The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (40 page)

The legislative takeover of the land and the process of turning it into JNF property was completed in 1967 when the Knesset passed a final law, the Law of Agricultural Settlement, that also prohibited the sub-letting of the Jewish-owned land of the JNF to non-Jews (until then only sale and direct lease were prohibited). The law furthermore ensured that water quotas set aside for the JNF lands could not be transferred to non-JNF lands (water is scarce in Israel and hence sufficient quotas are vital for agriculture).

The bottom line of this almost two-decade-long bureaucratic process (1949–1967) was that the legislation regarding the JNF, barring the selling, leasing and sub-letting of land to non-Jews, was put into effect for most of the state lands (more than ninety per cent of Israel’s land, seven per cent having been declared as private land). The primary objective of this legislation was to prevent Palestinians in Israel from regaining ownership, through purchase, of their own land or that of their people. This is why Israel never allowed the Palestinian minority to build even one new rural settlement or village, let alone a new town or city (apart from three Bedouin settlements in the early 1960s, which actually represented recognition by the state of the permanent residence sedentary tribes had taken up there). At the same time, Israel’s Jewish population, with a much lower natural growth, was able to build on these lands – apart from those destined for forestation – as many settlements, villages and cities as they wished, and wherever they wanted.

The Palestinian minority in Israel, seventeen per cent of the total population after ethnic cleansing, has been forced to make do with just three per cent of the land. They are allowed to build and live on only two per cent of
the land; the remaining one per cent was defined as agricultural land which cannot be built upon. In other words, today 1.3 million people live on that two per cent. Even with the privatisation of land that began in the 1990s, the JNF policy remains in place, thus excluding the Palestinians from the benefit that opening up the land market would provide for the public at large; that is, Israel’s Jews. However, not only have they been prevented from expanding over the land that was theirs, but also much of the land they owned before the 1948 war was confiscated from them, in the 1970s, for the building of new Jewish settlements in the Galilee and again, in the early 2000s, for the construction of the Segregation Wall and a new highway. One study has estimated that seventy per cent of the land belonging to the Palestinians in Israel has been either confiscated or made inaccessible to them.
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The final dispossession in the Galilee – so far – which parallels the confiscation of land in the West Bank for the two-fold purpose of building Jewish settlements and slowly, but surely, driving the Palestinians out of these areas, began after 1967.

In the early 1960s, before the final division of land between the ILA and the JNF, the latter launched Operation ‘Finally’ (
Sof-Sof
), which sought to further dispossess the Palestinians of land in the Galilee that was still in the villagers’ possession. The JNF offered to buy those lands or exchange them with lesser quality land elsewhere. But the villagers refused – their steadfastness forms one of the truly heroic chapters in the struggle against the Zionist ethnic cleansing operations. The JNF then began erecting special military outposts at the entrances to the ‘stubborn’ villages in an effort to exert psychological pressure on the inhabitants. Even with such callous means, the JNF only achieved its goal in a few cases. As Arnon Soffer, a professor of geography at Haifa University, who is closely connected with the government, explains:

We were murderous, but it was not malice for the sake of malice. We acted out of a sense of being exposed to an existential threat. And there were objective reasons for this feeling. We were convinced that without Jewish territorial continuity, especially along the national water carrier [the aqueduct that runs from the Lake of Galilee to the south of the coutry], the Arabs would poison the water.
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That there are no fences or guard posts along the entire route of the aqueduct raises doubts about the sincerity of the concern expressed here. The
need for ‘territorial continuity’, on the other hand, does sound sincere: it was, after all, the main inspiration in 1948 for Israel’s massive operations of expulsion.

The dispossession of Palestinian lands did not only entail the expulsion of their legal owners and the prevention of their repatriation and regaining ownership. It was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or ‘Ancient’ Hebrew places.

Nationalist extremists are also trying to wipe out any physical evidence that could remind future generations that people other than Serbs ever lived together in Bosnia. Historic mosques, churches and synagogues as well as national libraries, archives, and museums have been torched, dynamited and bulldozed ... They want to eliminate the memory of the past as well.

Sevdalinka.net

Over 700,000 olive and orange trees have been destroyed by the Israelis. This is an act of sheer vandalism from a state that claims to practise conservation of the environment. How appalling and shameful.

Address by Ronnie Kasrils, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, South Africa, London 30 November, 2002.

As the owner of lands in general, along with other agencies that possess state land in Israel such as the Israeli Land Authority, the army and the government, the Jewish National Fund was also involved in establishing new Jewish settlements on the lands of the destroyed Palestinian villages. Here, dispossession was accompanied by the renaming of the places it had
seized, destroyed and now recreated. This mission was accomplished with the help of archaeologists and biblical experts who volunteered to serve on an official Naming Committee whose job it was to Hebraize Palestine’s geography.

This naming committee was in fact an old outfit, already put in place in 1920, when it acted as an ad-hoc group of scholars that granted Hebrew names to lands and places newly purchased by the Jews, and they continued to do so for lands and places taken by force during the Nakba. It was reconvened by Ben-Gurion in July 1949, who turned it into a sub-division of the JNF. The naming committee was not working in a total vacuum. Some of the Palestinian villages were inevitably built on the ruins of earlier and even ancient civilizations, including the Hebrew one, but this was a limited phenomenon and none of the cases involved was unambiguous. The postulated ‘Hebrew’ sites date back to such ancient times that there is little chance of establishing their locations properly, but then, of course, the motive for Hebraizing the names of the evicted villages was ideological and not scholarly. The narrative accompanying this expropriation was very simple: ‘Throughout the years of foreign occupation of Eretz Israel, the original Hebrew names were erased or became garbled, and sometimes took on an alien form.’ The archaeological zeal to reproduce the map of ‘Ancient’ Israel was in essence none other than a systematic, scholarly, political and military attempt to de-Arabise the terrain – its names and geography, but above all its history.

The JNF, as mentioned before, was busy confiscating land in the 1950s and the 1960s, but it did not end there. It also owned land in the Greater Jerusalem area that it had received from the Custodian of Absentee Lands after the 1967 war. In the early 1980s, this land was passed on by the JNF to Elad, the settlers’ NGO that was then and remains today devoted to the ‘Judaization’ of East Jerusalem. This NGO focused on Silwan and stated openly that it wanted to cleanse that village from its original Palestinian inhabitants. In 2005 it received assistance from the Jerusalem municipality, which ordered the destruction of three dozen houses there under the pretext of ‘illegal construction and expansion’.

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the JNF’s main challenges were the government policies of privatisation of land ownership, accelerated under Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999) and Ariel Sharon (2001–2003; 2003–2006), which threatened to limit the JNF’s control. However, both
these right-wing prime ministers were torn between Zionism and Capitalism, and time will tell how much land their successors will allow to remain in the JNF’s hands in the future. What is not going to change is the strong hold the JNF has over Israel’s forests.

In these forests Nakba denial is so pervasive, and has been achieved so effectively, that they have become a main arena of struggle for Palestinian refugees wishing to commemorate the villages that lie buried beneath them. They are up against an organisation – the JNF – which claims that there is only barren land under the pine and cypress trees it has planted there.

When it set out to create its national parks on the sites of eradicated Palestinian villages, the decision as to what to plant was totally in the hands of the JNF. Almost from the start the JNF executive opted mainly for conifers instead of the natural flora indigenous to Palestine. In part this was an attempt to make the country look European, although this appears nowhere in any official document as a goal. In addition, however, the choice of planting pine and cypress trees – and this has been overtly stated – was meant to support the country’s aspiring wood industry.

The three aims of keeping the country Jewish, European-looking and Green quickly fused into one. This is why forests throughout Israel today include only eleven per cent of indigenous species and why a mere ten per cent of all forests date from before 1948.
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At times, the original flora manages to return in surprising ways. Pine trees were planted not only over bulldozed houses, but also over fields and olive groves. In the new development town of Migdal Ha-Emek, for example, the JNF did its utmost to try and cover the ruins of the Palestinian village of Mujaydil, at the town’s eastern entrance, with rows of pine trees, not a proper forest in this case but just a small wood. Such ‘green lungs’ can be found in many of Israel’s development towns that cover destroyed Palestinian villages (Tirat Hacarmel over Tirat Haifa, Qiryat Shemona over Khalsa, Ashkelon over Majdal, etc.). But this particular species failed to adapt to the local soil and, despite repeated treatment, disease kept afflicting the trees. Later visits by relatives of some of Mujaydial’s original villagers revealed that some of the pine trees had
literally split in two and how, in the middle of their broken trunks, olive trees had popped up in defiance of the alien flora planted over them fifty-six years ago.

Within Israel and throughout the Jewish world the JNF is seen as a highly responsible ecological agency whose reputation rests on the way it has been assiduously planting trees, reintroducing local flora and landscapes, and paving the way for scores of resort and nature parks, complete with picnic facilities and children’s playgrounds. Israelis find their way to these spots by clicking on the different icons on the JNF’s detailed website, or taking their cues from the material posted on the various information boards located at the entrances to these parks, and at various stations along the way within the recreational grounds themselves. These texts guide and inform visitors wherever they go, even if all they want to do is enjoy themselves and relax.

JNF parks do not only offer parking spaces, picnic areas, playgrounds and access to nature, but also incorporate visible items that tell a particular history: the ruins of a house, a fortress, orchards, cactuses (
sabra
), and so on. There are also many fig and almond trees. Most Israelis think these are ‘wild’ figs or ‘wild’ almonds, as they see them in full bloom, towards the end of the winter, heralding the beauty of spring. But these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. Wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village: still blossoming afresh each year, these trees are all that remain. Near the now-uncultivated terraces, and under the swings and picnic tables, and the European pine forests, there lie buried the houses and fields of the Palestinians whom Israeli troops expelled in 1948. However, guided only by these JNF signs, visitors will never realise that people used to live there – the Palestinians who now reside as refugees in the Occupied Territories, as second-rate citizens inside Israel, and as camp dwellers beyond Palestine’s border.

The true mission of the JNF, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence. Whether on the JNF website or in the parks themselves, the most sophisticated audiovisual equipment displays the official Zionist story, contextualising any given location within the national meta-narrative of the Jewish people and
Eretz Israel
. This version continues to spout the familiar myths of the
narrative – Palestine as an ‘empty’ and ‘arid’ land before the arrival of Zionism – that Zionism employs to supplant all history that contradicts its own invented Jewish past.

As Israel’s ‘green lungs’, these recreational sites do not so much commemorate history as seek to totally erase it. Through the literature the JNF attaches to the items that are still visible from before 1948 a local history is intentionally denied. This is not part of a need to tell a different story in its own right, but is designed to annihilate all memory of the Palestinian villages that these ‘green lungs’ have replaced. In this way, the information provided at these JNF sites is a pre-eminent model for the all-pervading mechanism of denial Israelis activate in the realm of representation. Deeply rooted in the people’s psyche, this mechanism works through exactly this replacement of Palestinian sites of trauma 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 Nakba and conceal the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy.