Written in collaboration with Muhib Nabulsi
If you work in the arts, particularly in Victoria, you’re probably familiar with the Besen family and the Besen Family Foundation.
It’s very likely you’ve worked with an organisation or institution that receives Besen funding.
In 1958, having already amassed significant wealth in Australia, Marc and Eva Besen visited occupied Palestine and met with genocidal coloniser David Ben-Gurion.
‘Ben-Gurion talked about his dream to settle the Negev and I made a promise to him,’ said Marc Besen. ‘It is a great privilege to take part in his vision and dream.’
Besen is referring to the Naqab in southern Palestine, which zionists began ethnically cleansing in 1948 through large-scale massacres, village depopulations and forced expulsions.
Eran Doran, zionist ‘mayor’ of the colonial outpost in question, has personally thanked the Besen family and foundation for their funding of colonial expansion in the region:
‘Thanks to you, this dream has become a reality’, he said. ‘For the first time, the youth of the Negev will receive accessible education from their birth until their enlistment in the IDF.’
Palestinians who have not been slaughtered or expelled from the Naqab now have access to less than 5% of their land.
Successive Israeli regimes have continued ethnically cleansing the Naqab, razing approximately 15,000 Palestinian buildings in the last six years alone. Palestinians continue to live under constant threat of dispossession, home raids, carceral abuse, torture, expulsion and murder by zionist colonisers.
The Besen family has directly collaborated with the ‘Jewish National Fund’ (JNF), a violent and fanatical expansionist organisation working to erase Palestinian presence and impose ethnosupremacist outposts on stolen land.
A major financial and colonial arm of the zionist occupation entity, the JNF remains actively involved in the dispossession and expulsion of Indigenous Palestinians.
In 1940, the JNF created the so-called ‘Village Files’: carefully constructed surveys and records of Palestinian villages.
This intelligence-gathering laid the groundwork for zionist militias who, during the Nakba, destroyed over 500 villages, killed at least 15,000 Palestinians and forcefully expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.
The JNF then concealed the mass graves and ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages under invasive European pine plantations.
JNF Victoria president Ronit Fraid has personally thanked the Besen family and foundation for their ‘devotion’ and ‘generous contribution’ to implementing JNF’s ‘vision’.
The Besen Family Foundation has also contributed to the ‘New Israel Fund’, the ‘United Israel Appeal’ and the ‘Zionist Federation of Australia’. The Besens are also personally and professionally entwined with the Schwartz and Gandel families.
Through their infiltration of arts and cultural spaces, zionist organisations act to suffocate any criticism of Israel while dressing up a genocidal colonial project in the costume of progressivism.
Tarrawarra Museum of Art is Besen Family owned and controlled.
Besen money can also be found behind such organisations as NGV, Collingwood Yards, Polyglot Theatre, ACMI, Rising Festival, Malthouse Theatre, and many others. Such spaces must, as a matter of urgency, be compelled to divest.
The Besen Family Foundation must be comprehensively rejected.
References:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/15/the-nakba-five-palestinian-towns-massacred-75-years-ago
https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-desert-promise-realised/
https://www.australianjewishnews.com/besen-remembered/
https://electronicintifada.net/content/naqab-key-piece-israels-apartheid-puzzle/34876
https://www.badil.org/publications/al-majdal/issues/items/1457.html
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/negev-israel-disguises-land-theft-legal-dispute