Film Uncovers Truth About JNF’s Tree Planting in Israel
CATHERINE BAKER
A woman overlooks the Hula Valley in northern Israel, on Nov. 22, 2022. According to Palestinian environmentalist Mazin Qumsiyeh, 219 species of plants and animals have disappeared from the valley since 1948, due to Israeli mismanagement and abuse of the land. (JALAA MAREY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES).
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2023, pp. 57-58
Waging Peace
THE PLANTING of more than 250 million trees in Israel since 1901 by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) has been a major part of efforts to uproot the native people of Palestine and reshape their land, said Mazin Qumsiyeh during a July 16 online discussion hosted by Voices From the Holy Land.
Qumsiyeh noted that Palestine lies within the Fertile Crescent, “where the local people have been intertwined with their environment for 12,000 years of agriculture and settled communities. So, when you dislodge a community, you’re also dislodging habitats.” As an example, he pointed to what happened in the Hula Valley when Israel drained wetlands and replaced agriculturalists using rain-fed techniques with those who relied on irrigation-based techniques: 219 species of flora and fauna disappeared.
Qumsiyeh, founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, offered his comments during a discussion of the documentary “My Tree.” The 2021 film follows Canadian filmmaker Jason Sherman as he embarks on a quest to find the tree planted in Israel as a gift to him back in 1975 on the occasion of his bar mitzvah, and to learn more about the consequences of that planting.
Iymen Chehade, professor of Middle Eastern history at Columbia College, Chicago, characterized the JNF’s tree planting tactic as a form of physical memoricide. Also alluded to in the film is the physical memoricide the JNF committed through the theft and redistribution to Jewish immigrants of property owned by Palestinians following their ethnic cleansing in 1948.
As the film makes clear, the claimed Zionist objective of “making the desert bloom” obscured another objective, which was to create forests over destroyed Palestinian villages. This prevented the villagers from returning to their homes while also hiding the evidence that those homes ever existed.
Panelist Seth Morrison appeared in the film discussing his 2011 resignation from the Washington, DC board of the JNF after he learned that the organization was stealing Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem and giving them to Israeli settlers, using subsidiaries to hide its involvement.
Morrison announced his resignation in an op-ed printed in the Forward and as a result, lost his job with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an organization that brings together Palestinians, Jewish Israelis and North Americans to focus on the environment. He also lost friends. “But I learned the truth about what was really going on,” he said. He now believes that “the only way to deal with Zionism is to directly oppose it and to focus on the Palestinian movement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).” Another route of action is to support the “Stop the JNF” international solidarity campaign.
One question Morrison and filmmaker Sherman have frequently fielded is why it took them so long to recognize what the JNF was doing. Both described their upbringing as culturally Jewish and not particularly religious. Nonetheless both were indoctrinated to offer “unflagging support for Israel,” as Sherman put it, which took years to unpack. While the filmmaker had knowledge of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, he was unaware of the JNF’s role. “They were simply off the radar, which a number of people that I interviewed for the film pointed out is almost a deliberate strategy. That’s what was new to me and why ultimately the JNF becomes the focus of the film.”
Sherman’s documentary has yet to be accepted into a Jewish film festival. Yet “it’s important for Jews who don’t know the story to see the film,” he said, so they realize what the JNF continues to do, such as its current efforts to replace the Bedouin people in the Naqab (Negev) Desert with a forest.
Chehade offered a final comment about olive trees that have been uprooted by the hundreds of thousands. Some of them are thousands of years old and have incredibly deep roots, he said. “Oftentimes the olive tree will grow back, split the pine tree, and take its rightful place on the land. And I really believe that this is symbolic for the Palestinian people,” he said. “Despite 100 years of dispossession and oppression, they one day, just like the olive tree, will have an opportunity to stand in their homeland. And everybody living there, no matter what religion or background or color, can live as equals, with dignity, freedom, justice and opportunity.”
The July 16 event was cosponsored by Kehilla Community Synagogue and the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church USA.
—Catherine Baker