Summary
The Jewish National Fund project of planting fast-growing pine, cypress and fir across Palestine — under the slogan “making the desert bloom” — as a technology of erasure: trees planted to hold land, mark ownership, conceal soldiers and cover depopulated Palestinian villages, while Palestinian olive, fig and almond trees were read as “nothing” and uprooted, as traced from 1908 to the present in Chapter 3 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.112-123).
Details
- The repudiation of the carefully curated Palestinian landscape is its guiding logic: Zionist settlers sought to, in Joseph Massad’s words, “transform … a ‘desolate’ and ‘neglected’ Asiatic desert into a blooming, green European terrain full of forests and trees”, gaining legitimacy through the claim that the native inhabitants did not properly care for their land (PDF p.113).
- Simon Schama describes diaspora Jews putting coins in JNF boxes: “The trees were our proxy immigrants, the forests our implantation”; “The diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be, if not a forest, fixed and tall?” (PDF p.114).
- The project began in 1908 with a donor-funded olive grove to be named the Herzl Forest; it has since seen over 240 million trees planted across Palestine/Israel (PDF p.114).
- The JNF described its trees as “the best guards of the land”: “walls and fences can be cut down. A tree says, ‘we are here.’ If you plant a tree, that’s your land” (PDF p.116).
- Its contemporary forms in Kelly’s account include “security groves” and boundary markers in the West Bank, forests as placeholders for future settlements, nature reserves severing Palestinians from their groves, and a JNF “peace forest” planned for the repeatedly demolished Bedouin village of Al-Araqib, funded by the evangelical Christian Zionist station GOD TV (PDF p.111, 121).
- The Olive Tree Campaign’s planting and narration is organized as its counter-practice: recitation against erasure, replanting olive trees on threatened land and narrating the continuity between the saplings uprooted in 1908, the “tiny wildflowers crushed” in 1948, and the groves razed in 2013 (PDF p.128).
Where sources disagree
No disagreement is recorded in the pages read so far; other sources’ accounts of the JNF are held on Jewish National Fund.
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Jewish National Fund, Joseph Weitz, Olive Tree Campaign, Deir Yassin, Nakba, Solidarity Tourism