The yearly harvest of the bushy herb usually involves three actors: za’atar, Palestinians, and the black goat. The Israeli government sought to undermine this tradition of multispecies interaction. It targeted the native Palestinian black goats in 1950 by enacting the “Black Goat Laws,” which accused them of overgrazing the land and damaging the plantings of soil-acidifying pine, thereby criminalizing their herding by the Arab farmer, the fellah. In the same year, imports of non-native white goats and plants from Switzerland increased. Soon after the laws’ implementation, gatherers saw a decline in the quantity and quality of wild za’atar. This was due to a disruption in the “natural trimming by gatherers and goats,” as Muzna Bishara states, which “strengthened the plants and helped them grow fresh branches in the following year.” Moreover, the native black goats played a vital role in wildfire prevention practices, so that, with their removal, fire risks began to slowly increase. Concern about the goats’ environmental impact diminished by the 1970s; however, during the same decade, the Green Patrol of Israel increased its enforcement of the ban, with methods so brutal that the State Comptroller censured the unit in his 1980 report. As a result, the herded goat population fell from 220,000 to 80,000. By 2013, only 2,000 goats were left, and, although the ban was repealed in 2018, it had already left its mark: quietly removing “dunam after dunam, goat after goat”— a reference to an Ottoman unit of land measurement where the goal was to take Palestine piece by piece.
