Mazuz versus Herzl

[Violet_Crumble]

By Israel Harel

Hanging on the wall was a box: "This is the sky-blue box (and) every penny inserted in it liberates the soil." This box was in homes, classrooms, youth movement branches, and workplaces - in Israel and the Diaspora. Young and old recited a song, actually a prayer, that said thanks to the pennies placed in those boxes, "we will redeem the nation's soil, from the North to the Negev."

The Jewish National Fund owns 2.5 million dunam (625,000 acres) of land in Israel. They were bought - I must tell you today, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and the justices of the Supreme Court in its capacity as the High Court of Justice - "dunam by dunam, clod by clod" so they would become the "Jewish people's eternal property," in accordance with the principle established by modern Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl, at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. Now, 106 years later, along comes the attorney general of the Jewish state created by Herzl's vision and declares that this era is over. Mazuz instructed the JNF this week, to allocate lands, without discrimination, to Jews and non-Jews alike. The State Prosecutor's Office conveyed the attorney general's instruction to the High Court in response to appeals various organizations submitted in 2004 on behalf of Arabs to whom the JNF had refused to sell lands. The State Prosecutor's Office also instructed the Israel Lands Administration to cancel tenders where one standard condition is that the purchasers must be Jews, since the JNF owns the land.

In 1961, when the JNF's lands were transferred to the ILA's management, not ownership, nobody could have suspected that one day the Jewish state would proclaim the allocation of Jewish-owned land to Jews a discriminatory act. In a covenant signed by former prime minister Levi Eshkol, on Israel's behalf, and Yaacov Tsur, representative of the World Zionist Movement, the JNF's owner, it was stated that Israel would comply with the "JNF's fundamental principle that the lands would remain in the nation's possession." Furthermore, the covenant specified, the "JNF would continue serving as an institution of the Zionist Organization in the Jewish public in Israel and the exile ... for the redemption of land."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/863014.html

[papau]

1. The Palestinians kill any Palestinian who sells land to a Jew - in Israel they write complaints n/t

n/t

[breakaleg]

2. It's about time! I hope this change will actually be implemented on the ground and not just

on paper.

I found this line interesting:

" The instruction to allocate the Jewish people's lands to the very nation competing with it for this country's ownership and sovereignty is part of the general moral degeneration to which we have succumbed in recent years."

Does this mean the author doesn't consider Israeli Arabs a part of Israel? Are they a member of another nation competing against Israel? hmmmm....

[Igel]

3. Try having your mind open to polysemy.

It helps, if you're actually interested in understanding.

It's a blight, if you prefer closed-off indignation.

[breakaleg]

5. I believe I understand his point quite well thanks. nt

[Donald Ian Rankin]

4. I think one part of this is wrong.

I wasn't alive then, but I would hope that if I'd have been alive in 1961 then I'd have been able to predict that racial/religious discrimination in the allocation of land grants would be proclaimed discriminatory.