The Jewish National Fund operates through colonialist strategies of greenwashing, land grab and suppression. Join long-standing Palestinian activists and anti-colonial environmentalists in exposing these abuses and shedding light on the urgency of supporting grassroots struggles in decolonizing the climate emergency.
This event which takes place on Friday, April 23rd at 18.00-19.30.00 [Palestine Time] is Part of From the Ground Up #2: Take Action Now, a Global Gathering for Climate Justice to move our thinking towards how we can collectively tackle the multiple crises we are facing. Please learn more about this global event here.
We will be joined by Dipti Bhatnagar, Climate Justice and Energy Program Coordinator, Friends of the Earth International and JA (FOE Mozambique) and Jamal Juma’, a long-standing Palestinian popular activist and coordinator of Stop the Wall Campaign.
The session will also include film footage of popular struggles against JNF’s colonization within and outside Palestine.
The two speakers will discuss how colonial dynamics, tools and transnational institutions and corporations are systematically destroying the climate and the livelihoods of people across the global south. The pillage of resources, destruction or reshaping of nature and the displacement of people living on the land is at the core of colonial conquest and the destruction of our planet.
Within this framework, Palestine is a paradigmatic example. Israel’s settler colonialism and apartheid is daily taking over more lands and pillaging more resources, evicting and ethnically cleansing ever more Palestinians from their homes.
The aim of this session is to bring activists and organizations from around the world to understand the role of policies of colonialism and land grab as intrinsic to the destruction of our climate, across the globe and in Palestine. We will discuss different ways of holding the JNF accountable for its prolonged ethnic cleansing as part of supporting Palestinian grassroots struggle and decolonizing the climate emergency. In the session we will also launch a declaration calling for keeping the JNF out of COP26 to be signed by participants/organizations as a first step to keep the JNF out of this global gathering for climate justice.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established as an explicitly colonial tool to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and impose Israeli apartheid. Currently, the JNF is actively stealing Palestinian land to support the de facto and de jure annexation of the Occupied West Bank, which is deemed illegal under International Law. Nevertheless, the JNF is registered as a tax-exempt environmental charity in over 70 countries across the world and has been granted observer status by the United Nations to the Conferences of Parties (COP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).
In this session, we want to expose the JNF’s greenwash and shed light on the urgency of supporting Palestinian grassroots struggle as part of the decolonization of climate emergency: Challenging the JNF in multiple countries and keeping it out of any climate emergency response like the COP26.