Battlefields and the roots of conflict in Palestine

Hiyam Mousa’s olive grove, which has been passed down through her family for generations, is under threat of being confiscated due to the construction of a bypass road connecting illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to West Jerusalem. As we reached up through the gnarled branches to pick this year’s harvest, she told me, “Destroying the trees is eliminating the history of the Palestinians. The trees are now a symbol of resistance, of resilience. The olive tree is sacred, because it’s a blessed tree in the Qur’an, so having your olive trees destroyed is like having your heart ripped from your chest.”

Since 2000, it is estimated that more than two million trees have been destroyed across the occupied Palestinian territories, whether through Israeli military operations, the building of settler roads, expansion of the settlements, or construction of the separation wall. Israeli organisation Kerem Navot released a report in September, which revealed that approximately one-third of West Bank land is inaccessible to Palestinians. Even on the land that is available, farmers also have to contend with burgeoning settler violence.

On 1 November, for example, a group of settlers blocked access to olive pickers on the outskirts of Burin village where, a few weeks’ earlier, settlers from the Yitzhar settlement had burned dozens of acres of Palestinian agricultural land and attacked farmers with stones, injuring four.

Unfortunately, such incidents are not uncommon. Confidential Israel Defence Forces (IDF) documents leaked to Haaretz in 2013 reveal how groves which are ostensibly under Israeli protection are often attacked. According to Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din, 97.4 per cent of investigations into the damage or destruction of Palestinian olive trees in the West Bank have been closed due to police failings.

With more than ten per cent of Palestine’s olive trees being destroyed since 2001, the threat to the olive industry has potentially devastating implications for numerous others, alongside the 100,000 families which rely on their agricultural output.

According to Baha Hilo, co-founder of To Be There, “The olive tree is the source of 40 per cent of production in Palestine. Each tree produces up to nine kilograms of olives which, once pressed, become 2 litres of oil, plus when you prune them they give you firewood.”

Besides the olives, he adds, and pressing the olives into oil, there are many industries that have developed which are based on the existence of the tree. “Soap is the obvious example.”

Some of the trees are 5,000 years old and survived the Persian and Roman Empires, the Crusades and British imperialism, amongst other historical turmoil. They do not merely hold an economic significance to Palestinian cultivators.

“Olive trees are not treated as things or objects,” Hilo explains. “You can easily hear people say, ‘It’s like killing a member of my family’. Because you don’t only kill the tree, you kill every part of your family’s history around that tree… When you remove the thing that connects them with these past generations you’re eliminating their history on that piece of land.”

In 2006 the chief inspector of Israel’s civil administration, David Kishik, stated: “Like children, their trees look so naïve, as if they can’t harm anyone. But like [their] children, several years later they turn into a ticking bomb.”

Israel’s forestation policies

Since 1901, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organisation founded by the Fifth Zionist Congress, has planted over 240 million trees in Israel; most are pine trees.

Prominent academics have claimed that the introduction of the pine, which is a fast-growing, principally European species, to the Holy Land had a two-fold mission for the Zionist national project. Firstly, the so-called “green lungs” of the fledgling state transformed the landscape ecologically and culturally from an Arabic desert to a new “Europeanised” land, for the influx of Jewish migrants. However, the trees were also used to cover evidence of the events of 1947-48, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe”, when the state of Israel was created on Palestinian land. As Ilan Pappé and Samar Jaber noted, “Covering ethnic cleansing with pine trees is probably the most cynical method employed by Israel in its quest to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible.”

Mount Carmel National Park near Haifa is the largest example, with the expansive pine forest covering the ruins of Ijzim, Umm Al-Zinat and Khubbaza villages, amongst others.

In an interview published in the Journal of Palestinian Studies, Muhammad Abu Al-Hayja describes how the planting of cypress trees around the village of Ayn Hawd was designed to erase any memory or visual reminder of the Palestinian community that used to live there.

“To this day I hate cypress trees, because they killed our fruit trees and were planted right in front of our houses to close us in, to shut out the air, to block the view of the sea. It’s not that we hate nature—we are the children of nature here. But the cypresses were planted for the Judaisation of the area. When I see them I think of what the Jews have done to us since 1948.”

Not only are the JNF’s forestation policies erasing a culture, but the introduction of non-native species to Israel could also have biologically devastating consequences. According to environmental professor at Al-Quds Bard Honours College Alice Gray, “The JNF’s planting campaign ensured that farmers would be unable to return to their land, as pines alter the chemistry of the soil, preventing the development of agricultural crops.”

In addition, the JNF plans to plant a 12-kilometre strip of eucalyptus trees around the Gaza Strip for “security” reasons. However, eucalyptus trees are extremely susceptible to wild fires, and emit a substance that inhibits the growth of other species nearby, disrupting the native eco-system.

Thus, it seems that conflict in the Holy Land is rooted not just in politics, but in the very earth underfoot. In its harnessing of the natural environment for political gain, Israel has created literal “battlefields”, flouting the axiom that “nature knows no boundaries”. The stated mission to “make the desert bloom” has provided Israel with both ideological and physical foundations for expansionist policies, which appear to have taken precedence over sustainability and environmental conservation.

For Palestinians, the very presence of the olive tree, which requires human cultivation to thrive, is a direct challenge to the Zionist claim that theirs was a “land without a people”, and provides a tangible connection with their ancestral roots. The olive tree is often referred to as a metaphorical expression of sumud – literally translated as “steadfastness” – a Palestinian concept that denotes unyielding defiance, and for many represents the struggle to remain on their land. The uprooting or burning of olive trees takes on a sinister parallel when considering the extensive Israeli housing demolitions, which cause widespread displacement and literally “uproot” Palestinians from their origins.

The irony is pointed out by Sonjar Karkar, founder of Women for Palestine, “Israel’s uprooting of olive trees is contrary to the Jewish halakhic principle whose origin is found in the Torah: ‘Even if you are at war with a city… you must not destroy its trees’.” That irony is lost on Zionist policymakers.

Megan Hanna is an independent journalist and photographer based in Palestine; follow her on twitter, @Megan_Hanna_.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.