A bank clerk named Haim Kleinman in Nadvorna, Galicia, placed a blue box labelled "Keren Le'umit" in his office and urged others to do the same. The first mass-produced boxes were distributed in 1904. Kleinman visited Mandate Palestine in the 1930s and planned to make , but perished in the Holocaust. The organisation chief executive later acknowledged that JNF does fund projects within settlements. A review of their tax filing from 2014 led Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T'ruah to estimate that about $600,000 of the $27.2 million in grants by JNF-USA went to support settlements. In 2021, JNF announced that it would change its policy and subsidize Israeli settlements in the West Bank. However, the necessary vote of the board was delayed indefinitely in April after opposition from members and supporters abroad.

Israeli lawmakers have sought, unsuccessfully, to allow the State Comptroller to examine the books of the organisation to determine whether the group's funds were being spent appropriately.

Leasing policy controversy

thumb|A community in the [[Negev established by the JNF under its Blueprint Negev program]]

thumb|Aminadav Forest

The JNF stipulates that only Jews can buy, mortgage or lease JNF land. Article 23 of the JNF lease states that the lessee must pay compensation to the JNF if this stipulation is violated. Shortly afterwards, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Arab Center for Alternative Planning also filed a petition to the Supreme Court challenging the ILA policy as discriminatory. The JNF responded to the two petitions on 9 December. In its response, the JNF stated:

On 26 January 2005, Israel's Attorney General Menachem Mazuz ruled that lease restrictions violated Israeli anti-discrimination laws, and that the ILA could not discriminate against Arab citizens of Israel in the marketing and allocation of the lands it managed; this applied both to government lands and to lands belonging to the JNF. However, the Attorney General also decided that, whenever a non-Jewish citizen wins an ILA tender for a plot of JNF-owned land, the ILA would compensate the JNF with an equal amount of land. This would allow the JNF to maintain its current hold over of land, or 13% of the total land in Israel.

As a result of the Mazuz ruling, authorities found themselves facing a conundrum: on the one hand the JNF, as a "private" organisation, had received donations from outside Israel which were specifically earmarked for the benefit of Jews; on the other hand, the state and the ILA (an agency of the state), which administered the land owned by the JNF, were banned from discriminating against non-Jews. In early 2005, the JNF and the Finance Ministry were reported as trying to draft a new agreement that would separate the JNF from the state, thereby allowing it to continue selling land to Jews only.

In July 2007, the Israeli Knesset approved the Jewish National Fund Bill, submitted by MK Uri Ariel (National Union/National Religious Party), in its preliminary reading; but the bill was later dropped. The bill sought to authorize the JNF practice of refusing to lease land to Arab citizens. The bill called for a new provision to the 1960 Israel Land Administration Law, entitled "Management of the Jewish National Fund's Lands"; the provision stated that regardless of other conflicting rulings, leasing JNF lands for Jewish settlement did not constitute discrimination, and: "For the purpose of every law, the association documents of the Jewish National Fund will be interpreted according to the judgment of the Jewish National Fund's founders and from a nationalist-Zionist standpoint."

In September 2007, the High Court heard a further Adalah petition seeking cancellation of an ILA policy as well as Article 27 of the Regulations of the Obligations of Tenders, which in concert prevent Arab citizens from participating in bids for JNF-controlled land. The High Court of Justice agreed to delay a ruling by at least four months, and a temporary settlement was reached (following the compromise proposed in 2005 by Menachem Mazuz) wherein, although the JNF would be prevented from discriminating on grounds of ethnicity, nevertheless every time land is sold to a non-Jew, the ILA would compensate it with an equivalent amount of land, thus ensuring the total amount of land owned by Jewish Israelis remains the same. Rubinstein's intention was "to avoid passing racist legislation [such as the Ariel Bill] that would limit the use of these lands to the Jews". Others denied however that the Ariel Bill was racist.

The Rubinstein proposal was not taken up.

In late 2007, a land swap deal was proposed that would allow the JNF to continue leasing its lands only to Jews. Urban JNF land sold in future to non-Jews would include an automatic swap mechanism: the fund would transfer the land to the ILA, and in exchange would receive the purchase price plus a similar-sized plot in the Negev.

In December 2011, Seth Morrison resigned from the board of JNF-USA in protest at the decision by Himnuta, a subsidiary of JNF-KKL, to launch eviction proceedings against the Sumarin family, who lived in the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem. In the case of the Sumarin family, the children of the original owner, Musa Sumarin, were declared absentees after his death even though there were other family members living in the home at the time. In 1991, the Israeli government took the step of transferring the property to the JNF subsidiary. A campaign against the JNF's eviction was launched by Rabbis for Human Rights, the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, and the Jewish organisation Yachad. The pressures led the JNF to delay the eviction.

In February 2026, released documents on deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein showed that he gifted $15,000 to the JNF in 2006, along with $25,000 to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

See also

  • Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Collections of the Jewish National Fund (KKL1-KKL17)
  • Israel Land Administration
  • Israel Land Authority
  • Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award
  • List of forests in Israel
  • List of Israel Prize recipients
  • Palestine Jewish Colonization Association

References

  • United States branch
  • Guide to the Jewish National Fund Records in the Hadassah Archives on Long-term Deposit at the American Jewish Historical Society
  • The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. Collections of the Jewish National Fund.
  • Adalah's lawsuit against KKL-JNF
  • – Note that JNF-CT (UK) is no longer affiliated with KKL-JNF
  • Joel H. Golovensky and Ariel Gilboa, "Is This Land Still Our Land? The Expropriation of Zionism", Azure 36 (Spring 2009).
  • Ameinu writes in opposition to JNF bill 2007
  • Collection of Jewish National Fund posters
  • Erez Israel: Mitteilungen des Hauptburös des Jüdischen Nationalfonds (B70), early newsletter of the Jewish National Fund, digitized at the Center for Jewish History