Less than two years later, in November 1947, the United Nations recommended that the indigenous Arab majority of Palestine (then consisting of about 70% of the population) establish a state of their own on 44% of its historic homeland, while the 30% Jewish minority (consisting mostly of recent immigrants from Europe) would get 56% of Palestine, despite the fact that the minority owned less than 8% of the land at the time. When that suggestion was understandably rejected by Palestinian representatives, a unilateral declaration established a Jewish State of Israel in Palestine and, in the ensuing war, Israel snatched an additional 22% of Palestine as its own.
In 1948, during what Israelis proudly refer to as their “War of Independence,” over 450 Palestinian towns were ravaged, abandoned and destroyed, including villages that had signed non-aggression pacts with their Jewish neighbors; over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their own homes. Ethnic cleansing and land theft laid the foundation of the new state. Zionist resettlement began immediately.
Benvenisti tells us, “Even villages that had not been captured by Israel, and whose residential sections were situated in the (Jordan-held) West Bank, did not escape land confiscation. More than sixty villages located on the Jordanian side of the armistice lines lost large portions of their landholdings, which were on the Israeli side.”
“In fact,” he writes, “the takeover of land began shortly after its military occupation. By April 1948 Jewish farmers had already begun harvesting the crops that had ripened in the abandoned fields and picking the citrus fruit in Arab groves.” So much Palestinian farmland was seized by Israel through extra-legal means and retroactive absentee laws that “by mid-1949 two-thirds of all land sown with grain in Israel was abandoned Arab land.”
For a colonial-settler state that often takes great pains to reiterate its historic connection to and love of the land it now controls, over the past six decades Israel has taken ever greater steps to destroy the very land it claims to value so much. Soon after the Nakba, Palestine’s famed citrus groves suffered “blatant neglect” as they “were not irrigated after the departure of their owners. Water pumps and pipelines were dismantled and stolen, and no one was interested in taking care of the trees.” As Benvenisti explains, “The Jewish citrus growers were barely capable of caring for their own groves once the cheap Arab labor on which they depended had left.”
Tragically, “the overwhelming majority of the 150,000 dunams of citrus trees – the most valuable agricultural crop left behind by the Arabs – remained untended” and “as a result, entire tracts of productive citrus trees, especially in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, were earmarked for the construction of housing developments.” The same thing happened to abandoned Palestinian olive groves and pomegranate orchards, which were seen by the conquering Israelis as “an annoyance.”
“Pomegranates from the ancient trees are not fit for marketing,” writes Shmuel Dayan, one of the founders of the Moshav Nahalal, a leader of the Moshav Movement, and father of Moshe Dayan. “We shall have to lay out tens of thousands of pounds [old Israeli currency] to uproot them. The residents expect the trees to be uprooted, and will afterwards use the land for growing cattle fodder.” To Dayan, the only tried-and-true method of agriculture was that of the classic moshav, and the glorious pomegranate trees interfered with the production of fodder. Before long it became clear that agricultural planning based entirely on dairy cattle and chickens was wasteful. Large surpluses of produce (eggs, milk and dairy products, certain fruits and vegetables) occurred; the agricultural settlements needed to be heavily subsidized, and when subsidies were cut, the immigrant moshavim were thrown into a state of crisis. But the olive and pomegranate trees of the “primitive” Arab village were no more.
Tens of thousands of dunams of olive trees were uprooted and replaced by non-indigenous European field crops, which the Jewish settlers preferred, as cultivation required a smaller workforce and less irrigation. The deliberate destruction of fertile land and bountiful groves and orchards was also integral of the Zionist enterprise, which relied on denying Palestinians the right to return to their own land. Consequently, Benvenisti writes, “the stronger the international pressure for the return of the refugees (throughout 1949-50), the greater the efforts to destroy the agricultural infrastructure that might have made possible the absorption of the returning refugees.”
He continues:
The destruction of hundreds of thousands of dunams of fruit-bearing trees does not fit Israel’s self-image as a society that knows how to “make the desert bloom.” And the contention that the green Arab landscape had been destroyed because of the necessity of adapting crops to the agricultural practices of the Jews only underscores the conclusion that it was not the war that had caused this devastation, but rather the disappearance of the specific human community that had shaped the landscape in accordance with its needs and preferences. The destruction of vast areas of orchards did not attract the same degree of interest as had the demolition of the Arab villages, despite the fact that it perhaps had a more devastating effect on the landscape.
And yet, this past May, a Ha’aretz report was proud to announce that since the founding of Israel, “exports have soared 13,400% from $6 million to $80.5 billion.” Ami Erel, chairman of the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute, boasted, “From an exporter of oranges in the early years, Israel has become a developed country.” Ha’aretz pointed out that Israeli “[a]griculture represented only about 2% of the country’s exports in 2010.”
The natural ecology of Palestine has further been altered by the Israeli obsession with planting artificial forests of pine trees. Max Blumenthal has written that “the pine trees themselves were instruments of concealment, strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the Zionist militias evacuated and destroyed in 1948…The practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists referred to as ‘redeeming the land’ was in fact the ultimate form of greenwashing.” Yet, these non-native species are not well-suited to the Palestinian environment. According to Blumenthal, “Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF’s trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.”
The devastation continues. Israel and its colonial outposts in the West Bank consistently destroy what remains of Palestinian olive trees and wheat fields.
Indeed, Netanyahu’s personal contempt for the land of Palestine and the environment in his never-ending crusade to steal, colonize and Judaize every square inch, is the topic of a recent Ha’aretz article entitled “For Netanyahu, saving Israel’s deserts is all about settlements.” The report, written by Zafrir Rinat, describes the Israeli Prime Minister as being “solid as a rock not only with regard to the right of the Jewish people to settle their land, but also in his insistence on seeing nature and landscape as no more than an obstacle to the realization of his settlement vision.”
Try as they may, Netanyahu and Bronner’s efforts to rewrite the history of Palestine are fruitless. The truth is sown in the soil.
