GEORGE KING

Thirty-five years ago, while on a two-week tour of Israel arranged by the Israel Nature Reserves Authority, our group of South African musicians was taken to visit a great many important sites, historical, holy, cultural and environmental, all of them fascinating. But as we travelled through part of Lower Galilee on our second day, we were taken off the main road and up a track through a deserted field where we stopped and got out of our bus. We walked a little way in the field that had a fair amount of smallish scattered rocks, and were led to a clump of saplings waiting to be planted in freshly dug holes. There we were invited to select a sapling of our choice and plant it in one of the prepared holes. It was explained to us that visitors to Israel were always invited to contribute to the country’s reforestation project. We could choose from a selection of pine and cedar saplings, and in doing so help restore the ancient landscape to its former glory – or so we were told. I remember going for a cedar as being indigenous to the region (as I mistakenly thought at the time), and duly filled in my tiny plot with Palestinian-Israeli soil. Relying solely on my memory, and not having kept any written record of the event, I am now unable to identify the site’s gently sloping location.

The Israeli government prides itself by claiming that it is one of the only nations in the world that entered the 21st century with more trees than it had 100 years ago. Since its inception, Israel has been devoted to sustainable forest management and afforestation, planting trees in semi-arid areas. Today over 200 million trees in forests and woodlands covering some 300,000 acres provide Israelis with a wide range of opportunities for outdoor recreation and appreciation of nature’ ^{[1]Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2021} – or so we were told.

But beneath the national pride in creating new forests where apparently no forests grew are several contentious issues, as argued by a variety of scholars. While the article on afforestation in the Wikipedia entry ‘JNF (Jewish National Fund)’ states that the millions of trees planted as part of the afforestation project were ‘largely in semi-arid, rocky, hilly terrain in which cultivation is not cost-effective and the risk of land degradation is high’, you begin to wonder why that gentle slope where we planted trees was apparently ‘barren’. But at the time, and having spent hardly 24 hours in the country, I don’t think any of us gave it a thought. Down in the valley below us – perhaps as little as 500m away – was a green patch of trees in apparently good shape. We were guests in the country, being treated hospitably, and were now invited to mark our visit by planting a tree in that rustic countryside. How nice!

On the face of it, then, the JNF afforestation project is a noble enterprise. But it has attracted an enormous amount of commentary and criticism, both within Israel and globally. These concerns deal with at least three interrelated issues which we shall consider briefly here. To start with, the contention by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs that there are now more trees in the country than a century ago is not backed up by any figures, references or photographic evidence. How can we be certain of the claim that there were fewer trees in 1921 than there are now? Was most of the land uninhabited back then, and the land barren? And was the field where we had been invited to plant trees similarly devoid of settlement or cultivation in the past?

Heidi Grunebaum, South African film-maker and research associate at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, provides some answers to these questions when she writes that ‘The massive tree-planting of the JNF has been an important mechanism in obliterating Palestinians’ presence from the land. International supporters of the JNF believe that their tax-deductible tree-planting sponsorships contribute to a noble act of environmental preservation, and not of destruction.’ She adds: ‘The organization’s involvement in settlement, infrastructural, forestation and other state projects includes areas from which Palestinians had been depopulated and prevented from return. With few physical traces of Palestinian presence, it has been easier for Israel to dismiss Palestinian claims for acknowledgement and return as tendentious’.^{[2]Grunebaum 2013} This destruction of evidence pointing to previous Palestinian presence within Israel outside the West Bank areas has been raised again and again by researchers and commentators.

Details of the far-reaching consequences of Israel’s politicization of the afforestation project are vividly brought home by Susan Nathan in her book The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. British-born, Nathan moved from her home in Tel Aviv to an Arab town in the northern part of Israel in order to learn at first hand about the challenges and discrimination encountered by Arabs who are technically Israeli citizens. She notes that forests were planted on the site of abandoned Arab villages after the 1948 war and that olive trees were replaced by pine and cypress trees.^{[3]Nathan 2005: 129-131} In her review of Nathan’s book, Laura Levitt tells us that what she found most upsetting were the stories about ‘the ongoing efforts to confiscate ancestral land and property from Arab Israeli citizens’.

These are places that had been inhabited by these Palestinian families for centuries. … Israel’s ongoing land acquisition policies are directly linked to efforts to contain Arab Israeli citizens in towns and villages that can no longer accommodate them. … Taken together all of these policies assure that Israel will remain a Jewish State. In other words, for Israel to be a Jewish State these discriminatory policies are crucial. They also mean that Israel cannot be a truly democratic state.^{[4]Levitt 2005.}

It’s sobering to find both that ‘more than two-thirds of KKL forests and sites – 46 out of 68 – conceal or are located on the ruins of Palestinian villages demolished by Israel’^{[5]Aparicio 2014} and that during the Nakba (Arabic for ‘destruction’) of 1948, a whopping 95% of the indigenous population was massacred or forcibly expelled from Palestine. The afforestation project appears to have had far more to do with camouflage and denial than with genuine restitution of a barren physical landscape. This becomes very apparent in the book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappé (and there is a review of it by Raja Shehadeh in the Journal for Palestine Studies Issue 71, 2007). Pappé writes: ‘where remnants of Palestinian villages are still visible, it has been the mission of the Jewish National fund (JNF) to conceal them, not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence’.^{[6]Pappé 2006: 228} He continues:

Deeply rooted in the people’s psyche, this mechanism works through exactly this replacement of Palestinian sites of traumas and memory by spaces of leisure and entertainment for Israelis. In other words, what the JNF texts represent as an ‘ecological concern’ is yet one more official Israeli effort to deny the Nakbeh and conceal the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy.^[7]ibid.

Let’s turn now to some of the specifically ecological problems created by the Israeli government’s afforestation project. Whatever the motives, planting forests in this part of the world is all very well: but not all forests are equal. When is a forest not a forest?

This is not a trick question. Simply putting saplings into the ground and caring for them is far from enough. According to Dominick DellaSala (Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology), ‘To an ecologist, a real forest is a place where the sum-of-the-ecosystem parts is greater than the whole’. He explains:

Real forests are superior to their fake counterparts in every aspect. They are complex structurally from the penthouse (forest canopy) to the basement (soils). Are connected by an Avatar-like sub-highway of root masses and fungal mats that soak up vital soil nutrients and moisture.^{[8]DelaSalla 2025.}

He calls plantations and tree farms ‘fake forests’ because they are

a poor substitute for real forests particularly old-growth stands – particularly old-growth stands. They are prone to intense forest fires, are climate polluters, and are biologically ‘ecosystems.'^{[9]DellaSala 2025.}

The anonymous author of ‘Green Colonialism in Palestine’, posted in Slow Factory (an environmental and social justice non-profit organization), notes that ‘planting trees is arguably the most insidious form of Palestinian erasure, and a lot of times it appears as protected parks, forests or natural reserves. Some call this an attempt to greenwash their theft’ (Slow Factory n.d., but apparently posted in November 2023 as there is a reference to that date in the text).

Another aspect to consider here is the choice of tree species. Ghada Sasa, a PhD Candidate in Political Science (International Relations) at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and possessing a Master of Environmental Studies, is quoted in Slow Factory’s ‘Green colonialism in Palestine’ as saying that Zionists have ‘converted Palestine into a tinder box’ by planting over 250 million trees since 1948, of which a large percentage are invasive pines and eucalyptus. With their oily resin these alien species are not only highly flammable; the eucalyptus in particular ‘is a thirsty tree that increases the effects of water scarcity in areas like the West Bank or other parts of Palestine’. 

Alon Mizrahi, the former Israeli footballer turned anti-Zionist and now gone into exile, backs up these observations when he tells how he had grown up beside one such ‘forest’, and even without knowing anything about the history of Zionism, it always felt strange to him, but never magical, the way a real forest feels. ‘Like those who planted them, they emit a sense of shallowness and fragility,’ he writes.^{[10]Jassat, 2025} He describes how many of Israel’s nature parks ‘are in fact camouflage – draped over the graveyards of erased Palestinian villages’, and concludes with the image of Israeli children celebrating Independence Day with their families in one of those parks, as many of them do. ‘They are literally dancing over the graves of the people Israel massacred, ethnically cleansed, and dispossessed.’

And in a piece in the Mail & Guardian earlier this year, veteran activist Ronnie Kasrils calls the blazing wildfires in parts of Israel during late April and early May this year ‘an apt symbol for the smouldering toxins in a failing Zionist system turning to ash. … Those like me, who were seduced as innocent children by the thieving Jewish national fund (JNF) into providing pocket money to plant trees ostensibly to make the desert bloom, can feel redeemed by whatever cause is now wiping the stolen terrain of its camouflage’.^{[11]Kasrils 2025} He describes how when he was Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry in South Africa’s early democratic government he prevented ‘a so-called South Africa Forest in the Galilee area of Occupied Palestine from being re-named the Nelson Mandela Forest’. As he describes it, ‘the implanted vegetation conceals the depopulated and destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, visited by South African filmmaker Heidi Grunebaum, who made a moving documentary’.

But it is not only the destruction of Palestinian villages and the planting of fake forests to disguise whatever evidence may remain of their presence in order to support the false contention that the land was uninhabited before the establishment of the state of Israel that threatens today’s Palestinians. Paul Josephson^[12]2025 uses the term ‘environmental Nakba’ (environmental catastrophe) to describe the overall ‘misappropriation of environmentalism to eliminate the Indigenous people of Palestine and usurp its resources’. Apart from Israel’s destruction of over a million olive and fruit trees in occupied Palestine since the 1967 war, the country has developed various technological systems to enforce separation between Palestinians, within both Gaza and the West Bank areas. Josephson notes that approximately equal numbers of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians today live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, but Palestine and the Palestinians are not connected to the national electricity or water grids, and that ‘Israel controls hydraulic infrastructure, and it has purposely diverted water from Palestine’. He adds that the environmental Nakba ‘accelerated after the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023’.

Ghada Sasa, who teaches political science at McMaster University in Canada, provides a useful summary of the processes used to make life difficult for Palestinians in the country. She argues (2015) that Israel primarily establishes the forests and nature reserves to (1) justify land grab; (2) prevent the return of Palestinian refugees; (3) dehistoricise, Judaise, and Europeanise Palestine, erasing Palestinian identity and suppressing resistance to Israeli oppression; and (4) greenwash its apartheid image.

This brings us to our last main consideration here, though all of them are interwoven: one that directly involves all of us in South Africa. Grunebaum’s feature-length documentary The Village Under the Forest, directed by South African Emmy Award winner Mark Kaplan, explores the hidden remains of the Palestinian village of Lubya, with herself as narrator. Writing in ‘Voices from the South’, the E-Newsletter of the Karibu Foundation (an entity based in Oslo that supports voices from the Global South ‘who provide alternatives to the dominant paradigms of power, distribution and development’), Grunebaum sets out some background to the documentary. She writes that the Lubya village was destroyed by the Israelis and hidden beneath ‘a purposefully cultivated forest plantation called the South Africa Forest. Using the forest and the village ruins as metaphors, the documentary explores themes related to the erasure and persistence of memory and dares to imagine a future in which dignity, acknowledgment and co-habitation become shared possibilities in Israel and Palestine’.^{[13]Grunebaum 2013} She adds ‘With few physical traces of Palestinian presence, it has been easier for Israel to dismiss Palestinian claims for acknowledgement and return as tendentious’.

Grunebaum has also published an important and substantial research paper in Anthropology Southern Africa. There she discusses in some detail how tree-planting in JNF forests by non-Israeli Jewish communities in different parts of the world ‘has conscripted transnational complicity with the excision of Palestinians from their homes and lands where the forests have been cultivated upon destroyed villages’,^{[14]2014, 214} in turn enabling the Nakba ‘to be erased from space and consciousness.’^[15]214 She backs up her contention by referring to a substantial and growing interdisciplinary number of scholars who have examined how the JNF forests ‘have become material and iconic signifiers of the nationalistic endeavour to re-narrate and re-present the topography of Israel so as to spatially and territorially reflect the claims of modern political Zionism’.

Writing in The Electronic Intifada of 5 May 2015, Sarah Levy describes how ‘campaigners with the group Stop the JNF in South Africa are trying to highlight how the land where the [South Africa] forest is located was once the site of the Palestinian village of Lubya. It was destroyed by Zionist forces during the Nakba …, the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948’. On 1 May 2015 a number of South Africans who had previously given money to the JNF issued a public apology. During the ceremony, held in the forest following a tour of the destroyed village, activist Shereen Usdin of the group South Africa Stop the JNF, said ‘Now as Jewish South Africans we have come here to this forest and to the ruins of Lubya in order to acknowledge and to take responsibility for this injustice.’^{[16]Levy, 2015}

Meanwhile, in 2016 National Director of the Jewish National Fund of SA Amber Cummins published a letter in the South African Jewish Report claiming that ‘researcher/historian Brian Shapiro’ had written up ‘a full objective overview of the [Lubya] area.’^{[17]Cummin 2016} There is no record I could find of any such report by Brian Shapiro on the Internet, and Cummins gives no reference, thus it seems prudent at this stage to disregard her claim in the light of the lack of evidence to the contrary.

You may well ask what would be an appropriate response other than outrage to these and many more horrific accounts of coldblooded deceit, fakery and injustice. Shehadeh points out that Ilan Pappé’s book on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is essentially a desperate appeal for both sides, Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and for the international community to come to terms with the past. So it seems fitting to give the last word here on this sorry story of fields, forests and fakery to Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, political scientist, and leading figure among Israel’s ‘New Historians’, who states the case succinctly and unequivocally for all the naysayers of this world:

Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem was never its Jewishness. Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is its ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margin of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight – and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desecrate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck us all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through Arab Muslim worlds but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.^{[18]Pappé 260-1}