My father, who emigrated from Poland to Israel in the early 1930s and settled in a workers’ neighbourhood near Haifa, died in December 1995. After his death we found in his house boxes full of letters and documents. One box contained a large collection of tree-planting certificates sent by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in honour of the birthdays that my brother and I had celebrated during the 1930s and 1940s. The sight of these illustrated certificates brought back to my memory many of our childhood experiences, at school and in the youth movements. There had been stamp collecting, the weekly donation dropped into the Blue Box, ‘flower days’ in the streets, collecting empty bottles and newspapers, donating days of work in kibbutzim, harvest ceremonies, and more. This was not exclusively our experience, for many people in Israel and Jewish people throughout the world had experienced these things as children and young people. These were experiences created by the Jewish National Fund in its work of collecting donations for the redemption of the land.

From the distance of many years I began to ask questions. If the JNF was a Zionist organisation established in 1902 for the economic purposes of buying national land in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), why did it become so involved in the fashioning of Zionist education? Why did it create a variety of educational projects for all those years? Who was responsible for them? What were the practical and educational results of collecting bottles or the weekly donation? What was the significance of the different symbols the JNF circulated, in particular the Blue Box? These and other questions led to the writing of this book. It attempts to expose the tip of the iceberg of the JNF’s work in Israel and the Diaspora in the areas noted. The organisational responsibility for carrying out these activities lay with the Propaganda Department, as it was called, which was one of the four divisions of the institution. Later on sub-departments within this department, namely Newspapers and Schools and Youth developed, and they all worked together under the heads of the Propaganda Department.