“The complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer.”

–Jewish National Fund director Yosef Weitz, March 20, 1941

“The Jewish National Fund is the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners – Jewish people everywhere.”

–Jewish National Fund mission statement

The first of 21 pogroms against Al Arakib, courtesy of the Jewish National Fund (photo by Active Stills)

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Land Day massacre by Israeli soldiers of unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel demonstrating against the expropriation of their farmland in the Galilee and the expansion of Jews-only settlements around their villages. According to Hatim Khanaaneh, a renowned doctor and activist whose memoir, “A Doctor In Galilee” is the best first hand account I have read of official Israeli discrimination against its Palestinian citizens, soldiers from the Golani Brigade celebrated the massacre in a nearby Jewish moshav by dancing and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.” The Land Day massacre electrified the Palestinian national movement inside Israel and popularized Toufiq Ziad’s poem, “Ounadikom” (I call out to you), an enduring cry of anti-colonial resistance that was recited this January in Cairo’s Tahrir Square by Waseem Wagdi.

On this year’s Land Day, the Jewish National Fund distributed a series of hysterical fundraising appeals and press releases that highlighted the organization’s sense of desperation. The letters are full of schnorring and devoid of content, as the JNF has no response to the factual arguments of its critics or to the reports of its recent abuses in the Negev. Instead, the organization has called for a “Stop the Hatred Day” and concocted a new slogan: “They destroy, we build.” Of course, anyone who is familiar with Al Arakib knows that it is the JNF that destroys and the indigenous Bedouins who rebuild.

Since it was founded in 1901, the JNF has been at the forefront of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. And now the group’s machinations are being exposed and countered through an effective, non-violent campaign based on a simple appeal to human dignity, international law and basic rights. It is no wonder its leadership is so defensive and desperate.

The excellent Israeli documentary “The Diaries of Yosef Nachmani” used the memoirs of one of the JNF’s top officials to expose the organization’s role in forcing Palestinian farmers off their own land, often through trickery and manipulation. JNF director Yosef Weitz was instrumental in hatching Plan Dalet, the campaign to ethnically cleanse at least 400 Palestinian villages and expel their residents in 1947 and 1948. After the war of 1948, Weitz orchestrated the planting of hundreds of thousands of non-native trees west of Jerusalem to cover up the scores of villages that had just been ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias. Today those trees look as natural to the landscape of the Judean Hills as the hair plugs on Joe Biden’s scalp.

The Land Day protests were sparked by the Israeli government’s “Judaization” of the Galilee, a plan that led to mass expropriations by the Israel Land Authority (ILA). Through a 1960 law, ILA was required to allocate half of the seats in its council to the JNF. A law the following year clearly stated the JNF existed “for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands and properties.” In other words, the JNF openly discriminated on the basis of ethnicity. Having acquired 70 percent of its land through confiscations from Palestinian refugees and present absentees through the Absentee Property Law of 1950, the JNF became a key mechanism for expropriation and ethnic cleansing under the guise of developing Israel for its Jewish citizens.

The 1995 Supreme Court Ka’adan ruling forbade the ILA from leasing land exclusively through the JNF. The court made its ruling on the grounds that the JNF openly discriminates against non-Jews. However, a Knesset vote in 2007 undermined the ruling, prompting the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to editorialize: “The Jewish National Fund’s land policy counters the interests of the state and cannot discriminate by law against the minority living in Israel.” (The title of the editorial was, “A Racist and Jewish State.”)

Today, though the ILA is able to sell some of its land to private developers, the JNF still controls 6 of 13 seats on the ILA’s council while maintaining numerous arrangements for land swaps with the state. With the ILA in possession of 93 percent of Israel’s land, the JNF remains in a prime position to dictate how the Galilee and Negev are “Judaized.” But as Alaa Mahajneh of the Palestinian-Israeli legal rights center Adalah points out, the increasingly complex arrangements make legislating equality from within the Israeli legal system even more difficult.

In recent years, the JNF has focused its efforts on an area in the Negev known as Al Arakib. It is the ancestral home of the Al Touri Bedouin tribe. In 1951, the Bedouins were removed from their land by the Israeli army, which told them they could return once it completed a series of training exercises. Years passed until the tribe came back, but by then they were considered “present absentees” thanks to the aforementioned Absentee Property Law. This meant that they were internal refugees with no rights to their own land, even if they had property deeds. Their land had been transfered into the hands of the Development Authority, the custodian for confiscated land at the time, and then handed over to the ILA, which eventually authorized the JNF to do what it does best: ethnic cleansing.

Nuri El Okbi, a veteran Bedouin rights activist from Al Arakib, attempted to move back to his family’s property, where the ruins of his father’s house lay. Not only did El Okbi have land deeds his parents had saved in a halvah box to prove their right to the land, he had aerial photos dating from 1947 that clearly showed his family’s home and fields. Each time he encamped there, however, Israeli police officers removed him by force. After the 40th attempt to return, El-Okbi received a restraining order forbidding him from setting foot on the land he spent his childhood. He can not return because he is not a Jew. In other countries during other times, this was considered apartheid.

Since the JNF has set its sights on Al Arakib, the village has been destroyed 21 times. Israeli police have used rubber bullets, percussion grenades, teargas, batons and bulldozers against women, children, and the elderly — all unarmed — in their effort to remove the Bedouin un-people from the area so the JNF can go to work. During the first destruction of Al Arakib, a squad of Israeli high school age students were hired to remove belongings from the homes of Al Arakib residents — the “Summer Camp of Destruction.” The students vandalized homes in the process and reportedly belted out the familiar “Am Yisrael Chai!” when the bulldozers moved in. ILA bulldozers accompanied by riot police have attempted to destroy and desecrate the Al Arakib cemetary, which contains graves more than a century old. And recently, the Israel State’s Attorney Office has announced plans to sue the residents of Al Arakib for $1 million shekels for the demolition of their own homes.

To complete its project in and around Al Arakib, the JNF has accepted millions of dollars in funding from a racist and anti-Semitic evangelical broadcasting network, GOD TV, that openly propagates End Times theology demanding that all Jews to convert to Christianity or suffer in an “everlasting lake of fire.” With the JNF’s help, GOD TV’s huckstering CEO Rory Alec will be able to fulfill his mission of “redeeming the land for Christ” by building “GOD TV Forest” on the ruins of Al Arakib. Meanwhile, Alec has lavished money on Givot Bar, a Jewish town in the area that is likely to benefit from the newly approved Communities Acceptance Law allowing small communities to openly discriminate against applicants on the basis of ethnicity and sexual orientation (and it is unlikely that blue collar Mizrahi Jews will be able to afford the 5000 Shekel application fee Givot Bar requires).

Recently, the Australian television news show Dateline produced an excellent report on Al Arakib. Dateline told the story of El Okbi, comparing him to the Australian aboriginal rights advocate Eddie Mabo, who won a landmark court case eliminating the white colonists’ legal fiction of Terra Nullius, a concept that still forms the basis of Israeli land confiscations.

Dateline then interviewed Shlomo Szizar, an official from the JNF’s bureaucratic parent, the ILA. In three lines, Siza summarized the logic of the JNF and the Zionist movement that brought it into being: “Every year, [the Bedouins] invade and we remove them. They invade and we remove them. We’re not going to let this land be invaded.”

Having turned the indigenous people of Palestine into “invaders” in their own land, the JNF’s leadership insists that their intentions are good. “I can tell you one simple thing,” JNF CEO Russell Robinson wrote in a March 28 email newsletter. “No other organization is doing anywhere near as much as JNF is to help enhance the quality of life for this [Bedouin] population.”

Go here and here to take action to stop the JNF.

How did a racist, conspiratorial crank become the GOP's anti-Obama point man?

These are good times for Jerome Corsi. Already notorious for his factually challenged book-length takedown of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Unfit For Command, the 61-year-old Corsi has another hit on his hands. His new book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality has made Corsi a hot commodity again on the right-wing radio circuit, the bane of the Obama campaign and catapulted to the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list. With his newfound notoriety, Corsi has brought his pathographic anti-Obama narrative to hundreds of thousands of readers–and millions on radio and TV–just as he did with Kerry. Corsi has become the court bard of the conservative movement. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Corsi told the New York Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Corsi’s success represents the apotheosis of a long, strange trip from the furthest shores of the right into the national spotlight. During George W. Bush’s first term, Corsi was a little-known financial services marketing specialist. In 1995, according to the Boston Globe, he coaxed twenty people into a shadowy investment venture in Poland that ultimately lost them a total of $1.2 million. “It ruined my career in the brokerage business, and it was a sad story for a lot of people,” said Bradley Amundson, one of those enlisted into Corsi’s bungled scheme. The FBI opened an investigation but never filed any charges.

Corsi had dabbled off-and-on the fringes of conservative backlash politics for nearly three decades. In his spare time, which he appeared to have lots of, Corsi busied himself at his computer, firing off opinions on the far-right website Free Republic, marked by their sexual and racial obsessions.

In a comment typical of the dozens he posted under the handle “jrlc,” Corsi wrote, “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” In another, he ranted, “Isn’t the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA–oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon’s [sic] first act in office was to promote ‘gays in the military.’ RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters–it all goes together.”

Then he composed Unfit For Command, suddenly vaulting into best-sellerdom. Surrounded by the media buzz of talk radio and Fox News, Corsi no longer plied the seamy troll-zones of the right-wing blogosphere. Overnight, he had become a conservative folk hero. But as Bush’s popularity waned during his second term, Corsi’s star dimmed. He tried to reignite it by co-authoring a book with “prophecy expert” Michael Evans, Showdown with Nuclear Iran, calling on the United States and Israel to attack Iran “before it’s too late,” and another, Black Gold Stranglehold, claiming to expose the Big Lie that will “enslave” Americans: “the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource.” Corsi’s conspiracy theories consolidated his cult status, but he did not revive the brightness of his Swiftboating campaign. As another presidential election approached, however, Corsi followed his well-trod path back to renown.

In early 2007, Corsi huddled with an old friend, Howard Phillips, a veteran conservative operative who had attempted to organize the anti-government militia movement into a cohesive political bloc during the 1990s. Corsi emerged from their discussion convinced of his destiny. He would declare his campaign for the presidential nomination of the ultra-right Constitution Party, enthusiastically embrace the party’s call for a complete halt on immigration, banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and upholding its official platform that the “US Constitution established a Republic under God, rather than a democracy.” With this momentous announcement, Corsi hoped to cast himself as the last, best hope to save America from the godless, globalist duocracy conspiring to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada into a “North American Union.” (His latest flop, published in 2007, was a screed entitled, The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.)

In July 2007, Corsi spoke before the Texas Constitution Party. At the time, he remained focused on foiling the ambitions of Hillary and Bill Clinton. “I don’t want Bill Clinton anywhere near the White House,” Corsi proclaimed. “We had enough serial rape going on when he was president.” But Corsi didn’t want a Republican in the White House either, especially not Senator John McCain. The war-scarred McCain, Corsi wrote in a column for the far-right webzine WorldNetDaily, is a possible jihadist dupe who “has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs…a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda.” Even George W. Bush was now treasonous. “Bush,” he told the Texas Constitution Party, “is post-America and post-God,” a figure so indebted to foreign interests that he had allowed “communist China” to “run its gunboats up the Mississippi.” In Corsi’s mind, both parties were fronts for the money-masters, the Trilateralists, the plotters of Bohemian Grove–the “elitists who want to destroy the nation-state.”

“They don’t want to offend anybody. They don’t want to offend Mexico. They don’t want to offend God,” he railed, accidentally inverting what he meant to say. “They take God out of my money. I think we ought to offend Mexico! I think we ought to offend the sexual abusers! I think we ought to respect God.”

Corsi’s audience went wild with applause, cheering almost as loudly as they did when he recounted a self-congratulatory tale of hanging up on a telemarketer because he was from India. Despite the mounting enthusiasm for his candidacy, Corsi unaccountably withdrew from the race just days after his Texas address. He promptly endorsed Chuck Baldwin, a theocratic Baptist pastor who had left the Republican Party in 2000 to protest what he viewed as Bush’s extreme liberalism. Bush, according to Baldwin, was “in bed with homosexuals” (or “sodomites” as he likes to call them) and had gone soft on abortion providers, whom Baldwin believed should be marched en masse to the gallows.

“Chuck [Baldwin], I know personally. He’s a man of God,” Corsi told the Constitution Party’s national convention in May. “He believes in the Constitution and he believes in the United States of America.”

Baldwin also believes that “moneychangers” of a certain Chosen People are “Destroying America–and Christians Don’t See It.” That is the title of a commentary he wrote in February of 2008. In it, he wrote: “The moneychangers of Jesus’ day were the equivalent of the international bankers of our day. With the consent and approbation of the Jewish leaders, these bankers set up shop in the Temple. Their purpose was to exchange whatever currency the Jewish worshipper brought with him or her into Jewish currency, which would then be used to purchase whatever sacrifice the worshipper required.” For proof, Baldwin cited the investigations of his associate, “Dr. Jerry Corsi,” who had bravely “exposed the moneychangers who are the driving force behind the burgeoning North American Union.”

Backed by Corsi, Baldwin seized the Constitution Party’s nomination this May. Then he unfurled a bold new agenda, calling for “an independent investigative committee to analyze” whether the attacks of 9/11 were an inside government job. Corsi, for his part, shared Baldwin’s skepticism. “The government’s explanation of the jet fuel fire is not a sufficient explanation,” Corsi said in January on the radio show hosted by Alex Jones, a fellow Baldwin supporter who promotes himself as “the grandfather of what has come to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.”

“With people like you starting to question 9/11 with the science,” Jones marveled, “boy that’s really gonna…”

“That’s what rattles the cage,” said Corsi in a self-satisfied tone.

In late 2007, with Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Corsi gleaned a new opportunity to “rattle the cage.” He punched out a proposal for an anti-Obama attack book,Obama Nation, and floated it to right-wing publishers. Mary Matalin, the longtime Republican consultant and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was hunting for titles for her two-year-old publishing imprint, Threshold, a conservative division of Simon and Schuster. When Corsi’s proposal landed on her desk, she was thrilled.

Matalin promptly signed Corsi to a lucrative deal, positioning Obama Nation as Threshold’s premier release of the summer season. In anticipation of heavy sales, Matalin ordered the printing of 475,000 copies. When the book was released in early August, conservative foundations and think tanks ensured its early success with a massive bulk buy, propelling it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Like Unfit For Command, which wrongly claimed that Kerry had falsified combat reports in order to earn medals in Vietnam, Obama Nation was larded with crackpot smears cobbled together from assorted right-wing blog posts. Corsi asserted, for example, that Obama had “extensive connections to Islam,” that he may have snorted cocaine in the Senate, and that he has staffed his campaign with card-carrying communists (including the former youth politics reporter at The Nation, Sam Graham-Felsen, an official Obama blogger and self-described progressive Democrat).

But even as Media Matters for America documented an extensive litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations in Obama Nation, and a nearly unanimous chorus of reviewers panned the book–”poisonous crap,” according to Time columnist Joe Klein–the Obama campaign could not afford to repeat Kerry’s fatal mistake of ignoring Corsi and leaving the debunking to the press. On August 14, the Obama campaign released a forty-one-page “investigative report on the lies in Jerome Corsi’s Obama Nation, entitled, Unfit For Publication. While the booklet systematically undermined the credibility of Corsi’s writing, it also underlined the pivotal role Corsi played in the Republican attack machine.

Thrown on the defensive by the revelation of Corsi’s myriad factual errors, Matalin rushed to her author’s defense. Obama Nation, she told the New York Times, “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be a political book. Instead, it is “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” Following Matalin’s lead, the conservative movement rallied to Corsi’s side. Rush Limbaugh hailedObama Nation as a “pretty damn good” book; Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted Corsi twice on his top-rated Hannity and Colmes, asking him during his second appearance whether Obama was ever a drug dealer. Meanwhile, the National Review’s Mark Levin assailed the media for “wanting to know about anything [Corsi] has ever said or written and his associations.” Even John McCain refused to condemn Corsi’s work. When asked by a reporter about Obama Nation, McCain responded simply, “Gotta keep your sense of humor.”

Though the conservative movement’s most influential media personalities are clamoring for interviews, Corsi still found time to visit the fringe figures that had promoted his conspiratorial tracts during his lean years between campaigns. On August 4, Corsi reunited with Alex Jones, the 9/11 “Truther,” to claim that Obama “really” was a Muslim. “We should not have anybody as president who–both their parents aren’t Americans,” Jones barked. “Bottom line, that’s always been the way it is.” Two weeks later, Corsi scheduled a spot on something called “James Edwards’ Political Cesspool,” a show he had already appeared on in July.

Who is James Edwards? A 28-year-old self-described “white nationalist,” he has leveraged sponsorship from neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial groups to become America’s most popular white supremacist radio host. On his website, Edwards has boasted of his friendship with neo-Nazi activist David Duke, and written “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to” African-Americans. He also warned “Hollywood promotes white genocide.” For Edwards, Corsi’s anti-Obama attacks were only a slight detour from the racialist ranting his show usually entertains.

However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters reported on Corsi’s planned appearance on Edwards’ show, Corsi quietly withdrew, claiming through his publicist that “travel plans have changed.” Bigger venues, in any case, await him. Once again, he’s a star–the crank acclaimed by conservatives as the greatest investigative journalist of the day.