Zochrot

Profile

Country/TerritoryIsrael
Websitehttp://zochrot.org/en
Founded2002.
In their own words“rais[ing] public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba” and “recognizing and materializing the right of return,” stressing that “the rights of the refugees to return must be accepted.”  This agenda is equivalent to calling for the elimination of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Funding

Activities

  • Promotes the Durban demonization rhetoric, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “ongoing destruction of Palestinian localities,” “expulsion,” “massacres,” and “disregard for the rights of refugees and displaced people.”
  • Supports a “One State Solution” or a “de-Zionized Palestine,” and refers to Israel as having an “ethnicized and racialized Zionist” system. (See NGO Monitor’s factsheet on Zochrot’s Support for “One State,” May 1, 2014.)
  • Publishes a database of information about “the destroyed Palestinian villages” and “testimonies” from “Palestinian refugees who witnessed and survived the Nakba of 1948.”
  • Runs a “project of thinking and planning Palestinians practices of return.”
  • In October 2023, in the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Zochrot posted a Twitter thread, “The pain we’re experiencing now is part of a trail of pain traced back at least 75yr ago. Truth telling & pointing out colonial structures of power & dispossession has been and remains our an integral part of our mission.. What happened on 7/10 and what continues to happen in #Gaza should be a reminder of that truth and an eye opener to the #Nakba that never ended and continues to be more present and resemble what happened in 1948… It is the Israeli society that must choose a different path towards #Justice which must uphold #Palestinians right of return.”
  • In March 2023, Zochrot launched a crowdfunding campaign “against increasing racism, militarism and threats of a second Nakba.” According to the campaign, “Against the rising tide of Jewish supremacist militias and the ever-increasing disenfranchisement and oppression of the Palestinian people, we must look straight at the roots of racism and violence.”
  • In February 2023, Zochrot was a signatory on a statement celebrating the decision of the Mayor of Barcelona to “cut ties with Israel…Until Israel’s cities are shared, we must not normalise the structural violence of apartheid.”
  • In August 2022, Zochrot was a signatory on a statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations.  According to the statement, “We stand in solidarity with our fellow human rights defenders in Palestinian society. We repudiate these baseless declarations and call on the international community to pressure Israel to revoke its decision.”
  • In September 2021, Zochrot launched a campaign to “stop funding the JNF” and to “expose the role of the JNF in the colonization of Palestine and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
  • In May 2021, Zochrot published an article placing sole blame on Israel for the continuation of the conflict: “The killing and destruction will end only when the root of the problem is addressed: a colonialist regime that continually dispossesses the Palestinians” (emphasis added). Zochrot further called for “recognizing the supremacist nature of the regime controlling the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and the ongoing nature of the Nakba.”
  • In June 2020, Zochrot held a webinar titled “Annexation 2020: Resisting one more chapter in the ongoing Nakba,” discussing the “implications of further Israeli colonization and to develop corresponding resisting strategies and actions.” During the webinar, a Jerusalem-based activist stated that Israelis should resist as “some sort of human shields…[and] disrupt and disturb the fake peace and order.”
  • In March 2020, Zochrot published an article “COVID-19 in times of settler colonialism. In Palestine, the Unequal Effects of an Epidemic,” claiming that “Israel [is] a settler colonial society.” The article compared Israel to various historical colonialist enterprises, and without providing any evidence of measures that might put Palestinians at risk, draws a parallel to “Europe unwittingly exported smallpox and measles to the ‘New World’ and Africa via the slave trade, later adding malaria and yellow fever…”
  • In May 2019, Zochrot launched a campaign against the Eurovision Song Contest called “Return Vision,” which included a tour of Tel Aviv and the “circumstances of its occupation and ethnic cleansing and a call for realizing the right of return.”
  • On December 1-3, 2017, Zochrot held its 5th International Film Festival titled “From Nakba to Return” at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque to mark the “70th anniversary of the UN Partition Plan. This plan has entrenched the concept of division and separation between Jews and Palestinians – a major milestone in the ongoing Nakba that has played a key role in turning hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into refugees.”
  • In October 2017, Tom Pessah, formerly a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, taught a course for Zochrot titled “Because It Is Something Colonial – The Nakba and the Zionist Settler Society.”
  • In September 2017, Zochrot organized a symposium titled “The Right and Meaning of Return” discussing “Strategies for dealing with the Zionist intent to relegate the right of return to oblivion, deny, or revoke it.” The symposium featured short films produced jointly by Zochrot, Israel Social TV, Baladna Association for Arab Youth, Association for the Defense of the Rights of Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel (ADRID), and the Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA).
  • In June 2017, Director of Pre-Transitional Justice Jessica Nevo participated in the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) forum to “mark fifty years of Israeli occupation,” which featured antisemitic rhetoric, calls for BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), and demonization campaigns against Israel’s existence.
  • In 2016, Zochrot published an educational kit “Shuruch- Cracks in Israel Historiography,” intended to serve as a supplement to the history curriculum for Israeli 11th graders. Chapters deal with a Palestinian “right of return,” “the ongoing Nakba,” Jewish terrorism, and “The 1929 wave of violence: The Jewish provocation that led to the escalation and mutual acts of violence, as opposed to the Zionist narrative which presents Jews exclusively as victims and Palestinians exclusively as perpetrators.”
    • In one chapter, similarities are drawn between BDS campaigns and pre-state Zionist movements in the 1930s and 40s.
  • In August 2016, South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) hosted Zochrot, along with BADIL, Association for the Defense of the Rights of Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel (ADRID), and Adalah, to discuss “Israeli settler colonialism” and address “the historical and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from the destruction of Lubya to current land evictions in the Naqab desert, the role that the JNF plays and other particular features of the Israeli settler colonial land regime.”
  • In March 2016, Zochrot hosted the “The Third International Conference on the Return of Palestinian Refugees.” The program included speakers and activists who are engaged in the promotion of the Palestinian “right of return.”
    • The conference was held in cooperation with Palestinian NGO BADIL, a political advocacy group that promotes antisemitism and anti-Israel campaigns. In 2010, the two organizations published a document calling for “De-Zionization” and for a one-state solution, effectively calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. BADIL regularly published antisemitic cartoons on its website.
  • In March 2015, Zochrot, together with Palestinian NGO BADIL, went on a speaking tour across the United States to discuss “the ongoing Nakba affecting Palestinians both in Palestine and in the diaspora.” According to the event flyer, “Presentations will aim to provide a historical overview of the Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic) and the Right of Return, the forcible displacement of Palestinian since before 1948 and continuing today, and the practicalities of return for refugees. In turn, American audiences will have focused time to consider their role in supporting the call for the Right of Return and how to integrate the Nakba into U.S.-based activism.”
  • In May 2014, launched a smartphone app, “iNakba,” timed to coincide with Israel’s 66th Independence Day. The app features an interactive map and photos of Palestinian villages from 1948, as a way of delegitimizing Israel and promoting the Palestinian “right of return.”
  • On April 23, 2014, a highly disturbing video was posted on YouTube, “The Holocaust’s Visit to Yad Vashem,” featuring radical activist Natali Cohen Vaxberg. In it, she visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and adopts the persona of the “Holocaust,” claiming to be “the best thing that ever happened” to the Jewish people. Several Zochrot officials were involved in the production of the video, including founder Eitan Bronstein, who acted as the “Holocaust Bodyguard,” and Moran Barir, a member of Zochrot, who filmed and edited the movie. (See here for more on this highly offensive video.)
  • Hosted a September 29-30 2013 conference at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, titled “From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of Palestinian Refugees.” Funding for the event was provided by a number of European government frameworks. However, in response to NGO Monitor inquiries, the funders referred to issues of “privacy” as the excuse to avoid exposing the amounts and other details to the public.
  • In 2012, Zochrot implemented a cooperative project called Oudna (“Our Return”) together with  Baladna, Association for the Defense of the Rights of Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel (ADRID), and the Arab Association for Human Rights to “support youth to imagine the concept of returning to their ancestral towns and villages which were destroyed during the Nakba.”
  • Founder Eitan Bronstein wrote a May 16, 2010 article, claiming that if the Palestinians give up their “right of return,” Israelis, “will be sentenced to the shameful life of an eternal occupier, armed from the soles of my feet to the depths of my soul and always afraid, like all colonizers.”
  • Endorsed the 2010 “Free Gaza Flotilla,” which used the pretense of humanitarian aid to attempt to violate Israel’s closure of Gaza.
  • In a December 2008 joint submission to the UN Human Rights Council for Israel’s Universal Periodical Review, Zochrot falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “forcible displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.”

Foreign Donations (amounts in NIS)

2020-2021 figures based on NGO annual reports, 2022-2023 figures based on quarterly reports submitted to the Israeli Registrar for Non-Profits.

Donor (amounts in NIS)*2021202020192018
Christian Aid (UK)221,592187,727304,370
Misereor (Germany)79,237180,856209,247173,551
HEKS-EPER (Switzerland)136,99571,749228,655424,284
Mennonite Central Committee33,96236,75093,505
Rockefeller Brothers Fund72,26068,849
Kurve Wustrow (Germany)246,905
Stichting Het Solidariets Fonds (Netherlands)57,00272,559105,817
EMHRF153,892145,143

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Further Reading