Tree planting in Palestine
On a stony hillside in
what was once Judea, a group of people are swinging pickaxes, carrying young
saplings, digging holes, planting and protecting the new trees with chicken
wire. These people are all Jews. This is not a Kibbutz. It is not an Israeli settlement.
This is land belonging to a family of Christian Palestinians.
Every year, around February time, Jews throughout the world observe the holiday of Tu Bishvat,
colloquially referred to as "the birthday of the trees." This
February, no fewer than three Jewish organizations devoted their efforts to
planting in the Palestinian territories with the express purpose of opposing
the occupation. I joined one of these -
the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, which initiated a tree planting campaign,
bringing a delegation of more than 20 Jewish anti-occupation activists to plant
olive saplings at the Tent of Nations, a family farm where the IDF uprooted
1,500 olive trees. Director for the Center for Jewish Nonviolence Ilana Sumka
surmised that the uprooting at the Tent of Nations was due to its proximity to
a nearby settlement: "We can only guess why the Israeli military - which
gave Tent of Nations neither advance warning nor compensation - would destroy
1,500 fruit trees on private Palestinian property. A new road to the nearby
settlements, or perhaps a new settlement altogether? I can't think of a good
reason for the destruction of those trees or a good reason to antagonize a
peaceful family."
The Tent of Nations
Known originally as Dahers’
Vineyard, the land now known as the Tent of Nations was purchased in 1916 by
Daher Nassar, the father of Bishara, and grandfather of the Nassar family, who
now run the Tent of Nations project. Since that time, many family members have
worked the land by day, and slept in caves by night. The land has produced
olives, grapes, almonds, wheat and other crops.
In 1991, the Israeli government
declared the whole area including the Nassar’s portion to be Israeli ‘state
land’. The Nassar family have all the original land registration papers and
have cultivated the land through Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli
governance; clearly demonstrating that the Israeli government has no right to
declare it theirs.
The family challenged Israel’s
declaration and the case was brought to the court. But in 2001, though the land
case was still unresolved, the local council of Israeli settlements decided to
build a road through the east side of the Nassar land. This was challenged, and
the building stopped. Nevertheless, once again in 2002, the same council took a
decision to build a road all the way through the Nassar land, this time through
the west side. The Nassars were able to stop both road projects through gaining
the intervention of the Israeli courts.
In 2005 the case of the land
ownership was debated in the high court, and after many postponements the
Nassar family were told that they could begin the process of registering their
land with the Israeli authorities. For over 20 years now, the family are still
struggling to hold on to the land and, under the slogan “We refuse to be
enemies”, they use their farm to bring Israeli and Palestinian groups together
to learn peace.
Zionism and Trees
The poignancy of planting
trees on this land was not lost on those of us who grew up with Zionist
narratives. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Zionist organization that,
among other things, runs the Taglit-Birthright program, has for years used tree
planting to strengthen the relationship between diaspora Jews and the State of
Israel. It has become frequent practice for Jews to donate money to the JNF for
tree planting - not only on Tu Bishvat, but also to mark the occasion of other
major life turning points - births, deaths, weddings, bar and bat mitzvah, among
others. The JNF website boasts that it has planted more than 240 million trees
in Israel.
The practice of tree
planting embodies not only a specific tactical offensive, but also symbolizes
an entire narrative central to Zionist ideology. The JNF website, in explaining
why tree planting is a priority, states, "When the pioneers of the State
[of Israel] arrived, they were greeted by barren land." The narrative of
barren land is absolutely central to the narrative of Zionism, as is the
accompanying narrative that until the arrival of Jewish settlers, the land was
empty not only of agriculture, but also of people. These tropes operate in
Zionist discourses in order to discredit the vibrant histories of Palestinians
in the land now occupied by Israel – land which was never barren and had been
cultivated by Palestinians for centuries.
In addition to tree
planting, tree uprooting is another political tactic utilized in the region.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates
that more than 7,342 olive trees were damaged between January and September
2014 (and tens of thousands over recent years). Over 100,000 Palestinian
families rely, either directly or indirectly, on the olive harvest for their
survival. Tree uprooting has thus emerged as a tactic of dispossessing
Palestinians from their land as well as punishing, intimidating and terrorizing
those who resist. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and vigilante settlers have used
tree uprooting as a terror tactic in recent years. This despite the fact that
the Torah explicitly says that one's enemies' trees should never be destroyed.
Threatened olive trees at Tel Rumeida
The Delegation
Our delegation of mainly
American Jews included 3 rabbis, a civil rights activist who had been one of
the organisers of Freedom Summer as part of the civil rights movement in the
south of the USA 50 years ago, and the recently retired head of USAid for the
West Bank and Gaza, as well as amazing, energetic young activists working
tirelessly for the cause of justice for Palestinians. As well as the tree
planting the delegation met with leading non-violent activists from both Israel
and Palestine and leading Palestinian politicians. We visited Hebron and the
South Hebron Hills, meeting with UN worker Hamed Quwasmeh and Breaking the
Silence's Shay Davidovitch. We heard a range of views, ranging from the state
building emphasis of
Salam Fayyad, ex- Prime Minister of the Palestinian
Authority, the one state approach of people like Sami Awad, seeking to engage
with some settler leaders to challenge some of the "non-negotiables"
and the equal rights based approach of Sam Bahour, a leading business man and
political activist in Ramallah.
New ideas
Sam Bahour’s proposals
were most interesting to me and are worth looking at in some detail. He takes
as his starting point the need to resolve two crucial ambiguities regarding
Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza: its rule over the Palestinians and
the colonization of their land. Resolving these matters is essential to
achieving a final resolution of the conflict.
First, he asks, is it,
or is it not, an occupation? The entire world, including the US, thinks it is,
and therefore considers the Fourth Geneva Convention and other relevant
provisions of international law to apply. The Israeli government contests this
on technical grounds, arguing that the Geneva Convention relates only to the
sovereign territory of a High Contracting Party, and that Jordan and Egypt did
not have legal sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip (respectively)
when they previously governed these territories. But at other times, the
Israeli authorities rely on the Geneva Convention to validate their policies,
particularly with regard to treating Palestinians under Israel’s jurisdiction
but outside its sovereign territory differently from Israeli citizens.
Israel should no longer
be able to have it both ways. The laws of occupation either apply or do not
apply. If it is an occupation, it is beyond time for Israel’s custodianship —
supposedly provisional — to be brought to an end. If it is not an occupation,
there is no justification for denying equal rights to everyone who is subject
to Israeli rule, whether Israeli or Palestinian. He wants the Israeli
government put on notice that, by the 50th anniversary of the occupation, it
must make up its mind definitively one way or the other. This would give it
until June 2017 to make its choice between relinquishing the occupied territory
— either directly to the Palestinians or possibly to a temporary international
trusteeship in the first instance — or alternatively granting full and equal
citizenship rights to everyone living under its jurisdiction.
He wants an end to the divisive
and increasingly stifling one-state-versus-two-states straightjacket that tends
to polarize debate and in practice ends up perpetuating the status quo. His aim
is to bring matters to a head and to enable people to advocate equal rights for
Palestinians and Israelis, free of the implication that this necessarily
carries a threat to the existence of the state of Israel. Maybe there will be
two states, maybe one, ultimately people with equal rights in the region will
decide, but until the Palestinians, like the Israelis, achieve their primary
choice of self-determination in their own state (if ever they do), they should
no longer, in the modern era, be denied equal rights in whatever lands they
inhabit.
The army in Hebron blocks our way
Trials and tribulations
As a delegation we had
some brushes with the army whilst we were there. Our meeting with Issa Amro of
Youth Against Settlements in Hebron was almost prevented by the army refusing
us access. Eventually they allowed us to proceed by walking through Palestinian
gardens rather than past Jewish houses. They explained that just as they would
not allow right wing settler supporters to walk past Palestinian houses, they
were not going to allow us - meeting with a Palestinian activist - to walk past
Jewish houses. Issa had just been released from police custody after an
altercation with a settler, who had followed him shouting "We can't wait
for ISIS to come and behead you all". The settler was not detained.
We did not manage to
plant all the trees we had hoped to. It was a slow process at times. Thorny
bushes that take water away from the young saplings had to be uprooted. As I
swung my pickaxe at the usurpers I looked around me at the surrounding Israeli
settlements, which also deprive Palestinians of water. Whilst settlements boast
swimming pools, vineyards and verdant parks, attempts to upgrade and augment
water systems in Area C of the West Bank are met with demolition orders. Area C
is the land controlled by the Israeli military since the zoning of the West
Bank, supposed to be a temporary measure leading to the formation of a
Palestinian state, by the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. It constitutes 62%
of the West Bank. 650,000 Israeli settlers now live there, illegally under
international law.
I witnessed one such
problem in the South Hebron Hills where the last of four water tanks belonging
to a local Palestinian farmer, Noor Idris, was due to be demolished within 12
Noor Idris, fighting a losing battle for his last water
tank
days of our visit. In
what is essentially desert, it would be impossible to farm his 20 acres of land
without a water supply. If Noor can produce a master plan for the area, with
input from a qualified surveyor, in 12 days and at a cost of about 60,000 shekels
(£10,000), he may stand some chance of reversing the demolition order. Given
time there are human rights organisations, like Bimcom, an organisation of Israeli
planners, that can help. But things are not looking good for Noor. The Israeiis
want Area C cleared of people like him. They want Palestinians to head for the
towns, leaving areas like the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley in
Israeli hands. And to achieve this the Israelis use a hodge podge of outdated
planning laws, from times of Ottoman, British Mandate and Jordanian rule.
At Tent of Nations we
planted 200 trees and 500 altogether were paid for by the delegation's
fund-raising. The solidarity day we had planned for 100 activists at the Tent
of Nations, to plant the rest, had to be cancelled. This was terribly
disappointing, as many Israeli activists including Rabbis for human rights, had
planned to be with us. But the cancellation was not for any of the reasons one
might have feared or expected. But because the area was under a foot of snow!
Jerusalem in the snow
Hebron
I spent a week prior to
meeting up with the delegation in the second oldest and largest Palestinian
town in the West Bank, Hebron. This deserves a whole article of its own. It is
the only place that has an Israeli settlement right in the middle of the town,
and a huge army presence protects the 500 or so settlers living there. It is
where 21 years ago Baruch Goldstein, one of the settlers, massacred 29 people
and injured 100 or so others whilst they were at prayer in the Ibrahim mosque.
Since then Palestinians have lived under strict curfew and military
supervision, whilst settlers perpetrate with impunity everyday acts of
violence.
The vegetable market, Hebron, now emptied and closed by
the army
My focus while I was
there was the land abutting the settler area above the town in the suburb of
Tel Rumeida, land belonging to the Palestinian Abu Heikel family. This land has
been systematically encroached upon and stolen and most recently several fields
were laid bare of their fruit trees and bulldozed in the name of “archaeology”.
No items of specifically Jewish interest have been uncovered – only Roman and
Canaanite walls. The Abu Heikels and their neighbours fight a daily battle to
remain on and protect their land. It is land they have worked since the 1930s –
land which they bought and rented from Jewish survivors of the 1929 massacre in
Hebron. The Abu Heikels were one of 19 families that hid Jewish families in
their houses during the Arab revolt which sparked off the massacre. Because
their land once belonged to Jews the settlers justify their attempts to claim
it. The families of those Jews who originally lived there want no such theft in
their name. But the cycle of hatred, harassment and land grab continues.
Final reflections
For me, as someone of Jewish
heritage, being part of the delegation was a rare and precious thing. It made
me realise how different it is to be Jewish in America as opposed to Britain.
Here our observant Jewish community is small, feels quite threatened, and can
be quite conservative. Most Jews who are radical and who support rights for
Palestinians tend to be secular. The huge Jewish community in the States is so
much more varied and opinions on Israel/Palestine amongst Jews and synagogues
cover the whole spectrum. Organisations like J Street and Jewish Voice for
Peace and T’ruah, the Rabbinic call for human rights, challenge AIPAC, the huge
advocate for Israel in the US. On our last Friday together we met up, alongside
other Jews, at the house of Israeli artist Jo Milgrom, for a Shabbat dinner. I
was one of only a tiny handful of people that could not join in the Hebrew
songs and prayers. I felt a sudden pang of loss for this disconnection from my
heritage. I realise how, for so many Jews, myself included, the situation in
Israel/Palestine skews our relationship to our own Jewishness and to the
radical traditions that are so crucial to Jewish identity.
