9/9SF Protest Of Lantos&Jewish National Fund

Call to Demonstrate Against

ISRAEL\'S JEWISH NATIONAL FUND\'S APARTHEID POLICIES!
&
REP. TOM LANTOS\' COMPLICITY IN CRIMES AGAINST
THE IRAQI AND PALESTINIAN PEOPLES!

6 PM SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2001
Fairmont Hotel, California & Mason, San Francisco

Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos is being honored by the JNF on September 9 for his active support of Israel\'s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and his effort to institute sanctions against the Palestinian National Authority.
The Jewish National Fund, which describes itself on its website as \"the caretaker of Israel,\" has been a primary instrument in removing the indigenous Arab population from Palestine. Founded in Switzerland in 1901, its initial role was the purchase of land from Arab landowners that were living outside of the country.
With the declaration of Israeli statehood in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee from their homes and villages, the first act of \"ethnic cleansing\" following the end of World War Two. What others saw as a human tragedy, Yosef Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund at the time, saw as an opportunity.
Weitz a former director of the JNF wrote in his diary on January 26, 1949: \"I marked on my map land areas of one [Palestinian] village after another and I should like to swallow it all.\" According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, he succeeded. \"Weitz allocated a special budget for the \'amelioration\' of the abandoned villages; bulldozing the ruins and covering them up so that all traces of the Arab presence were erased.\" (The Birth Of Israel, Myths And Realities, Pantheon, 1989, P.96) Three hundred and ninety two villages in what was Palestine were wiped from the map.
Following Israel\'s declaration of statehood, the JNF established regulations prohibiting land from being sold, leased or rented to non-Jews. As a result, 93% of the land within Israel\'s present borders is restricted to Jews only, effectively confining Israel\'s Arabs who represents 20% of Israel\'s total population to a ever diminishing portion of the Galilee.
Now illegal, such racist discrimination was once prevalent in the United States where it was called a \"restricted covenant.\" Its targets, ironically, were Jews as well as African- Americans, Latinos, Asians and other people of color. Despite its overtly racist, apartheid agenda, the Jewish National Fund has been allowed to function in the US as a tax- exempt non-profit corporation. Up to now, it has attracted little attention from politicians or human rights activists, posing as an environmental organization raising money to plant trees in Israel, even as Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers destroy ancient Palestinian olive groves in the Occupied West Bank. That situation, we are hoping to change, beginning with our picket line.
Rep. Tom Lentos, has been an egregious offender in the area of human rights, which is ironic since he is co-chair of the House Human Rights Caucus. He is being honored, apparently, for his efforts to withhold funds from the Palestinians suffering under an Israeli occupation that has been described by UN Human Rights Chair Mary Robinson as a \"travesty,\" and for his efforts to maintain the catastrophic sanctions against Iraq.
He is particularly complicit with regard to Iraq, having orchestrated through rigged hearings, the needed support in Congress for the Iraq war. During the buildup before what was to be a close vote to begin the bombing, Lantos convened hearings on what Iraq was doing in Kuwait. He brought forth an alleged \"nurse\" who testified that she had personally seen Iraqi soldiers pull incubator tubes from babies in a Kuwaiti hospital in order to take the incubator machines to Iraq.

The \"nurse\" was, in fact, the Kuwaiti ambassador\'s daughter and the story was revealed in the NY Times to have been a complete fabrication. Lantos was probably aware of this fact as it was Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm on the Kuwait government payroll that came up with the idea. And it was the same firm that provided Lantos at the time with free rental space for his \"Congressional Human Rights Foundation.\"

Not content with having deceived the public as well as Congress, Lantos has led the fight in Washington to maintain the embargo of food and medical supplies and equipment for 11 years that has caused a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions in Iraq, resulting in the death of over one million of its people, including a half million infants less than 5 years of age. At one of his community meetings, he justified the deaths of those children by arguing that Roosevelt and Churchill bombed children in Germany in order to win the Second World War.

AD HOC COMMITTEE TO END ISRAELI APARTHEID
ENDORSERS: Al-Awa-SF, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, SF, Bay Area Coalition to End the Sanctions On Iraq, International Action Center, International Socialist Organization, L.A.G.A.I. (Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention), Middle East Children\'s Alliance, Q.U.I.T. (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism), Bay Area Workers Democracy Network, Women In Black-San Francisco, Students For Justice In Palestine,Jews for Divestment from Israel

Ad Hoc Committee To End Israeli Apartheid
For further Information email united [at] labornet.org

To Add Your Endorsement Please Contact Us
Please Bring Your Banners and Signs



APARTHEID IS ALIVE AND WELL IN ISRAEL!

Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories and within Israel permit unequal treatment of Palestinians and deny them basic rights that Israelis enjoy. Home demolitions and restrictions on land ownership are geared toward removing the indigenous Palestinian population from the area. Humanitarians throughout the world, including many Israeli organizations and the UN Conference on Racism, have condemned Israel\'s brand of racism.

*Almost a million Palestinians were expelled from Israel in 1948, their land expropriated and homes destroyed. The claims of those deported have not been resolved.
*Through policies of deportation and expropriation, the Jewish population grained control of 93% of all the land in Israel, which was put under state control. That land was then transferred to the Jewish National Fund and other quasi-governmental agencies and is only available to Jewish Israelis.
*Palestinians living in East Jerusalem are subject to restrictions on construction and zoning, and can lose their residency rights if they live abroad for more than 7 years- even if they were forcibly deported.
*Jews outside of Israel- even if they have no ties to Israel- can seek citizenship under the \"Law of Return\" while indigenous non-Jews have no such rights.
*Restrictions on building and zoning confine Palestinians to specific, underdeveloped areas.
*Israel allows discrimination in land ownership, leasing and residency- For example, 60% of East Jerusalem is inaccessible to Palestinians under Israeli zoning and building restrictions.
*Marriage is religious only. There is no civil marriage in Israel, consequently mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews are not possible.
*Civilians are subject to military attacks and imprisonment.
*Many government benefits and resources are conditional upon military service, which Palestinians are automatically exempt from.
*As a Jewish state, non Jews and non-religious face discrimination.
*Unrecognized Palestinian villages are denied services such as water, education and health care.
*Discriminatory educational and employment opportunities are the realities for the Arab population.
*Racial profiling by Israeli security forces is a common daily practice.

How the Jewish National Fund Supports Apartheid in Israel:
The JNF fulfills its mission of exclusion and discrimination with the tacit approval of the US Government, which has granted it tax-exempt, non-profit status, and the support of politicians including Diane Feinstein, Willie Brown, and this year\'s JNF honoree Tom Lantos.
-----------Background Information
New York Times OP-ED, Monday, January 6, 1992, p. A17.

Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?

By John R. MacArthur

In his urgent arguments during the fall and winter of 1990 for military action against Saddam Hussein, President Bush made much of the Iraqi leader\'s cruelty toward the Kuwaiti people. Mr. Bush\'s allegations of atrocities by Iraqi forces generally went unchallenged. Mr. Hussein?s violent disposal of dissident Iraqis was a matter of record, so few politicians, journalists or human rights investigators were prepared to question the President\'s campaign to paint his opponent as Adolf Hitler reborn.

Some claims were no doubt true, but the most sensational one \"that Iraqi soldiers removed hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on hospital floors\" was shown to be almost certainly false by an ABC reporter, John Marti, in March 1991, after the liberation of Kuwait. He interviewed hospital doctors who stayed in Kuwait throughout the occupation.

But, before the war, the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action. Amnesty International believed the tale, and its ill-considered validation of the charges likely influenced the seven Senators who cited the story in speeches backing the Jan. 12 resolution authorizing war. Since the resolution passed the Senate by only six votes, the question of how the incubator story escaped scrutiny \"when it really mattered \" is all the more important. (Amnesty International later retracted its support of the story.)

A little reportorial investigation would have done a great service to the democratic process. Americans would have been interested to know the identity of \"Nayirah,\" the 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Oct. 19, 1990, when she tearfully asserted that she had watched 15 infants being taken from incubators in al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers who \"left the babies on the cold floor to die.\" The chairmen of the Congressional group, Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Edward Porter, an Illinois Republican, explained that Nayirah\'s identity would be kept secret to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.

There was a better reason to protect her from exposure: Nayirah, her real name, is the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah. Such a pertinent fact might have led to impertinent demands for proof of Nayirah\'s whereabouts in August and September of 1990, when she said she witnessed the atrocities, as well as corroboration of her charges. The Kuwaiti Embassy has rebuffed my efforts to interview Nayirah.

Today, we are left to ask why Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed such glaring omissions. What made Nayirah so believable that no one on the caucus staff bothered to check out her story?

One explanation might lie in how Nayirah came to the Congressmen\'s attention. Both Congressmen have a close relationship with Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti-financed group that lobbied Congress for military intervention. A Hill and Knowlton vice president, Gary Hymel, helped organize the Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing in meetings with Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter and the chairman of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem. Mr. Hymel presented the witnesses, including Nayirah. (He later told me he knew who she was at the time.)

Until he started working on the Kuwait account, Mr. Hymel was best known to the caucus for defending the human rights record of Turkey, a Hill and Knowlton client criticized for jailing people without due process and torturing and killing them. He is also one of the firm\'s lobbyists for the Indonesian Government, which has killed at least 100,000 inhabitants of East Timor since 1975.

Mr. Lantos\'s spokesman says that Hill and Knowlton\'s client list doesn\'t concern the Congressman, who accepted a $500 contribution from the firm\'s political action committee in 1988. In fact, Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a group they founded in 1985, to be housed in Hill and Knowlton\'s Washington headquarters. The firm provides a contribution to the foundation in the form of a $3,000 annual rent reduction, and the Hill and Knowlton switchboard delivers messages to the foundation\'s executive director, David Phillips.

Hill and Knowlton\'s client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, donated $50,000 to the foundation, sometime after Iraq\'s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. (The foundation\'s main supporter is the U.S. Government-financed National Endowment for Democracy.)

Since the gulf war, Hill and Knowlton\'s collaboration with the Lantos-Porter human rights enterprise has been strengthened by the naming of the firm\'s vice chairman, Frank Mankiewicz, to the foundation\'s board in October 1991. Perhaps the Congressmen and directors were impressed by the recent addition of China to Hill and Knowlton\'s prestigious portfolio of clients. (The firm\'s clients, Indonesia and Turkey, were notably absent from the foundation?s 1990-91 list of human rights \"activities.\")

Congress and the news media deserve censure for their lack of skepticism about the incubator story. As for Representatives Lantos and Porter, they deserve a medal from the Emir for their work on behalf of the Kuwaiti cause. But their special relationship with Hill and Knowlton should prompt a Congressional investigation to find out if their actions merely constituted an obvious conflict of interest or, worse, if they knew who the tearful Nayirah really was in October 1990.




The Role Of The Jewish National Fund

Edited By Assaf Adiv
asafadiv [at] netvision.net.il

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is one of the most important tools of the process by which Arab lands have been robbed from the local Arab farmers. Previous to the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948 it was using all its financial means to purchase lands and to get the tenants out of it by force - usually these were poor farmers who lived on land that belonged to a Feudal Lord in Haifa, Jerusalem or Beirut for
hundreds of years. With the establishment of the state, the Jewish settlement project swung
into full gear, with a mission to de-Arabise the country, accompanied by a drive to control Palestinian-Arab land. Prior to 1948, only about 7-8 percent of the country was in Jewish hands, and about 10 percent were vested with the representative of the British Mandate. The Israeli
State, however, quickly increased its land holdings, and it currently owns 93 percent of the state area (within the Green Line). The lion\'s share of this
Land transfer was based on expropriation of Palestinian refugee property, but even about two thirds of the land belonging to Palestinians who remained as Israeli citizens were expropriated. At present, Palestinian-Arabs, who constitute around 20% of Israel\'s
population, own only around three percent of its land.
In 1960 Israel established the \"Israel Land Administration\" (ILA) - and this body was granted all authorities to deal with State or Public owned lands i.e. Jewish owned lands (as all Arab collective lands were confiscated). Since 1960 the ILA as the official body that represents the policies of Israel control and deals with 93% of the lands of Israel (app. 20 millions dunums