Letter to Western News re: Davenport JNF - 2008-03-09

From IKE

Dear Editor,

We are writing to you as alumni of the University of Western Ontario Medical School and doctors in the community, concerning Dr. Davenport's decision to attend the London Jewish National Fund's Negev dinner in June. We believe his attendance would run contrary to many of the values that a President of UWO should actively support.

We bring to this letter all of the easily available public information about the JNF that Drs Coulter, Farah, Heap and Lynk have highlighted. In addition, we bring to it the story of our own family. Our father was one of the 750 000 people forcibly expelled from his home, carried on foot by his mother out of their home and into a refugee camp a hundred kilometers away. The town they were forced to leave was known then as Saa'Saa and our grandfather and grandmother carried with them its memories until they died in exile years later. As with many other Palestinian villages, Saa'Saa was taken over by the JNF, which renamed it and worked to erase its history by planting trees over our family's and so many other Palestinian homes.

While the JNF presents a friendly face to the public, the reality is far different. The JNF is, in reality, a tool of discrimination and dispossession used by the Israeli government against the Palestinian inhabitants of Israel and against the millions of Palestinian refugees driven from their land in 1948 and 1967. This process of dispossession continues, unfortunately, to this day. As a pseudo-state organization, the JNF owns or indirectly controls the vast majority of land inside Israel. It therefore bears the burden of responsibility for the bigoted laws in Israel today that prohibit or actively discourage non-Jewish citizens of Israel from owning or even leasing these lands. As part of its program to make Israel "green", the JNF has also been responsible for the erasure of past and present Palestinian habitation. Canada Park, built in Israel by donations to the Canadian JNF, covers the ruins of three Palestinian villages (Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba) destroyed by the Israeli army in 1967. This process has been repeated throughout the state of Israel, in an attempt to eliminate the ability of Palestinian refugees (the largest refugee population in the world) to connect with or return to their land.

We ask Dr. Davenport not to support the discriminatory policies of the Jewish National Fund. Declining to support such a politicized, prejudiced organization would go well with UWO's policy of supporting equality within the University as well as without. His refusal to attend the Negev dinner would send a strong message that UWO is opposed to bigotry, land theft, and the twisting of history. We remain hopeful that Dr. Davenport declines the invitation.

Thank you for your time,

Eman Loubani, MD (Class of 2004) Mohammed Loubani, MD (Class of 2006) Tarek Loubani, MD (Class of 2007)