“Taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations may well be Canada’s most important contribution to Palestinian dispossession,” begins a parliamentary petition drawing attention to an underappreciated phenomenon. Registered Canadian charities send over a quarter-billion dollars a year to projects in Israel.
Since the federal government introduced deductions for charities in 1967, around $6 billion in subsidized donations have gone to Israel. With around a third of those funds as tax write-offs, that’s $2 billion in public support for a violent apartheid state.
This money has helped to directly dispossess Palestinians. After the 1967 war, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of Canada raised $15 million ($120 million in today’s money) to build a large park on illegally occupied land. Three peaceful villages (Beit Nuba, Imwas and Yalu) were demolished to make way for Canada Park.
Despite repeatedly attempting to return home, the 5,000 expelled Palestinians were not allowed back. A 1986 UN Special Committee reported to the secretary-general: “[We] consider it a matter of deep concern that these villagers have persistently been denied the right to return to their land on which Canada Park has been built by the JNF Canada and where the Israeli authorities are reportedly planning to plant a forest instead of allowing the reconstruction of the destroyed villages.”
JNF Canada, which subsequently raised millions of dollars to refurbish the park, replaced most traces of Palestinian history with signs devoted to Canadian donors such as the Metropolitan Toronto Police Department, City of Ottawa and former Ontario premier Bill Davis. Inaugurated by former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1975, the Diefenbaker Parkway bisects Canada Park.
Established in 1910, JNF Canada is among the most important of the 200+ Israel-focused registered charities. It raises about $7-$20 million annually in tax-deductible donations. Despite projecting itself as an environmentally friendly organization, it is a linchpin of Zionist colonialism.
In the late 1920s, JNF Canada helped raise $1 million ($17 million today) for the lands of Wadi al-Hawarith (or Hefer Plain). A 30,000 dunam (roughly 7,500 acres) stretch of coastal territory located about half way between Haifa and Tel Aviv, the land was home to a Bedouin (mostly nomadic) community of more than 1,000. Without consulting the Palestinians living on the land, JNF acquired legal title to Wadi al-Hawarith from an absentee landlord in France.
For four years the tenants of Wadi al-Hawarith resisted British attempts to evict them. Historian Walid Khalidi explains: “The insistence of the people of Wadi al-Hawarith to remain on their land came from their conviction that the land belonged to them by virtue of their having lived on it for 350 years. For them, ownership of the land was an abstraction that at most signified the landlords’ right to a share of the crop.”
The conflict at Wadi al-Hawarith became a lightning rod for the growing Palestinian nationalist movement. In 1933, a general strike was organized in Nablus to support the tenants of Wadi al-Hawarith. Palestinians, especially those without title to their lands, resented the European influx into their homeland.
Canadians underwrote early Zionist immigration to Palestine. At the turn of the century thousands of dollars were raised and in 1910 the Federation of Zionist Societies launched a scheme to buy a few thousand dunums of land in the Galilee. After the 1917 Balfour Declaration, fundraising to colonize Palestine became easier with hundreds of thousands of dollars raised annually. By the mid-1940s Canadians had invested $5 million ($80 million today) for Zionist colonization.
Even as Israel has become a wealthy country with a GDP per capita equal to Canada’s, the wealth transfer has continued. For 57 years, all Canadians have been subsidizing this wealth transfer through tax deductions.
This needs to end. Amidst the holocaust in Gaza, the little discussed phenomenon of registered charities subsidizing apartheid is garnering more attention and push back.
NDP revenue critic Niki Ashton recently sponsored a widely endorsed parliamentary petition, sent a letter to the revenue minister, and emailed her large list about Israel charities. Ashton’s call that “not one cent of Canadian tax-dollars should be funding genocide” is echoed in a recent public letter headlined Stop Subsidizing Genocide. Signed by Gabor Maté, Yann Martel, Linda McQuaig, Roger Waters, Monia Mazigh, Amir Khadir, Desmond Cole, Libby Davies, Ellen Gabriel, Alex Neve, and Sarah Jama, the letter calls into question the quarter-billion dollars a year sent to projects in Israel. It concludes that “the Canada Revenue Agency must enforce its rules on registered charities assisting foreign militaries, racist organizations and West Bank settlements.”
Colonialism is not now, nor should it have ever been, charity.
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