page_title: Jewish National Fund
section_title: Leasing policy controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Jewish National Fund / Controversies / Leasing policy controversy
caption_attribution_description: English: A Blueprint Negev planned community comprised of mobile homes in the Negev desert of Israel.
context_page_description: Jewish National Fund was founded in 1901 to buy and develop land in Ottoman Palestine for Jewish settlement. The JNF is a non-profit organization. By 2007, it owned 13% of the total land in Israel. Since its inception, the JNF says it has planted over 240 million trees in Israel. It has also built 180 dams and reservoirs, developed 250,000 acres of land and established more than 1,000 parks.
  In 2002, the JNF was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society and the State of Israel.
context_section_description: 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.
  On 13 October 2004, Adalah, an organization and legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, submitted a petition to the Supreme Court entitled Challenging the Prohibition on Arab Citizens of Israel from Living on Jewish National Fund Land. 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:
  The JNF is not the trustee of the general public in Israel. Its loyalty is given to the Jewish people in the Diaspora and in the state of Israel... The JNF, in relation to being an owner of land, is not a public body that works for the benefit of all citizens of the state. The  loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.
  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 2,500,000 dunams (2,500 km²) 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" organization, 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.
  An alternative proposal submitted by Amnon Rubinstein, a former minister, recommended that a distinction be made
caption: A community in the Negev established by the JNF under its Blueprint Negev program
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