The Jewish National Fund (Hebrew: קרן קימת לישראל, Keren Kayemet LeYisrael) (abbreviated as JNF, and sometimes KKL) was founded in 1901 to buy and develop land in Palestine (later Israel) for Jewish settlement. By 2006, it owned 14% of the total land in Israel.

The JNF was founded at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel upon an earlier suggestion by Zvi Hermann Schapira to create an organization to buy and develop land in Palestine for Jewish settlement.

The JNF received its first parcel of land, 200 Turkish dunams (18 hectares) east of Hadera, as a 1903 gift from the Russian Zionist leader Issac Leib Goldberg of Vilnius. It became an olive grove.^[1] In 1904 and 1905, the JNF purchased land plots near the Sea of Galilee and at Ben Shemen. In 1921, JNF land holdings reached 25,000 acres (100 km²), rising to 50,000 acres (200 km²) by 1927. At the end of 1935, JNF held 89,500 acres (362 km²) of land housing 108 Jewish communities. In 1939, 10% of the Jewish population of the British Mandate of Palestine lived on JNF land. JNF holdings by the end of the British Mandate period amounted to 936 km².^[2] From the beginning, JNF's policy was to lease land long-term rather than sell it.