This article may seem unimportant to you. But many people whom I have loved,
contributed money for those pine trees that the author describes. We, everyone
who is Jewish, everyone who supported Israel after the Holocaust, believed what
we were told, - that Palestine was a desert, that the Arabs lived in dusty,
poverty stricken villages, that the Jews would reclaim the land, that we were
paying for trees to help them do that. We didn't know, and most of the people
who believed this, (if they were alive today still would not), that the trees
were planted to camouflage the destruction of villages and to increase the
acidity of the soil so that all the olive trees and fruit trees that were
native to the region, could not grow. We were so easily manipulated, so
credulous.
Miriam
Mondoweiss
In age of forest fires, Israel’s law against Palestinian goats proves
self-inflicted wound for Zionism
Jonathan Cook on December 1, 2017
Black goat (Photo: Béria L. Rodríguez @ Wikimedia Commons)
A ban by Israel on herding black goats – on the pretext they cause
environmental damage – is to be repealed after nearly seven decades of
enforcement that has decimated the pastoral traditions of Palestinian
communities.
The Israeli government appears to have finally conceded that, in an age of
climate change, the threat of forest fires to Israeli communities is rapidly
growing in the goats’ absence.
The goats traditionally cleared undergrowth, which has become a tinderbox as
Israel experiences ever longer and hotter summer droughts. Exactly a year ago,
Israel was hit by more than 1,500 fires that caused widespread damage.
The story of the lowly black goat, which has been almost eliminated from
Israel, is not simply one of unintended consequences. It serves as a parable
for the delusions and self-destructiveness of a Zionism bent on erasing
Palestinians and creating a slice of Europe in the Middle East.
The 1950 Plant Protection Law, one of Israel’s earliest measures, was
introduced as a way to outlaw the black goat, also known as the Syrian goat,
from large areas of the country. The goats had been the lifeblood of Bedouin
farming communities.
At the time officials declared that the goat was damaging vegetation,
especially millions of pine saplings recently planted as forests.
The trees were fulfilling an important Zionist mission, in the eyes of Israel’s
founding fathers. They were there to conceal the rubble of more than 530
Palestinian villages the new state had set about destroying and prevent the
return of some 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled during the 1948 war that
founded Israel – what Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for “Catastrophe”.
Close by the ruins of the villages, Israel established hundreds of exclusively
Jewish communities like the kibbutz and moshav to farm the former lands of the
Palestinian refugees.
Both the ban on goats and the mass planting of European pines were part of
Zionism’s efforts to sell the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as
“environmentalism” – a supposedly green agenda that is now being exposed as a
sham.
Planting pine forests
Jews around the world were encouraged to drop pennies into charitable “blue
boxes” as a donation to help the young state “redeem the land”.
In fact, the money was being mostly used to plant pine forests over the razed
Palestinians villages, making it impossible for the refugees to return and
rebuild their homes.
Additionally, the pine was useful because it was fast-growing and evergreen,
shrouding in darkness all year evidence of the ethnic cleansing committed
during Israel’s creation. And the forests played a psychological role,
transforming the landscape in ways designed to make it look familiar to recent
European immigrants and ease their homesickness.
Finally, the falling pine needles acidified the soil, leaving it all but
impossible for indigenous trees to compete. These native species – including
the olive, citrus, almond, walnut, pomegranate, cherry, carob and mulberry –
were a vital component of the diet of Palestinian rural communities. Their
replacement by the pine was intended to make it even harder for Palestinian
refugees to re-establish their communities.
In charge of planting and maintaining these forests was the Jewish National
Fund, an internationally recognised Zionist charity. Paradoxically, its website
extols its work in Israel as “innovators in ecological development and pioneers
in afforestation and fire prevention”. The JNF claims to have planted some 250
million trees across Israel.
In an indication of Israel’s success is selling these colonisation policies as
environmentalism, the United Nations lists the JNF as having expertise in
climate change, forestry, water management and human settlements. The UN also
allows the organisation to sponsor panels and workshops at UN conferences
around the world.
In September the JNF attended the UN Convention to Combat Desertification,
where, it noted, it would be “presenting its activities in creating a greener
world”.
Jewish farmer-warriors
The 1950 legislation, also known as the Goat Damage Law, continued Israel’s
land colonisation policies – this time, not against the Palestinian refugees,
but against the small number of Palestinian communities that had survived the
Nakba.
By the end of the 1948 war, some 150,000 Palestinians were still clinging to
their communities, chiefly in the north, in the Galilee, and in the south, in
the semi-desert Negev, or Naqab. In 1952, under international pressure, these
Palestinians were given citizenship.
Many of the surviving Palestinian communities knew little aside from an
agriculture their ancestors had practised in the region for generations. But
Zionism’s credo – that “Hebrew labor” would allow Jews to “make the desert
bloom” and remake themselves as farmer-warrior “Sabras” – required that
Palestinians be displaced from farming land.
Estimates are that some 70 percent of the land belonging to Palestinian
communities in Israel was seized by the state – and is now held in trust for
Jews around the world. Deprived of land and access to cheap water for
agriculture, most Palestinian citizens were forced to become casual laborers,
many of them working on building sites in the country’s center.
But one group was seen as a particular threat to the new Zionist ethos – and
especially hard to turn into a captive labour force. The Bedouin were located
in remote locations in the Galilee’s hills and the dusty plains of the Negev,
and their pastoral way of life, herding goats and sheep, made it hard for
Israel to control them.
‘Dunam after dunam’
The connection between the land and the goats – and the central role both
played in maintaining Palestinian identity and reinforcing a tradition of
“sumud”, or steadfastness – was identified early on by the Zionist movement.
One of its early slogans, referring to an Ottoman unit of land measurement, was
“dunam after dunam, goat after goat”. The goal was to take Palestine piece by
piece, so incrementally and quietly it would pass unnoticed in the rest of the
world.
After the Nakba, Israel turned to aggressive containment policies against the
Bedouin who had not been expelled outside the state’s new borders. These
policies focused on both their lands and herds.
In 1965, the year before military rule over Palestinian citizens ended, a
Planning and Building Law de-recognised almost all Bedouin communities. Their
homes were declared illegal and they were denied all public services.
Israel’s goal was to pen the Bedouin up in a handful of urbanised “townships”,
forcing them to abandon agriculture and become casual labourers in a Jewish
economy, like other Palestinian citizens.
The 1950 Plant Protection Law struck an especially hard blow against the
Bedouin. The black goats supplied them with milk for their own use and for
sale, and the hides were used for tents and blankets.
As agriculture minister in the late 1970s, Ariel Sharon stepped up the campaign
against the Bedouin – and similarly preferred to veil his policies as a bogus
concern about ecology.
In his case, he had a private investment in the state’s success in “Judaising”
the Negev and getting rid of most of the Bedouin: in 1972 he had acquired a
vast ranch there, covering 4 sq km.
The land had formerly belonged to refugees from the destroyed Palestinian
village of Houg, now imprisoned in Gaza. Palestinian physician and author Hatim
Kanaaneh notes that the village’s only remaining structure, the mosque, was
“serving as the pen for [Sharon’s] Arabian thoroughbred horses”.
The Green Patrol
Five years after be bought Sycamore ranch, Sharon created the “Green Patrol”, a
paramilitary unit of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, whose tasks
included seizing and slaughtering the Bedouin’s black goats.
Palestinian community activist Maha Qupty notes that in the first three years
of the Green Patrol’s operations, the number of black goats was slashed by 60
percent, from 220,000 to 80,000. The patrol’s practices were so brutal that an
official watchdog, the State Comptroller, censured the unit in his 1980 report.
The number of goats in Israel has fallen much further in recent years. A report
in the Haaretz newspaper noted that by 2013 there were only 2,000 goats still
grazing in and around the vast Carmel forest, next to Haifa, down from 15,000
before the Green Patrol’s establishment.
And it was in that same Carmel Ridge that the danger posed by the goats’
enforced disappearance first became apparent.
The extensive forest hugging the slopes of the Carmel Ridge was planted to
enforce and conceal the expulsion of several Palestinian villages. But in 2010
the forest was engulfed in flames that ultimately claimed the lives of 44
people. The majority were warders travelling to Damun prison, where Palestinian
political prisoners are held outside the occupied territories in violation of
international law.
The fire, which raged for four days, required the evacuation of 17,000 people
from their homes, including from sections of Haifa.
That blaze was a prelude to much more widespread fires a year ago, at the end
of a long dry summer. Some 1,700 fires were reported across Israel and the West
Bank, many of them in the forests Israel had planted over the destroyed
villages. Haifa was again badly damaged.
Zionism’s self-inflicted wounds
In both the 2010 and 2016 forest fire outbreaks, Palestinian citizens were
accused by police and government officials of being responsible, despite a
dearth of evidence – and convictions – to back up such claims.
Allegations of arson were a useful deflection from the reality: that the fires
were a Zionist own goal. The danger posed by planting unsuitable European pine
forests in the arid conditions of the Middle East had been aggravated by longer
summers, as climate change kicked in, and by the destruction of the black
goats. They had cleared the vegetation around the trees that prevented the
fires from quickly spreading.
In fact, there had been warnings that these pine forests were a fire hazard
long before the advent of significant climate change. Nearly 20 years ago, I
visited a kibbutz on the edge of the Carmel Ridge where there had been a recent
fire.
Nir Etzion sits on the agricultural lands of Ayn Hawd, which was a rare example
of a Palestinian village that had escaped destruction – in its case, to be
reinvented as a Jewish artists’ colony under a similar name, Ein Hod.
The staff at Nir Etzion told me a familiar and paranoid tale: that internal
Palestinian refugees, living close by, had started the fire to drive them from
their kibbutz. The kibbutzniks overlooked the fact that the refugees themselves
were put in much graver danger by the fire.
As I recounted in my contribution to a book of essays, Catastrophe Remembered,
experts were clear even then that the European pine forests on the Carmel Ridge
were dangerous in the region’s dry conditions.
‘Repair historic injustice’
But until this month, the dreams of the Zionist movement – of disappearing all
traces of a Palestine that existed before Israel’s creation – had proved far
more potent than the danger of forest fires.
Paradoxically, it has taken Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian member of the Israeli
parliament, to pry his colleagues from their delusions and face up to the
reality of climate change.
Zahalka is the moving force behind the effort to repeal the 1950 law,
justifying its revocation on a study by a good Zionist institution – the
Technion, Israel’s renowned technical university. Its research has confirmed a
wisdom that was obvious to generations of Palestinian farmers: that the goats
graze on dry bushes and shrubs, and thereby suppress the risk of fires.
Zahalka has stated that the repeal of the 1950 law will “restore the goat’s
lost honor” and “repair a historic injustice” for Palestinian farmers.
Zahalka has won backing from the agriculture minister, Uri Ariel, and Ayelet
Shaked, the justice minister. Both are tightly linked to the settler movement,
and Ariel is a director of the JNF.
But faced with the scientific evidence and the threat of more fires, Ariel has
climbed down. “Goats are an important factor in fire prevention, and we want to
encourage the act of grazing,” he now says.
Sadly, it has taken Israeli governments nearly 70 years to reverse their policy
of destroying the black goat – a policy that intentionally sought to wreck
Palestinian agriculture, and with it Palestinian communities, heritage and
identity.