Reparations for victims and prosecution of living perpetrators

JNF Coretta Scott King Forest The Jewish National Fund (JNF) covers the scenes of some Israeli massacres with anti-racism-themed parks and forests. The organization promotes the Coretta Scott King Forest as a symbol of “commitment to peace and justice” but the forest covers up destroyed Palestinian villages, including Ayn al-Zaytoun, whose inhabitants the JNF helped to kill and expel.

Walid Khalidi, in All That Remains, mentions the thirty seven young villagers chosen at random and reports Israeli historian Benny Morris’s conclusion that “they were probably among a group of seventy people later massacred in a gully between Ayn Al Zaytoun and Safad under orders from Moshe Kelman who, in anticipation of a Red Cross visit to the area, ordered their hands to be untied to conceal the fact that the killing had been done in cold blood.”

In 1976 the JNF also named a forest after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. within the Mount Turan Forest in the Upper Galilee region, near Nazareth, which they claim later grew to include 10,000 trees.

Icons of anti-racist struggle are co-opted in the service of ethnic cleansing, for the JNF’s involvement in such crimes is both historical and ongoing.

While the Ayn Al Zaytoun villagers saw their killers erect an “anti-racism”-themed park to conceal their destroyed homes and land, the survivors of Jimzu and other villagers saw insult piled on injury: – the Memoria Forest planted over their village is promoted as a symbol of tolerance and anti-fascism, a tribute to those 30,000 Argentines, including 3,000 Jewish citizens of that country, who died at the hands of the Argentine Junta.

The Memoria Forest visitors’ centre, however, conceals not only the history of the Palestinian villages underneath, but the sinister record of Israel’s arming and training of the military officers who carried out the mass killings of 1976-83. At the height of the Junta’s terror, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires reported that there was “no country in the world in which so many Argentine officers were staying simultaneously for the purposes of weapons procurement, training, etc.”

The Israeli Embassy refused Jewish leftists the passports that would have sprung them from the regime’s torture chambers. Torturer Peregrino Fernandez revealed much later that assistance in his work came from the Israeli Embassy’s Herzl Inbar (later Israeli Ambassador to Spain).

Prisoner Jacobo Timerman later wrote: “I will forget my torturers, but I will never forget the Jewish leaders who acquiesced to the torture of Jews”.

The JNF Coretta Scott King Forest dishonors that iconic family name and the JNF nationally themed parks and forests implicate citizens of multiple countries in the crimes of the JNF. The Memoria Forest is not the only JNF park to exploit the memory of those who fought and died to oppose fascism around the world, while concealing Israeli savagery in Palestine and support for extreme right-wing regimes elsewhere.

The racist JNF planted a 10,000-tree forest supposedly in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. within the Mount Turan Forest in the Upper Galilee region, near Nazareth. The JNF established the King Forest in 1976, eight years after his assassination.

The JNF’s Coretta Scott King Forest is also themed as a tribute to the Kings’ struggle against racism, claiming an Israeli “commitment to peace and justice” but it covers and conceals a notorious racist massacre:

“As a tribute to Coretta Scott King and her message of peace and equality, a section of the Biriya Forest…will be replanted as the Coretta Scott King Forest. King, who passed away in 2006, was a distinguished human rights activist and leader. She devoted her life to social justice, alongside her husband, The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Coretta Scott King Forest is in addition to a forest that was planted in Israel in memory of her husband.

King…spoke to us about his vision of the Promised Land, a land of justice and equality, brotherhood and peace…With your help, we can rebuild Israel’s northern forests and carry on Coretta Scott King’s commitment to peace and justice.”

The Coretta Scott King forest, sits inside one of Israel’s largest man-made forests, built over the ruins of six destroyed Palestinian villages located in the Safad region – Dayshym, Alma, Qaddita, Birrya, Amqa, Ain al-Zaytoun. All these villages were obliterated in the Nakba, and their inhabitants killed or expelled.

Ayn al-Zaytun formed the basis for the epic novel by Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (Bab El Shams) and the film of the novel (Tabar).

JNF in Israel is still actively involved in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, aided and abetted by more than 40 JNF national groups around the world.

Bibliography

Abbasi, M. (2004). “The battle for Safad in the war of 1948: A revised study,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 36, pp. 21–47;

Benveniśtî, Meron (2000). Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948 (Illustrated ed.). University of California Press). p. 130;

Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press), pp. 222–23)

Nazzal, Nafez (1978). The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948. Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies. p. 36;

Pappé, Ilan. (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld), p.111–13;

Quigley, John B. (2005). Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective (Duke University Press), p. 61;

Bronstein, Eitan. (February 2014). “Under the Forests,” Zochrot, https://www.zochrot.org/publication_articles/view/55274/en?;

Stop the JNF. “JNF Anti-racism Themed Forests Conceal Racist Massacre,” https://www.stopthejnf.org/jnf-anti-racism-themed-forests-conceal-racist-massacre/

Stop the JNF. “Á Tale of Four Parks,” https://www.stopthejnf.org/a-tale-of-four-parks/

Tabar, Vivian. “Insulting the Memory of an Anti-Apartheid Activist,” Counter Currents (30 April 2010), https://www.countercurrents.org/tabar300410.htm

Back