Our Bond with Israel: US Jews’ Affective Attachments to Palestine, Palestinian Erasure, & the IHRA Definition

Melissa Weiner

The IHRA Definition, Racism, and Historical Precedents for Today’s Moment

The purpose of the IHRA definition – criminalizing critique of the Israeli state, as with all Zionism, and as the other articles in this journal issue (like the conference) address – is to facilitate ongoing settler colonialism.¹ Settler colonialism entails three key elements: settler migration, land and resource theft, and Indigenous removal, including genocide and epistemic erasure.² We should also remember what Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire say about colonialism; namely, that it’s always violent and no one colonizes innocently.³ The IHRA definition of antisemitism, like Zionists’ lawfare⁴ tactic, also ensures settler colonialism continues by silencing, through any means necessary, all criticism of this settler project. 

Given both the unified resistance’s efforts to take back land and the Israeli government’s violent response and, now, an ongoing year-long genocidal campaign, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is a distraction. As Toni Morrison observes,

It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is and to know the function, the very serious function of racism – which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.⁵ 

Like racism, the IHRA definition keeps us distracted from the realities of settler colonialism, instead asking us to explain over and over that support for Palestinian human rights is not antisemitic, that Palestinians have a right to exist, a reason for being. But there will always be one more thing. 

These distractions are a longstanding element of Zionist strategy to generate the material support necessary for Palestine’s colonization. This strategy of distraction began in the early 1900s, when Zionism was not hegemonic among US Jews, many of whom were poor, recently-arrived immigrants who chose not to go to Palestine.⁶ To generate this financial and political support for their settler project, Zionists used three key tactics. First, they developed affective attachments among US Jews to Palestine, its land, and Jewish settlers. Second, and relatedly, publicity materials normalized settler colonialism, erased Indigenous owners of land, and facilitated US Jews’ entitlement to the land and what happens on it. Finally, they denied any and all negative impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous Palestinians, claiming instead that it benefited them. 

This paper, part of a larger project examining the role of US Jews in Palestine’s colonization between 1917 and 1967, focuses on these aspects of Zionist strategy during the early years of the settler project, from 1917 through 1956. These tactics, developed beginning over a century ago, continue to be used to ensure ongoing political and financial support for, while simultaneously distracting us from, the settler project’s violence, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and across historic Palestine.

The Jewish National Fund’s Role in Land Theft, Migrant Settlement, and Indigenous Erasure

Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in the country… After the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us… The only solution is the Land of Israel… without Arabs…There is no room for compromise on this point. The only way is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left. For that goal, money will be found – even a lot of money… There is no other solution. 

Joseph Weitz (1940)⁷

This paper discusses these historical antecedents, starting with this quote from Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund (hereafter JNF) from 1932 to 1948, who was also a member of the Jewish Agency’s Transfer Committee.⁸ Weitz’s admission links all aspects of the settler project – land theft, settler migration, and Indigenous genocide.⁹ It was the JNF that did and continues to play a leading role in the Zionist settler project. It solicits contributions, largely through blue boxes and tree planting, from Jews around the world and especially in the US, toward dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. 

The JNF was founded in 1901 with the purpose of acquiring land for Jewish settlement, land that would be held for Jews in perpetuity.¹⁰ Non-Jews could never again purchase or lease that land. After acquiring the land (both through payment to large absentee landowners pre-Nakba and theft during and after it), the JNF then prepared it for settlement, often destroying Palestinian villages and then either building settler homes or planting trees on top of the villages, sometimes turning them into national parks.¹¹ According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, “The true mission of the JNF… has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it creates to deny their existence.”¹² The JNF however, usually refers to the latter two strategies as “afforestation,” denying how they usually use non-Indigenous trees to greenwash ethnic cleansing and the destruction of delicate Indigenous ecosystems.¹³ “Securing” the land was usually a euphemism for funding “defense” militias.¹⁴ Acting in concert with the Jewish Agency and, after 1948, the Israeli State, the JNF did exactly what Weitz said it would do – leave no village intact across much of historic Palestine. The JNF was therefore instrumental in fulfilling David Ben-Gurion’s admonition that Zionists “must do everything to ensure [the Palestinians] never do return.”¹⁵ 

However, Zionists needed money to colonize the land, build settlements and pre-state infrastructure (including militias), transport settler migrants to the growing colony and, later, expel 85% of the Palestinian population, destroy a similar percentage of their villages, and appropriate 78% of historic Palestine.¹⁶ Some of the money for this violent colonizing project came from JNF blue boxes and tree planting campaigns. Most of it was raised in parallel campaigns by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and the United Palestine Appeal (UPA) which, in 1938, was wrapped into the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). This consolidation of the UPA with the UJA ensured that anyone giving any money to any Jewish organization during the war years would lack a choice as to whether their donation went to, for example, money to help Holocaust refugees resettle in the US or to Palestine’s colonization. In addition, these and other affiliated organizations directly campaigned for contributions providing material objects, such as clothes, machinery, and arms to settlers colonizing Palestine.  

The JNF remains a para-state institution enabling discrimination against Indigenous Palestinians absent laws explicitly discriminating against Indigenous Palestinians.¹⁷ Since it is the JNF that forbids land leasing and ownership to Palestinians, not the Israeli government, it remains a foil for ongoing discrimination, segregation, and apartheid across occupied historic Palestine. Historically, this institutional arrangement allowed the Israeli state to plead innocent to the charge of discrimination against Palestinians when they sought membership in the UN, even as the Nakba continued in 1949. The JNF modeled and heralded the use of emotional, didactic appeals to both fundraise and generate affective attachments among diasporic Jews to their settler project. 

Finding the Money through Emotional Appeals

To successfully raise the millions of dollars from US Jews to implant their society in Palestine through colonization, to ensure Palestinian villages would not be left standing and that Palestinians would be ethnically cleansed, Zionists strategically developed affective attachments among US Jews to Palestine, both its land and their Jewish peers settling it. To do this, the Head Office of the JNF in 1927 recommended:

We must inundate the Jewish public with slogans and pictures, to rivet their attention, to create an atmosphere of unrest… [to distribute the pictures and slogans] in every place a Jew sets foot in: in communal centres, lodges, places of business, society and union centres, the offices of charity organizations, mutual aid societies, rabbinical offices, libraries, theatres, bath houses and rest houses, shelters, hospitals, pharmacies, clinics, synagogues, seminaries, schools, doctors’ waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels, pensions… leave no place where there is no illustrated poster with a clear and brief text.¹⁸

Not just the JNF, but all Zionists explicitly and strategically targeted US Jews using emotionally laden messaging. For example, the UJA’s Proposed Publicity program advocated films incorporating “the major elements of the work of the constituent agencies [of the UJA] in a dramatic form, preferably against a background of the tragedy and upheaval overseas.”¹⁹ 

A few years later, JNF president Israel Goldstein wrote to Henry Montor, president of the UJA, in a personal and confidential letter that, for fundraising, child refugee settlements in the form of Youth Aliyah “offers the greatest single emotional appeal in campaigning today. No one can resist a plea on behalf of a child to be saved.”²⁰ Later that year, the National Youth Aliyah Committee echoed this sentiment: “The Youth Aliyah is revealed, not only as an educational program but also as a significant colonizing force in Jewish Palestine.”²¹ During the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, when Palestinians publicly demonstrated their opposition to their homeland’s colonization,²² the UPA wrote “confidentially” in an “urgent” bulletin that they needed to raise £1.6 million (approximately $156.7 million in 2024) “to go through this vast new program of reasserting Jewish determination to expand colonization opportunities in Palestine.”²³ 

Brochures and form letters assailed US Jewish readers, urgently exhorting them to contribute money for Zionist settlers, to “not fail them!”,²⁴ asking, “shall they stand alone?”²⁵ and, especially, given the horrors of the unfolding Holocaust, that funding for colonization was, as US Jews, “our responsibility.”²⁶ For example, in 1936, Stephen Wise, the President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) wrote to members, 

If we have a feeling of responsibility to these Jews, if we want truly to save them from the extermination with which they are threatened, we must give heed to their own pleas and their own wishes: we must help to send them to Palestine! It is incredible to think that among the almost 5,000,000 Jews in the US there is not a sufficient understanding of the gravity of the problem that faces us.²⁷  

Five years later, the UPA described a “new measure of responsibility for American Jewry for the preservation of the Jewish homeland in Palestine,” including “the ability of Palestine to defend itself and give manpower for its security” in their call to raise $12 million in 1941 (approximately $256.4 million in 2024).²⁸ 

Zionists continued these emotional appeals after the Nakba to ensure funding for their ongoing settler project of transporting settlers, destroying Palestinian villages, and ensuring that Palestinians did not return. After the establishment of the state of Israel, a 1950 issue of the  Zionist Newsletter (published by the Information Department of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization) continued to highlight the need “to stimulate a positive attitude of cultural and emotional identification with Israel,” especially among US Jewish youth.²⁹ The ongoing effort to mobilize funds and political support, including for military defense of their stolen land, also appeared in a 1949 brochure entitled, “Well What Does Zionism Mean to the American Jew Now?” This brochure reads in part, 

So there’s a Jewish state after all! It makes me feel that maybe my Zionist membership was of some help in bringing about the creation of Israel. Now wait a minute! Maybe I’m still needed – we’re not through yet. There are still big problems ahead of us – financial and economic problems. This isn’t the time for us to “demobilize.” The help of American Jews is more necessary now than ever before – after all, we want the Jewish State to be a success. And there’s the problem of security too. We must see to it that Israel receives all material support required that is consistent with American and international law.³⁰

All of these emotional appeals were designed to ensure uninterrupted financial subsidization of settler colonial state building and Palestinian dispossession, erasure, and genocide through US Jews’ emotional and physical attachment to the land and institutions on it. 

Scripting and Normalizing Settler Colonialism

In addition to inundating the US Jewish public with slogans and pictures, as the JNF advocated, Zionists utilized scriptive things, which invite action toward a particular goal or practice in order to build an emotional attachment to their settler project and normalize colonization of Palestine.³¹ Archival documents reveal a near obsession with deluging the US Jewish public with these messages and programs to generate both affective attachments and generate funds and settlers (which was far less successful in the US). Zionist materials, both public and internal, such as personal letters, reveal an intentionality in using emotional appeals to garner the material and financial resources necessary for Zionists to colonize Palestine.³² From Zionism’s outset, the strategy was to “conquer hearts”³³ and this strategy continues into the present, both with the many scriptive things that continue to facilitate settler land theft and Palestinian dispossession, such as trees, Israel bonds, and the IHRA definition. Importantly, Zionist materials urged both emotional and practical ties to Palestine.³⁴ Although always a violent process, settler colonialism appears completely normal throughout Zionist archival documents. Through both language and material scriptive things, Zionists drew US Jews to, and normalized, their settler project in Palestine, often using the occasions to raise funds for, and thus further this project. 

Nor was it a secret that Zionists sought to colonize Palestine, and they normalized settler colonization throughout their materials. Terms – such as settler, settlements, colonies, and colonization – appear throughout the materials, often also in Hebrew. Zionists referred to the Jewish settlement community as the “Yishuv,” which means settlement in Hebrew, and agricultural settlement communities as “moshavim,” which translates to “colonies.” US Jews reading about Zionist colonization in Palestine regularly encountered, and likely learned, these Hebrew words. Similarly, dozens of New York Times headlines, such as “Conference of Zionists: Elect Delegates at Their Meeting in Baltimore. Will Colonize Palestine” in 1899,³⁵ “Urges Jews Here to Settle in Palestine: Rabbi Magnes Says Marvelous Progress Has Been Made in Zionist Colonies There” in 1912,³⁶ and “Seek Trained Youth to Settle Palestine”³⁷ in 1947, all resemble the use of this terminology throughout internal and external Zionist materials. The Zionist origins of Palestine’s colonization, including the founding of the first colony in 1882 and the Palestine Colonization Association in 1891, occurred alongside and was supported by European imperialist expansion during the Berlin Conference (1885–86) dividing Africa among European nations, particularly the British Empire.

Perhaps most importantly, the Constitution of the Jewish Agency, the pre-state apparatus that worked with the British Mandatory Government to organize, establish, and run pre- and para-state institutions, made clear in their 1929 Constitution the centrality of colonization (as well as segregated employment through “Jewish labor” and the right to “control the exploitation of natural resources” in Palestine). The constitution reads, in part: 

The Agency shall promote agricultural colonisation based on Jewish labour, and in all works or undertakings carried out or furthered by the Agency, it shall be deemed a matter of principle that Jewish labour shall be employed. So long as the requirements of economic efficiency are fulfilled, the social form of any settlement which may be established in Palestine shall be deemed to be a matter for the settlers, provided always that it shall be left to the judgement of the Jewish Agency to determine the economic soundness and practicability of any proposed plan of colonisation before the appropriating of any of the funds within its control for any particular settlement.³⁸ 

Indeed, throughout the materials, Zionists repeatedly told US Jews, “For the upbuilding of a Jewish Homeland, it is necessary that the largest possible number of Jews settle as quickly as possible in Palestine.”³⁹ 

In these decades before Zionism was hegemonic, Zionists regularly requested rabbis use their synagogues to proselytize for Zionist settler colonization funds, normalizing the movement and participation in it.⁴⁰ Many, though not all and not at first, complied.⁴¹ For example, Phineas Smoller, a Missouri rabbi, in response to a letter from Leo Frachtenberg, the current UPA Executive Director who hoped he would do exactly this, wrote, “I shall try to convince Danville Jewry that the rebuilding of Palestine is absolutely necessary and the most constructive problem in the history of our people.”⁴² 

To accomplish settler colonial normalization necessary for Palestine’s colonization, many of these Zionist fundraising schemes relied on scriptive things, which invited or foreshadowed actions⁴³ relating to settler colonization of Palestine, enabling US Jews to participate in the settler project from afar, while developing material attachments to the objects they purchased. Didactic opportunities, especially for Jewish children, were central to fundraising efforts, sometimes more so with the JNF and other organizations seeking to establish a longstanding connection to Palestine which would eventually lead to donating funds, even if it didn’t occur in that moment.⁴⁴

Likely the most well-known of these scriptive things is the JNF Blue Box, which, as their promotional materials and recent Canadian website describe, was “the box that built a country.”⁴⁵ These ubiquitous JNF boxes were central to the establishment of affective ties between US Jews and the land of Palestine as well as the financing of various settler projects. This was the intention, according to a 1921 Value of the Blue Box memo, from the JNF. By introducing “the JNF into the Jewish home in its everyday life and across generations… It performs constant and perpetual propaganda work for the JNF wordlessly.”⁴⁶ Most Jews associate these boxes with the purchase of trees to be planted across historic Palestine. Jews also “gift” each other JNF trees during milestone life events and annually during Tu b’Shevat (the new year of the trees). And, indeed, the JNF uses these funds to do so, planting trees over depopulated and destroyed Palestinian villages, greenwashing a century of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and destroying Indigenous ecosystems, unbeknownst to most US Jews both then and now.⁴⁷ These boxes therefore represent a significant aspect of, as well as a metaphor in which US Jews willingly, but often unknowingly, directly participate, in settler colonial ethnic cleansing and its concealment, unsettling Palestinian individuals, communities, and the landscape itself.

In addition to the Blue Box, Zionists provided US Jews with myriad opportunities to finance Palestine’s colonization by purchasing everything from trees, bricks, beds, and wings in hospitals, to school lunches and eye medicine for children, furniture, rooms, even entire homes for settlers.⁴⁸ These material items that US Jews could “own” in Palestine also represented “practical” aspects of and contributed to normalizing Zionist settler colonial construction. US Jews could also purchase products from settler businesses in Palestine such as wine, olive oil, and soap, either through the mail, in person at Zionist owned businesses, particularly in New York City, or Palestine Pavilions celebrating Zionist productivity in their colonization efforts.⁴⁹ Importantly, Sara Ahmed discusses how emotions must be attached to an object (including people), rather than just an idea, for them to be salient and orient action.⁵⁰ For example, Hadassah, the women’s branch of the World Zionist Organization, organized the Palestine Supplies Fund, which in the late 1920s sent linens, garments, hospital supplies, cod liver oil, and mosquito netting, among other items, to Palestine, which the organization claimed created a bond between the women of their organization and their peers settling Palestine who used these items.⁵¹

Even the smallest amount would contribute to the settler project, as Zionists reminded the US Jewish public: “Remember each one of your dimes will help to redeem a new piece of land for the Jewish people, and generally strengthen our positions in Palestine.”⁵² However, for those with more resources, they could claim the land itself. “If you have the means,” a 1933 radio broadcast by Louis Lipsky, former president of the ZOA, urged listeners, “settle yourself in Palestine, prepare to go over there, see the land for yourself, and make arrangements for your settlement‬.”⁵³

Zionists further normalized fundraising for settler colonialism through their encouragement of donating money towards Palestine’s colonization for any and all occasions. In this way, Jewish and secular holidays, birthdays, graduations, and Mother’s Day,⁵⁴ all became opportunities to contribute to Palestinian dispossession. Hadassah, the women’s branch of the ZOA, recommended integrating fundraising for the project into routine social events such as card parties, luncheons, Purim balls, and baby showers.⁵⁵ They also suggested, “On special Zionist occasions, on a Jewish holiday, or on any joyous occasion, the children may invite a [Jewish] Palestinian child as an imaginary guest to a meal at home, the cost of the guest’s meal to be contributed to the fund. This can be made the occasion for giving the children a talk on some phase of Palestinian life.”⁵⁶ 

Zionists institutionalized settler colonialism into diaspora Jews’ holiday celebrations more intensely beginning with the inauguration of the Israeli bond campaign in 1951.⁵⁷  Zionists mobilized language in both internal communications and publicity materials to explicitly call for Jews to create a “bond with Israel” through Israeli bond purchases.⁵⁸ This campaign, initiated when the newly imposed state desperately needed financial backing to continue their colonization project, funded all varieties of settler expansion – including settlements and infrastructure for Zionist settlers and military equipment that would ensure Palestinian dispossession and erasure during the critical years of 1949–1959, when the Israeli state continued depopulating remaining Palestinian villages in Israel-controlled historic Palestine.⁵⁹ Therefore, and as with previous campaigns, Zionists strategically engaged US Jews’ emotions to bind US Jews to the land of Palestine and their co-religionists settling it through an advertising campaign for Israeli bonds with the explicit goal of creating, and using the advertising slogan of, a “bond with Israel.”⁶⁰ At the time, these bonds enabled the Israeli state budget to cover the price of the military since bonds and other US subsidization funded nearly all other aspects of the Israeli government.⁶¹ 

In addition to inundating the US Jewish community with calls to build and purchase a “bond with Israel,” Zionists spurred the underwriting of Palestine’s ongoing settler project through local and national competitions over social and material capital in the community,⁶² awarding valuable assets to those who sold the most bonds, and thus further enabled Palestinians’ dispossession and colonization. Zionist newsletters prominently featured those with the most sales, and women who sold more than $2,500 worth of bonds received gold charms in the shape of the twelve ancient tribes of Israel, a material and valuable award.⁶³ In the first year of the program, hoping to raise $25 million, Israeli Bonds raised $52.6 million ($635,385,746 today) towards Palestine’s ongoing colonization from US Jews.⁶⁴ 

Denying Dispossession: Palestinian Erasure, Dehumanization, and Zionist Benevolence

Erasing Palestinians from their land, and their claims to sovereignty on it, are rife throughout the materials directed to US Jews of all ages and the national and international community with Zionists disseminating overt and covert messaging that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”⁶⁵ This erasure is and has always been essential to the Zionist project, as settler colonialism requires material and epistemic Indigenous erasure through settler replacement of this population.⁶⁶ When Palestinians do appear, they are backward, uncivilized recipients of Zionist humanitarian benevolence. They are never equal subjects with agency, only objects. 

Denying Indigenous existence, subjectivity, and sovereignty over their own land is a hallmark of settler colonialism.⁶⁷ Zionists accomplished these discursive erasures and Palestinian de-indigenization by referring to them as tenants and laborers on the land, arguing that their “backward” nature left them unable to correctly work, and thus unentitled to, their own land, or erasing their presence entirely.⁶⁸ Participants in Avukah’s (the student organization affiliated with the ZOA) summer school, learned from their Diagram of Zionism that Zionist settlers “were able to come there because Palestine was an undeveloped under-inhabited land.”⁶⁹ Baruch Zuckerman, representing Labor Zionists, speaking in Yiddish, told attendees of the 1943 American Jewish Conference, “we are entitled by every right… Palestine is due to us.”⁷⁰ A year later in testimony to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Emanuel Neuman, president of the ZOA, was more direct; he told US House representatives simply, “Palestine has never been an Arab state.”⁷¹

Zionists also used well-worn tropes of white settler benevolence, civilization, and modernity that they brought to “primitive” Indigenous Palestinians to convince US Jews that “the coming of the Jews, who are building up the country at large, is a distinct benefit to them [Indigenous Palestinians].”⁷² For example, a representative description of Zionist settlers compared to Indigenous Palestinians appearing throughout the materials is featured in a promotional booklet, Palestine: The New California. In it, Zionists described settlers as maintaining “political and social standards [that] are many times higher than the standards of the undeveloped, uneducated, and backward fellah or Bedouin.”⁷³ However, as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire remind us, colonizers’ beliefs that their particular form of colonization is benevolent and benefits the colonized by imposing on them Western civilization and modernity is both a centuries’ old hallmark of settler colonialism and a lie.⁷⁴

These messages appeared throughout public-facing material – radio scripts, conference plenaries where large groups of members would be in attendance and, especially, materials seeking funds to colonize through land purchases and agricultural settlements. These materials did not mention how Zionist policies, such as that of Jewish labor, excluded Palestinians from working on recently purchased land or connect the JNF’s policy of maintaining land for exclusive Jewish use in perpetuity forever removed Palestinians from land they may have lived and worked on for generations. Zionists used similar arguments that their colonization benefited Indigenous Palestinians before national and international bodies from whom they sought increased support for colonization in the lead-up to partition, particularly the US State Department and the League of Nations, and later the United Nations.⁷⁵

For example, the caption of an undated JNF publicity photo (likely from the late 1930s) for “A Modern Palestine Colony,” hoping to raise $2 million for settler migration and colonization, noted “its modernity is typical of the civilization which the Jewish people have brought into Palestine within the last decade.”⁷⁶ A letter to US Secretary of State Hull, as discussion of partition begins after the 1937 Peel Commission’s report and recommendation, from a Delegation of American Jewry (comprised of the Emergency Committee for Palestine of the ZOA),  states that “the Arab population far from suffering any setback from this influx of capital and men, actually benefited materially in every phase of its life from the resources and the example of their Jewish neighbors.”⁷⁷ A few years later, in 1944, a World Jewish Congress press release, describing Zionists’ impact on Palestine, claimed, “Jews have brought untold benefits to one of the backward areas of the earth.”⁷⁸ Jewish undergraduates were told similarly, that “The Jews who come do not displace the Arabs. On the contrary, they are necessarily leading the Arab peasants out of the feudal system which holds them as serfs” and that “conditions of poor Arab peasants (fellahin) has been improved by Jewish immigration.”⁷⁹

Zionists’ repeated racist tropes, applied to Indigenous Palestinians, socialized US Jews to view Palestinians in these ways and almost certainly ensured a lack of sympathy for them during the Nakba. While Zionists would eventually expel 85% of Palestinians from their land and destroy a similar percentage of their villages,⁸⁰ documents as early as 1930 reflect Zionist consideration of and support for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homeland, particularly to Jordan and Iraq.⁸¹ This was seven years before the Peel Commission’s 1937 report suggesting partition and transfer. There is no mention of transfer in public-facing documents I encountered in the archives, potentially suggesting an awareness of controversies this would create and intentional efforts to limit the US Jewish public’s knowledge of these discussions.  

Similarly, after 1948, Palestinians exist only as “infiltrators” or terrorists, unentitled to return to the land from which they were expelled and had lived on for centuries, or ungrateful beneficiaries of the Zionist state.⁸² This framing sought to generate not affective attachments to Palestinians but, rather, fear and loathing of them, encouraging US Jews to consider their co-religionist settlers brave and justified in their efforts to permanently erase Palestinians from their land. 

Funds Found, the IHRA Definition, and the Ongoing Palestinian Nakba

These emotional campaigns worked. Zionists raised millions of dollars, enabling and normalizing Palestine’s colonization through land conquest, settler migration, and genocide during the Nakba and into the present. These relatively small contributions–for example, donating pocket change to purchase trees planted over ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages through the JNF–had a cumulatively large and critically important impact on Palestinians and their sovereignty over their land for over a century, regardless of whether or not US Jews were aware of these contributions. In this case, it is important to recognize not only the erasure of actual Indigenous Palestinians from their land and histories on it, but also the erasure of US Jews’ complicit involvement in this violent dispossession. 

In 1929 alone, the United Palestine Appeal raised $2.1 million,⁸³ or $37.7 million today. By 1940, Zionists had doubled this annual amount, with $4 million⁸⁴ donated to the Keren Hayesod and JNF that year, or $87.7 million today. In 1944, the UPA expected to raise $8 million, compared to $4 million the previous year.⁸⁵ During the Nakba, the UPA raised $74.7 million in 1948⁸⁶ while Israeli bonds, in 1951 alone, raised $52.6 million for the newly established settler state.⁸⁷ The figures in this paragraph alone total approximately $2 billion in 2024 ($1,949,700,000). They do not include money US Jews donated in other ways, through material donations, or funds for Zionist schools, hospitals, or militias, such as money donated to Americans for Haganah and the American Friends of the Fighters for Freedom (funding Lehi, also known as the Stern gang).⁸⁸ 

Zionists continue to celebrate the importance of JNF blue boxes in colonizing Palestine. According to the JNF website, “Jews the world over collected coins in iconic JNF Blue Boxes, purchasing land and planting trees until ultimately, their dream of a Jewish homeland was a reality.”⁸⁹ However, then as now, most US Jews have no idea what their donations were and are used for. There is never any mention of Indigenous Palestinians or that these funds were and are used for ongoing genocide. These blue JNF boxes therefore represent a significant aspect of, as well as a metaphor in which US Jews willingly, but often unknowingly, directly participate, in settler colonial ethnic cleansing, and its concealment. 

The IHRA definition is another way. Like the Blue Boxes and State of Israel bonds, the IHRA definition of antisemitism completely erases Palestinians,and vilifies their real claims of injustice. This is particularly true now, during the genocide, when people protesting it are called antisemites. However, in both cases, denying and contributing to settler colonial genocide is a crime against humanity, one in which US Jews are and have been complicit for over a century, and something which they/we will have to contend with in the years and decades to come. Recently, after decades of work by activists, especially Palestinians from villages under which JNF’s Canada Park sits, Canada revoked the tax-exempt status of the JNF, with the hopes of limiting funding.⁹⁰ At press time, the JNF has sought to challenge this ruling, claiming that it is antisemitic.⁹¹ 

Given the Israeli government’s ongoing displacement, dispossession, and genocide of Palestinians, and the significant financial contributions US Jews continue to make to this through Israeli bond purchases, divesting the state of monies necessary to do so would represent a critically important way to limit this financialization of Palestinian oppression and removal. Cashing existing bonds and donating money to Palestinian organizations seeking equality and justice could represent important contributions towards decolonization.⁹²

As a tactic linked to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, any such attempt would likely be labeled as antisemitic under the IHRA definition and therefore must be ready to contend with this challenge. 

During the genocide in Gaza, Zionists have continued to use emotional appeals to solicit funds, including through the JNF, Israel Bonds, and Friends of the IDF. On their website, Friends of the IDF claims, “Their job is to look after Israel. Ours is to look after them.”⁹³ The IDF also offers opportunities to “adopt” individual battalions, enabling sponsors to “care for a battalion with a personal touch.”⁹⁴ The website for the JNF’s “Israel Resilience Campaign” advises donors that “giving monthly is the best way to provide ongoing loving caring fulfilling support of Israel.”⁹⁵ While information as to how much has been donated to each of these campaigns since the start of the genocide in October 2023 is not available, by April 2024, donors had provided a “record” $3 billion dollars to the settler state through Israel bond purchases in only six months.⁹⁶ 

These tactics therefore clearly carry into the present, where we can see the long-lasting impact of Zionist efforts over the last 100 years, including today’s genocide,and, therefore, their relevance today. These tactics that continue to financially underwrite the Zionist settler project are now so ubiquitous to US Jews’ lives and practices that they go almost unnoticed, thereby enhancing the impacts of the IHRA definition, making this history itself unspeakable and criminal. Therefore, challenges to both must center Palestinians and their 75-plus year history of dispossession. They must provide material financial support for decolonization and limit material support for ongoing colonization and genocide, from both US Jews and the US government. They must demand reparations for over a century of anti-Palestinian racism, dispossession, and murder. And, to do so, they will need to contend with the now-decades’-old affective attachments among US Jews to the State of Israel, the land, and their co-religionist settlers on it, while simultaneously attending to the ever-present possibility of being charged with antisemitism under the IHRA definition. 

Acknowledgements

The author is deeply grateful to the participants at the inaugural Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism conference held in October 2023 for their deep engagement with and comments on the presentation on which this paper is based, as well as the reviewers. All mistakes are my own.