When Zionists talk about Israel making the desert bloom, they are using the most insidious language to describe Israel’s ecocide of Palestinian ecosystems and biome, which is an often overlooked casualty of colonial violence.
One of the worst perpetrators of this ongoing ecocide is the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli organisation that disguises itself as an environmental NGO yet owns around 13% of the occupied land in Palestine (which I’ll bring up a lot below). The JNF can be considered the main reason Zionists love to brag about the number of tress and forests that they have planted in Palestine, while skipping over the part that addresses what trees, where they are planted, and why they're planted in the specific areas.
As for what kind of trees, the JNF planted vast swaths of non-native trees, mainly pine and eucalyptus trees, in place of indigenous arboreta. Both trees are invasive species; pine is not indigenous to the land, and therefore it is not a sustainable plant. Pines planted by Israel often fail to adapt to the soil which requires replanting them over and over again. Additionally, they require huge amounts of water, which in turn affects water systems and aquifers around them. On top of that, the acidic pine needles that the tree sheds tend to destroy all surrounding small plants, gravely affecting the livelihood of Palestinian shepherds whose animals depend on grazing the land. Lastly, and not to forget, that these invasive plants are more prone to fires. As Palestinian scholar Ghada Sasa put it, zionists have "converted Palestine into a tinder box" over the past century, which was evident in 2010’s Mount Carmel wildfire, which was the worst in Israel’s history. Ironically, this fire revealed underneath it agricultural terraces constructed by Palestinian farmers, which were purposely obscured by Israel when constructing the park.
With that, and as for where these forests are stationed, they are often built on top of the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages. Take for example Birya Forest, Israel's largest man-made forest in the north, and was strategically planted over the ruins of six different Palestinian villages, one of which was 'Ayn Zaytoun (meaning spring of olives), a farming village that used to home 1,000 Palestinians, who were ethnically cleansed by Israel to make way for this forest. Other examples include the Canada Park or Carmel National Park. In places like the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, the ruins of demolished Palestinian homes can be spotted among the pine trees, and in this particular case, it’s the ruins of the village of Ajour.
Finally, the reason why the JNF seems to be fixated on pine trees for example is primarily because to them, pine trees help evoke an imagery of European wilderness, and this is evident with Jewish settlers nicknaming the Carmel National Park "little Switzerland", despite it being partially built on top of the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Tira. Additionally, pine trees grow fast, which works in Israel’s favour to attempt to accelerate the erasure of Palestinian history and memory. The JNF usually distributes pine saplings to settlers to plant annually, and they understand that while these cost nothing, yet, in their own words, there will make a forest in 10 years’ time.
This is all scratching at the surface of Israel’s green colonialism and ecocide in Palestine, and I should probably make another post to talk about Israel’s deliberate destruction of Palestinian farmland and crops to build its Jewish-only roads and separation apartheid wall, or how it pays tax incentives to Israeli companies with the highest polluting rates to move to the West Bank, or how they drained the oldest documented lake in history despite scientist warnings, or the continued destruction of olive trees (about one million) by the state of Israel and its violent settlers. But in any case, at this point no one can buy into Israel’s green-washing of its genocide, especially after seeing what they had done to Gaza’s lands, particularly fertile lands.
Simply put, Zionism has employed every method at its disposal to try to erase Palestinians and their history, including planting trees.
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