Beginning of JNF's end: How Zionist project was stripped of bogus 'charity' status in Canada

By Maryam Qarehgozlou

After 57 years of overt and covert operations, Canada recently revoked the "charitable" status of the Jewish National Fund, a Zionist settler-colonial institution implicated in land theft in Israeli-occupied territories, effectively bringing down the curtains on it.

Following the decision on May 30, the JNF received a significant legal and political blow.

The growing scrutiny over its financing of projects connected to the Israeli military’s genocidal practices and forced displacement of Palestinians led to the revocation of its Canadian tax-exempt status.

Initially announced by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in August 2024, the CRA’s decision cited violations linked to the JNF’s overseas funding practices.

The JNF challenged the decision in court, but the May 30 ruling definitively upheld the CRA’s findings and cemented the Zionist group’s loss of its legal status.

With the court’s rejection of its appeal, JNF Canada is now legally defunct as a “registered charity,” virtually bringing an end to nearly six decades of financial support from Canadian donors for its discriminatory and colonial programs in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Yves Engler, a Montreal-based author and activist and an outspoken critic of the Israeli regime and its lobbyists, told the Press TV website that the recent ruling will considerably weaken JNF’s fundraising potential and could result in the organization’s closure in Canada.

“The revocation of the JNF's ‘charitable’ status is a big blow to its fundraising capacities and will likely lead to the dissolution of the organization in Canada. It still has at least one outstanding legal bid, but it looks highly unlikely to succeed in reversing its revocation,” he said.

Over the years, the JNF, a linchpin of Zionist settler-colonialism, has tried to project itself as “an environmentally friendly organization concerned with ecology and sustainable development.”

However, it has been found involved in “greenwashing” — planting forests over the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages to obscure the history of extermination.

Human rights organizations and pro-Palestinian advocates have consistently condemned the JNF for its role in funding projects that support Israeli military and settlement expansion, warning that the JNF’s activities contribute to the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

The supremacist organization maintains a presence in many countries across the globe, particularly those with significant Jewish populations or strong ties to the Israeli regime, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Latin America, and several European nations, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

According to Engler, the revocation of JNF’s “charitable” status in Canada is important, particularly for the UK and Australia, where there’s been significant campaigning against it.

“There are significant ties between Canadian and UK tax authorities, so it’s definitely on UK officials’ radar,” he told the Press TV website.

Establishment of the JNF

The JNF lies at the core of Israeli apartheid — a colonialist institution that has actively contributed to the erasure of Palestinians from their homeland for more than a century.

The JNF was established in 1901 by Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, nearly five decades before Israel’s illegal formation following the Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced during a Western-backed war.

Its primary objective was to illegally acquire land in Ottoman-controlled Palestine to expand Zionist settlements.

Today, the JNF functions as a tool that allows Israel to dodge international accountability while playing a quasi-official role within the Israeli regime concerning the colonization of Palestinian territories.

By presenting itself as a private “charitable entity” abroad, the JNF allows the Israeli regime and its military-industrial complex to avoid scrutiny and accountability.

It played a crucial role in circumventing UN Resolution 194 and obstructing Palestinians’ right of return by asserting that the land was now owned by the organization, a supposedly private body not subject to international law.

Currently, the JNF controls 13 percent of Israeli-occupied lands and wields considerable influence over most of the remaining territories, which were primarily stolen from Palestinians forced from their homes by Zionists between 1947 and 1948.

JNF Canada and its role in Palestinian dispossession

JNF Canada, established in 1968 as a so-called independent Canadian “charity,” is one of the country’s oldest and most influential Zionist institutions.

With its bogus “charitable” status, the JNF received hundreds of millions of dollars in annual donations from Canadian taxpayers, who were effectively subsidizing its discriminatory land-use policies in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Before the Canadian government’s prohibition of the JNF’s institutional racism, the organization raised approximately $10 million annually in tax-deductible donations, a third of which came from public coffers.

Canada has been directly complicit in Palestinian dispossession on at least three major documented occasions.

In the late 1920s, a JNF representative visited Canada to collect $1 million for the appropriation of Wadi al-Hawarith (or Hefer Plain), a 30,000 dunam (roughly 7,500 acres) stretch of coastal territory located about halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv.

This land had been home to a Bedouin community of 1,000 to 1,200 individuals living there for over 350 years.

Following the June 1967 War, the JNF gathered $15 million to construct Canada Park on illegally occupied land, demolishing three villages – Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalu – to make way for the park. The 5,000 displaced Palestinians were not permitted to return home.

In 2007, JNF Canada initiated a $7 million campaign to renovate the park, erasing most traces of Palestinian history with signs devoted to Canadian donors such as the Metropolitan Toronto Police Department, the City of Ottawa, and former Ontario premier Bill Davis.

In the early 1980s, JNF Canada assisted in financing an Israeli regime project to “Judaize” the Galilee, the largely Arab northern region of occupied territories.

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JNF Canada allocated tens of millions of dollars ($35 million was the overall fundraising goal) to establish 14 Jewish settlements in Galil Canada.

A map displayed by the JNF to nine- and ten-year-olds at Jewish day schools in Toronto encompasses the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza, essentially denying Palestinians the right to a state within even 22 percent of their historical homeland.

This openly Jewish supremacist organization has long received backing from key figures within the Canadian political elite. Former Prime Ministers John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, and Brian Mulroney have all addressed JNF events, and prominent politicians continue to support the organization.

Activism delivers results

For decades, successive Canadian governments shielded the JNF from scrutiny despite the institution’s racist policies that explicitly contravene decades-old Canadian and international law.

A 1998 United Nations Human Rights Council report discovered that the JNF systematically discriminates against Palestinian citizens residing in Israeli-occupied territories (Arab Israelis).

The report highlighted that JNF lands are “chartered to benefit Jews exclusively,” leading to an “institutionalized form of discrimination.”

In 2005, Israel’s High Court reached similar conclusions, determining that the JNF systematically excluded Palestinian citizens of Israeli-occupied territories, representing a fifth of the population, from leasing its property.

The JNF’s parent organization in the occupied territories, the Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (KKL), openly acknowledges its discriminatory practices. Its website notes that a survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70 percent of the Jewish population in occupied territories “opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews.”

Furthermore, JNF’s bylaws and operations breach Canadian policy and law. Housing discrimination is illegal under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and a September 2003 Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) public policy statement emphasizes that racial equality is a primary goal of Canadian charitable policy.

“An organization is not charitable at law if its activities are contrary to Canadian public policy,” explains the CRA.

However, before the recent ruling, the CRA and politicians in Ottawa disregarded calls to investigate the JNF’s violations of Canadian law.

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Internal documents obtained by The Electronic Intifada reveal that in 2010, the CRA was urged to investigate or revoke the JNF’s charitable status, but this request appears to have been ignored.

Ismail Zayid, born in a West Bank village demolished to create the JNF’s Canada Park, had been appealing to the CRA about its charitable status for over 40 years.

Lebanese-Canadian activist Ron Saba had persistently written to various Canadian government departments, officials, corporations, and media outlets, urging them to rescind tax-exempt status and endorsement of the “racist JNF tax fraud.”

At the Green Party convention in 2016, Corey Levine introduced a resolution to revoke the JNF’s charitable status due to its practice of “institutional discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.”

Independent Jewish Voices has also campaigned against the JNF for years.

These efforts brought the issue into the mainstream, though Levine, IJV, and the entire Green Party were smeared as “hard-core Jew haters” for even considering the resolution.

Nevertheless, years of dedicated activism to expose the inherent racism within Zionism and Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession have ultimately proved successful, leading to the revocation of the JNF’s charitable status.

JNF UK, a "charitable" facade with entrenched influence

Despite its clear incongruity with the requirement of promoting social welfare, the British chapter of JNF continues to operate as a so-called “charity” despite documented ties to illegal settlement construction and military activities in Palestine.

JNF UK extends support to several Israeli military academies, including Derech Eretz, Naveh-Otzem, Ein Prat, Or Me’Ophir, Nachshon, Meitarim Lachish, and Hashomer Hachadash.

These institutions offer military training and act as direct gateways to the Israeli army.In 2005, the UK Charity Commission even inspected the JNF UK chapter.

Gary Mond, former senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Honorary Treasurer at the JNF UK, has been linked to online Islamophobic content.

Similarly, JNF UK chair and former Israeli intelligence officer Samuel Hayek has made Islamophobic remarks.

The UK Charity Commission launched an investigation into JNF UK in January 2022 to assess the situation.

However, despite the Charity Commission’s timid attempts, JNF UK continues to function as a settlement-building, militaristic lobby group, backing a hostile foreign power at odds with British interests.

JNF UK’s influence within British society has become increasingly significant, as former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown join the current prime minister and the president of the apartheid Zionist entity as patrons of the organization.

Other campaigns against JNF from UK to US

In England, activists successfully persuaded former prime minister David Cameron to withdraw his patronage from the JNF.

Also, 68 members of the British parliament supported a bill to revoke the organization’s “charitable” status due to its explicitly discriminatory constitution, which prohibits renting, leasing, or selling land and property to non-Jews.

In Scotland, the Green Party and Friends of the Earth have backed the Stop the JNF campaign, while the Green Party of England and Wales has also advocated for the JNF to lose its “charitable” status.

In 2011, renowned American folk singer Pete Seeger distanced himself from a previous JNF event, and a board member of the US organization resigned in protest against the JNF’s involvement in the eviction of a Palestinian family from East al-Quds.

In 2013, Stop The JNF successfully urged the new owners of Reggies, a major South African toy retailer, to sever ties with the settler-colonial organization.

The recent Canadian court ruling marks one of the most significant legal challenges to the JNF’s international operations thus far; this precedent-setting decision could impact other jurisdictions assessing the activities of organizations with charitable status but political agendas, analysts say.

Dozens of other branches of the JNF around the world “are threatened by Canada’s revocation,” according to Engler.

He warned that the JNF “can and will” adapt its fundraising strategies and public outreach in response to increased scrutiny and potential legal challenges in other jurisdictions.

“The Canadian branch has tried to bypass its revocation by holding joint events with another registered charity, Israel Magen, which then offers donors tax receipts,” he told the Press TV website.

However, he added, “a campaign has been launched targeting Israel Magen’s charitable status.”

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