Israeli state will compensate it with additional land, so that it can maintain its 13 percent hold over land in Israel.
The question of the Israeli state’s involvement in the JNF, which is technically a private association, is also relevant to the Arkansas question. From the beginning, the JNF was the leading edge of the Zionist movement, before the creation of the state of Israel, because it saw Jewish control over the land as the only question that mattered for Zionism. It purchased land under the Ottomans, then under the British. When the state of Israel was created and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, it handed over more “unoccupied” land to the JNF. So the JNF and the state have been intertwined from the start (again, as any of us who raised money in those lovely little light blue metal boxes back in the 1970s could tell you).
But once the legal challenges began, the claim was that the JNF is a private organization, not a creature of the state, so whatever discrimination in the sale of land the JNF engages in, is not illegal, since it is not the action of the state. This argument would never fly in the United States, at least not since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which you can see even in the statement of the Arkansas attorney general.
A position, in other words, that every Democrat — liberal, centrist, or conservative — takes for granted, that every schoolchild is taught to think is sacrosanct, that even most conservatives on the Court give lip service to, is completely at odds with this foundational institution of the state of Israel.
In Arkansas, a lot of the back and forth also involves the question of whether the owners of the land are an LLC or part of the community and so forth. Again, none of that really matters, but it’s telling that the defenders of this racist enclave are making the same kinds of moves that defenders of the JNF make.
Again, I would imagine that most of us reading this story in the Forward, including the writers and editors of the Forward, are horrified by this idea in Arkansas and that it is a developing movement in the United States. But if you are, and you support the state of Israel, you’re going to have to come to terms with the JNF, which as any Jewish person will tell you, was the fulcrum of international Jewish support for Israel back in the early days through at least my childhood years, when trips to Israel and Birthright weren’t as common as they are now, and continues to be central to the state today.
Great Job Corey Robin & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
