On Tuesday I attended an event hosted by the Jewish National Fund titled Making the World a Better Place, which was supposed to highlight the positive impact Israel is supposedly making on the global community.
The JNF (also known as the KKL) owns 13 percent of the land in Israel. Since the 1950s, the JNF has operated as a part of Israel and controls about 93 percent of the land. The JNF’s constitution explicitly states that JNF-KKL land and property is not to be rented, leased, sold or worked by non-Jews.
So you could see why I was surprised that such a discriminatory organization was allowed to come on campus by UF Intercultural Engagement.
The event sought to whitewash the oppression and discrimination inflicted on Palestinians and other ethnic groups by highlighting Israel’s green efforts and medical technologies. You want to know how Israel can truly make the world a better place?
1. Stop its settler colonial project that has ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their land since 1948.
2. Affirm the right of return to more than 4.25 million Palestinians who were displaced from their land and reside in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
3. Stop the Prawer Plan, which seeks to displace more than 40,000 bedouins.
4. Stop placing Palestinian children as young as 9 in military detention centers.
5. End its discrimination against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and against African migrants.
6. Stop playing such a huge role in the military industrial complex, which greatly harms the global South.
7. Stop threatening sovereign nations with the threat of military strikes, and
8. Realize that an ethnocracy can’t call itself the only democracy in the Middle East when it only represents one group of people.
Eric Brown is a UF political science junior. This letter to the editor ran on page 7 on 11/15/2013 under the headline "How Israel can better the world"
