The Jewish National Fund of Canada (JNF Canada) plans to hold its annual Negev Gala fundraising dinner on November 13th in Ottawa. It will honour Ontario Conservative MPP Lisa Macleod as guest speaker. The Negev dinner has a dark connection to past ethnic cleansing and and current genocide in Gaza. Read more…..

What is the Negev, and why is Israel celebrating it? JNF (Canada) has been holding “Negev dinners” across Canada for many years, often inviting high profile politicians like Stephen Harper and John Baird. The dinners celebrate Israel’s conquering of the southern half of Israel,called the “Negev”, ridding it of almost all of its Palestinian residents in a massive ethnic cleansing exercise.

At the time Israel was created in 1948, about 65,000 to 100,000 Palestinian Bedouins were the only inhabitants in the Negev, a semi-arid and mostly desert area. A few lived in large communities like al-Majdal (present-day Ashkelon) where rainfall was greater. But most were pastoral farmers and shepherds, tending their sheep and goats and carefully eking a living out of the dry landscape. In addition, a small number were traditional nomads, making a living by carrying goods across the desert.

While lightly inhabited and mostly desert, the Negev was of great strategic importance to the new State of Israel for four main reasons:

1. It had long, hard to control, borders with Egypt and Jordan
2. It kept Egypt and Jordan, two countries hostile to the creation of a Jewish State, separated.
3. It was inhabited almost exclusively by Palestinian Bedouin Arabs. In 1948 there were virtually no Jews living in what is now half of Israel, so the claim of Israeli ownership was weak.
4. It gave Israel access to the Red Sea with its port at Eilat (where it now has a submarine base.
5. (NOTE: It is now also important strategically for its several air bases and the Dimona nuclear facility.)

Ethnic cleansing, expulsion and escape to Gaza

The new State of Israel immediately began “Judaizing” the Negev, (the official term) by confiscating lands, expelling Arab Bedouins from their dwellings and encouraging colonisation of the area by Jews. They created new militarized Jewish settlements, including the town of Sderot, build on the remains of the previous Palestinian village named Najd. (In Sderot, today there is a park named after former Conservative politician John Baird.)

Many of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Negev escaped to Gaza, while others fled to Jordan or the West Bank.

The expulsion was brutal. Many died. Salman Abu Sitta, born into a prominent Bedouin Palestinian family, was just ten years old when he and his family were forced to flee their home near Beersheba in 1948. They found refuge in Gaza along with thousands of others.

As for many Palestinians of his generation, the profound effects of that traumatic loss would form the defining feature of his life from that moment on.

In his memoir ‘Mapping my return” Abu Sitta describes the brave but losing struggle by Palestinian Bedouins to keep control of their land in the face of well armed and well trained European Jewish forces (“English, French, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian…”)  determined to drive them out. Its account of the savage brutality of these Zionist militias is difficult to comprehend, but entirely consistent with the actions of today’s Israel toward the Palestinians still penned into what became the Gaza strip.

The JNF Canada Negev Dinner celebrates Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the southern half of Israel.

The Canada Revenue Agency has recently revoked JNF Canada’s charitable status. The whole JNF “Negev dinner” should be cancelled as well. The dinner is a fundraiser named for the historic Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Negev. The descendants of many of those Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 are now subjected to ongoing Israeli genocide, according to the International Court of Justice.

CTIP readers might want to contact their local federal, provincial and municipal officials to urge them to decline any invitation to this or any event aimed at celebrating ethnic cleansing and fundraising for Israel in the midst of its murderous attack on Palestinians.

Canada Talks Israel Palestine (CTIP) is the weekly newsletter of Peter Larson, Chair of the Ottawa Forum on Israel/Palestine (OFIP). It aims to promote a serious discussion in Canada about Canada’s response to the complicated and emotional Israel/Palestine issue with a focus on the truth, clear analysis and human rights for all. Readers with different points of view are invited to make comment.
Want to learn more about us? Go to Ottawa Forum on Israel/Palestine.ca