[Salon] End of JNF Charitable Status is Big Win for Canadian Activists – Little Thanks to the ‘Left’

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End of JNF Charitable Status is Big Win for Canadian Activists – Little Thanks to the ‘Left’

While most “left-wing” historic enablers of the JNF would likely claim ignorance of JNF racism and colonialism, it isn’t convincing.

August 15, 2024

Canadian Social Democratic Leader Jagmeet Singh. (Photo: OFL Communications Department, via Wikimedia Commons)

By Yves Engler

Historic. Maybe the biggest victory for Palestinian solidarity activists in Canadian history.

The Jewish National Fund of Canada losing its charitable status is a blow to Israel, Zionist groups, and Canada’s establishment.

But the grassroots win should embarrass much of the mainstream self-described “left”.

In response to the Canada Revenue Agency revoking the openly racist JNF’s charitable status, NDP revenue critic Niki Ashton emailed her list a fundraising appeal highlighting her recent role in challenging charities funding the Israeli military and West Bank colonies.

She also re-tweeted a member of Independent Jewish Voices applauding the revocation and the union representing 17,000 CRA staff endorsing the JNF revocation. While Ashton and others in the NDP have offered the anti-JNF campaign some support in recent years, historically NDP officials have promoted this lynchpin of Zionist colonialism.

In 2016 then NDP foreign affairs critic Hélène Laverdière participated in a JNF tree planting ceremony in Jerusalem. During a visit to Israel with Canada’s Governor General Laverdière he attended a ceremony with JNF World Chairman Danny Atar. A year earlier NDP MP Pat Martin spoke at a JNF event hosted by the prime minister’s wife, Laureen Harper, at 24 Sussex Drive. It was organized to “recognize and thank the people that have helped to make JNF Canada what it is today.”

Last year Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles hosted a meeting partly organized by Noah Tepperman, a long-time director of Windsor’s JNF branch and NDP activist in that city. In 2015 then Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath published an ad in a JNF Hamilton handbook and offered words of encouragement to its fundraiser while Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter planted a tree at a JNF garden in 2011.

Manitoba NDP Premier Gary Doer was honored at a 2006 JNF Negev Dinner in Winnipeg and cabinet minister Christine Melnick received the same honor in 2011. During a 2010 trip to Israel subsequent Manitoba NDP Premier Greg Selinger signed an accord with the JNF to jointly develop two bird conservation sites while water stewardship minister Melnick spoke at the opening ceremony for a park built in Jaffa by the JNF, Tel Aviv Foundation and Manitoba-Israel Shared Values Roundtable. (In 2017 Melnick won a B’nai Brith Zionist action figures prize for writing an article about a friend who helped conquer East Jerusalem and then later joined the JNF).

It’s not only the NDP that was historically cozy with this organization that has finally lost its “charitable” status. In 2013 Green Party leader Elizabeth May attended a JNF Ottawa fundraiser, which dozens of us protested. Erasing the existence of the indigenous Palestinians, May lauded “the great work that’s [the JNF] done in making the desert bloom.”

In 2016 May successfully diluted a party resolution — strongly endorsed by members in an online poll prior to the convention — calling for the JNF’s charitable status to be revoked.

The union movement has also had ties to an institution ‘Judaizing’ historically Arab areas. In 2000 JNF Hamilton dedicated its Negev Dinner to Enrico and Joe Mancinelli from the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).

“They have a longstanding relationship with and support for the state of Israel,” explained JNF Hamilton chairperson Tom Weisz. In recent years JNF Hamilton fundraisers have taken place at the union-owned LIUNA Station banquet hall and in April LIUNA communications director Victoria Mancinelli, whose father and grandfather were past honourees, interviewed Noa Tishby during the JNF gala.

When I was pushed out of my job at Unifor – just after the 2013 merger between the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union and Canadian Auto Workers – the new head of research cited an article (among others written on my own time) I penned critical of the JNF.

While most “left-wing” historic enablers of the JNF would likely claim ignorance of JNF racism and colonialism, it isn’t convincing. Over the past two decades, there have been dozens of rallies against JNF galas and many email campaigns and articles.

Born in a West Bank village demolished to make way for the JNF’s Canada Park, Halifax professor Ismail Zayid has been complaining to the CRA about its charitable status for four decades. Partly due to his activism, CBC’s Fifth Estate did a powerful 1991 documentary entitled “A Park with no Peace: Canada Park”.

A 2007 Montreal Planet report was headlined “The JNF Tax Fraud: 1967-2007. Forty Years of Canadian government complicity in the financing of JNF’s racism and Israeli apartheid.” It was published by Lebanese Canadian Ron Saba who recently re-sent me a 2007 Canadian Jewish News article headlined “Human rights complaint accuses JNF of racism”.

It notes that Saba “filed a complaint concerning the JNF with the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC). Saba filed the complaint against the ‘Government of Canada for violating the Canadian Human Rights Act and Canada Revenue Agency Policy Statement CPS-021 by subsidizing racial discrimination through granting and maintaining charitable status for the Jewish National Fund.’ … Joe Rabinovitch, executive vice-president of JNF Canada, said that, unfortunately, these kinds of complaints are not uncommon. ‘I’ve seen this 100 times in 100 different ways,’ Rabinovitch said. ‘Every year, without fail, we get two or three of these [complaints], and they also send them out to every MP in Canada.’”

Accomplished with little assistance from the institutional left, the JNF tax deduction revocation is a genuine grassroots victory. It’s the culmination of decades of rallies at JNF galas, countless email campaigns, substantial educational work and formal complaints to the CRA about the JNF. (I’m proud to say that over the past fifteen years I’ve published 20 articles on the JNF and dozens on other Israel-focused charities.)

Broader Palestine activism likely also contributed to the revocation. Many Charities Directorate staff probably attended the University of Ottawa and Carleton, which have had active Palestine solidarity movements over the past two decades. Exposed to the issue at university, many are likely horrified by Israel’s recent violence while simultaneously emboldened to uphold charity law by the popular uprising against genocide.

The August 10 Canada Gazette formally revoking the JNF and Israel-focused Ne’eman Foundation’s charitable status is an important step in disrupting Canada’s most significant contribution to Palestinian dispossession. But our work is not done. Dozens of other registered charities are violating CRA rules by assisting colonies in the West Bank, racist organizations, and the Israeli military. Their charitable status should also be revoked while new laws are crafted to ensure taxpayers aren’t subsidizing hundreds of groups assisting a wealthy, apartheid state, committing a holocaust in Gaza.

As NDP revenue critic Niki Ashton recently put it, “not one cent of Canadian tax dollars should be funding genocide.”

 – Yves Engler is the author of Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and a number of other books. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Visit his website: yvesengler.com.