The Olive and the Pine
Planting a tree often becomes almost a shorthand for doing a good deed. But such an act is not always neutral. In some places, certain trees can become windows into history, tools of erasure, or symbols of resistance.
This story originally ran in October 2020.
Featuring: Liat Berdugo, Irus Braverman, Jonathan Kuttab, Noga Kadman, Iyad Hadad, Raja Shehadeh, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Miri Maoz-Ovadia, Nidal Waleed Rabie, and his granddaughter Samera.
Bibliography
Berdugo, Liat. “A Situation: A Tree in Palestine.” Places Journal. January 2020.
Braverman, Irus. Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel Palestine. Cambridge University Press: 2009.
Kadman, Noga. Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948. Indiana University Press: 2015.
Long, Joanna. “(En)planting Israel: Jewish national fund forestry and the naturalisation of Zionism.” University of British Columbia: 2005.
”Our History.” Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael Jewish National Fund. Accessed 8 October 2020.
Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. One World Oxford: 2006.
Shehadeh, Raja. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. Scribner: 2007.
Tal, Alon. Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel. University of California Press: 2002.
Credits
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by: Justine Paradis
Mixer: Justine Paradis
Editing by Taylor Quimby, Sam Evans-Brown, and Erika Janik
Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer
Music for this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Special thanks to Yehoshua Shkedy, Amit Gilutz, Eliana Passentin, and Vered Ben Saadon. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for our Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey everybody! You’re listening to Outside/In and I’m Nate Hegyi.
Today we’re reaching back into the archives and pulling out a really special story. On the surface, it’s about trees. But what it’s really about is war, colonization, and the things we plant to make us feel at home.
We produced it back in the fall of 2020, but the story remains, in my humble opinion, a gem.
Enjoy.
Justine Paradis: When Liat was 5 or 6 years old, she planted a tree.
It was an outing with the whole family - her parents, her older sister, her baby brother. She doesn’t remember the day, but she’s got the pictures.
Liat Berdugo: In one of the photos, I’m standing with all of my family members. It looks like we must have just planted trees. My sister and I are holding, I don’t know what you would call that tool, maybe a spade, to dig a hole in rocky soil, and we’re posing for the camera.
And the family is gathered around one of these young trees: a pine sapling, dark green, bushy, maybe two feet tall - right in the center of the photo.
Liat Berdugo: I know, yeah. That photo is so funny. It looks... it literally looks like I’m growing out of that pine sapling. Like, both of us are quite young, and both of us are enjoying the strong Mediterranean sunlight. And yeah, it looks like we’re both sort of merged in that photograph.
Liat - Liat Berdugo - is a writer, curator, and assistant professor of art + architecture at the University of San Francisco. And, in an article published in January 2020 for Places Journal, Liat actually brought a kind of artistic questioning to bear on her own family pictures - the pictures of the day when they planted the trees.
Liat Berdugo: The picture definitely looks posed. Like, um, the sapling I've planted looks like it was planted really poorly. Like, the hole wasn’t deep enough, and the soil looks so rocky. Um. I remember asking my dad after I saw the photo whether I was actually able to dig that hole myself? Like, it actually looks quite challenging. And without even thinking he said no, I dug it for you. So even in the photos, there’s this… they bring up this sense of what agency means, like did I do that thing?
What’s really happening in this photo?
Liat Berdugo: Did my parents want me to do that thing?
Why would her family bring her there to do this?
Liat Berdugo: Did they want me to do it enough that they did it for me? I mean, what are the implications of family, and history, and agency, even in these pictures, comes up for me when I look at them.
And why would she even be asking these questions about planting a tree?
After all, “planting a tree” is almost a shorthand for “doing a good deed.”
A new tree is a positive act in the world.
But in this case, as the years went by, Liat came to see that forest and forests like it as part of a project. A project that included her and her family, but that was also so much bigger.
Liat Berdugo: I’ve been going through, I don’t know how I would even describe it, but a process of coming to understand my own… my own responsibility for the situation Israel/Palestine.
[beat]
… um, and that process has been ongoing, so I wouldn't say that was like a singular moment, but it certainly was one of these tiny little heartbreaks along a journey where what I thought was true, or what I thought to be the case, turns out to be very different than how I see things now.
[theme rise]
Justine Paradis: This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. I’m Justine Paradis, in today for Sam Evans-Brown.
In Israel/Palestine, plants are political.
Amit Gilutz: Groves, you know, fields, trees, are also casualties.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman: That’s the line in the sand of sorts. That’s the conflict area.
And particular trees can become windows into history, tools of erasure, or symbols of resistance.
Irus Braverman: So environmentalists nowaday... would, like, cringe!
Raja Shehadeh: And we have to fight back by staying put. That’s called sumud.
Today on the show, the olive and the pine.
[theme fade]
First, the pine. When Liat described the picture of herself planting that pine sapling, she put it in a very particular way.
Liat Berdugo: It literally looks like I'm growing out of that pine sapling.
That in the photo, she and the tree appear merged. I don’t think she put it this way by accident. Liat was pointing to a theme: that trees and people are linked.
Liat Berdugo: There’s a proliferation of Israeli names that mean tree. Like Alon, or Ilana, or Tamar, or Tamara.
Alon - oak tree. Tamar - palm tree.
Liat Berdugo: This identification of trees with children in particular runs rather deep in Jewish Israeli culture.
Liat grew up mostly in Philadelphia, but her dad is Israeli. She’s a citizen of both countries too. And they’d often go to visit extended family in Israel. It was on one of those trips that they went to the Jerusalem Forest to plant their pine trees.
Irus Braverman: Which is a very powerful act. People come, they plant a tree, in their name, maybe in the name of someone they love, who is not, no longer here. And s o they feel like they have a place in that small edge of the world even if they’re not there personally.
[music begin]
This is Dr. Irus Braverman - she is a professor of law and adjunct professor of geography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.
She’s the author of going-on-10 books, and in one of them, Planted Flags, Irus draws out this point that in Israel/Palestine, trees act as living representations of people - sometimes quite explicitly.
Irus herself was born in Jerusalem, and shortly after her birth, her parents received a certificate, informing them that a tree had been planted in her name in the Peace Forest in Jerusalem.
The certificate says, “We wish you the fortune of seeing it/her grow with much pleasure and ease” -- this was written in Hebrew, which, as Irus writes in her book, uses a single pronoun to refer to both the child and tree. On this certificate, Irus’ growth and the growth of the tree are connected.
There’s another part of the Jerusalem Forest, at the western edge. It’s called the Forest of the Martyrs. It’s said that there are planted 6 million trees, for the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
In her book, Ir us notes that when children planted a stand of those trees in 1951, they were told: “Remember, children, that you do not plant trees, but people.”[1]
[music beat]
The state of Israel was established in 1948, a few years after the Holocaust and the end of World War II.
But the tree planting started before that. Let me explain.
The Jerusalem Forest, where Liat and her family planted their pines, was planted by the KKL JNF - Keren Kayemet LeYisrael - the Jewish National Fund.
JNF-Treevideo-BlueBox: It all began in the year of 1901. Theodore Herzl was speaking in Basel,Switzerland addressing the Fifth Zionist Congress. His goal? The immediate creation of a National Fund, allowing the purchase of land in Israel and the reestablishment of a Jewish Homeland. [fade under]
The JNF is a zionist organization… which, in this context, is referring to a political/national goal [2] to create a Jewish state, Israel, in the land of Palestine.
The JNF created what was called the blue box, a little box that people might have had in the house, where they’d put spare change to save up and donate to buy land and plant trees in the land of Palestine.
The blue box is a symbol of the KKL-JNF, and it functioned as a way to connect the diasporic community with the goals of the organization’s goals.[3]
JNF video: By the second World War, Blue Box numbers exploded to over a million. Land was repurchased and the dream of a Jewish homeland realized.
The KKL - JNF came to plant forests that were mostly, even exclusively, pines. Specifically, the Aleppo pine - [Pinus halepsensis] also known as the Jerusalem pine. It’s a species with silver-grey, to purple-brown bark and can grow tall with spreading branches, if given the room, and long green pine needles that grow in sort of a puffy clouds on the branches. It was chosen by early KKL-JNF foresters for its perceived ability to withstand drought, and for its adaptability. It can grow in both arid and soils rich in organic material. But a big reason[4] was that, like many pines, it grows fast and seeds prolifically. So, they’re termed a “pioneer” species.
Irus Braverman: Pines were seen as a pioneer ecosystem
where they can actually make something that is unproductive into something productive.
But “pioneer” has a second meaning here.
Irus Braverman: It’s also a change in identity of the Jew from this diasporic entity that works in certain professions to being this person working, a pioneer working on the land.[5]
Like the pine, Jewish Israelis were rooting. Physically connecting with the land.
[music note]
Irus Braverman: And the pine, being a very European tree, creating a very European-looking landscape, something that a lot of European Jews who were coming from Europe, from a traumatic experience, something that made them feel a little like home.
Here’s Liat again.
Liat Berdugo: Planting trees has almost been like a Zionist commandment. I mean, when I was a kid, I learned about the value of nature through the Jewish holiday of Tu Bishvat, which is the Festival of Trees, and I learned all these songs about how we should be planting trees over our naked land. Right? And this idea that the land was barren before, and now here come the Jews who can, um, who can make it bloom…
Make the desert bloom.
According to its website, KKL JNF has planted 250 million trees since its founding. And a lot of those early forests were essentially pine monocultures.
[beat]
These trees were part of the birth of a new nation, a narrative of growth and homeland after a deeply traumatic episode in a long, long history of anti-Semitic violence, violence that didn’t end after World War II.
But planting trees was not merely symbolic. It was also strategic.
Liat Berdugo: This idea that trees are really innocent and benevolent and good - yet in this context, in Israel/Palestine, I saw afforestation as a mode of colonization.
Here’s Irus Braverman again.
Irus Braverman: If there aren't enough people to settle the land, and there weren't so many Jews then, then in a way it's easier to take over the land by planting trees so that nobody else can live there. And then protecting those trees so nobody can cut them. Also making any cutting be very visible, so that you could monitor more easily, and protect land from being settled by others.
And in fact… in Israel/Palestine, going back to the Ottoman Empire, certain trees and certain forests have been afforded certain legal protections. When Israel was established, the pine was one of them.[6] [7]
Irus Braverman: So it’s a kind of a mechanism, although we don't think of trees that way, it’s kind of a mechanism of taking over and protecting land when you don't have enough humans. So it’s kind of a quasi, say, police officer standing there, right?
[music swell]
Liat Berdugo: So I remembered planting these trees when I was a kid. I mean, I knew that I had, I think because I had seen the pictures. And I didn't really think much of it until I read Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh’s book The Conflict Shoreline, that came out in 2015. And it referenced the fact, which was then unknown to me, at the time, that a lot of the JNF-KKL forests, which is where I planted my tree, have been systematically planted over the ruins of Palestinian villages.
[swell, and then out]
Jonathan Kuttab: Of course trees form good cover. But also they promote the idea that we are here to make the desert bloom, as if there was nothing there.
This is Jonathan Kuttab, an attorney and cofounder of the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq. We talked over Skype, on a pretty bad connection.
Justine Paradis: So the forests… would you say they almost point to where the villages used to be?
Jonathan Kuttab: Many times that is the case. Many times that is the case.
Noga Kadman: When I was a child they used to take us to an Arab village near Jerusalem where many people come to swim in a pool, there is a spring there. And there are still houses, standing with ruins. And I always felt there that this place has always been ruined.
That’s Noga Kadman. She’s a researcher and author of a book called Erased from Space and Consciousness.
Historically, some Westerners have seen Palestine as wretched, empty. After a visit in 1867, for instance, Mark Twain called Palestine “desolate and unlovely. The British poet Thackeray described it as “unspeakably ghastly and desolate.”
And even JNF’s own materials make it sound like these places were unlivable before the planted forests.
JNF Video: It all begins with a vision. A vision of lush and breathtaking forests, where once was only rocky and brown land… a vision of transforming the Negev and the Galilee, injecting a vitality that is transforming them into places people want to live.
Transforming the land into a place people want to live - but people did live there.
I said earlier that Israel was established in 1948. But those words don’t actually describe what happened.
Broadly, if you are Israeli, you might call that period of 1947-1948 the War of Independence.
If you’re Palestinian, you might call it al-Nakba. The catastrophe.
During this time, 700,000 Arab and Palestinian people were displaced. And hundreds of villages depopulated and destroyed.
At the time, the head of KKL-JNF’s forestry department was a man named Joseph Weitz - KKL-JNF’s website calls him the father of Israel’s forests.
In June 1958, in a memo to the government, Weitz wrote:
“We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the villages for cultivation and resettlement. Some of these will become parks.’”[8]
Earlier in 1940, Weitz had written in his diary:
“Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country… Not a single village or a single tribe must be left.”[9]
Noga Kadman: I mapped all those villages that are now within the parks, of the JNF forests, national parks, and nature reserves. I realized that almost half of the villages are within such places now.
In the research for her book, published in 2015, Noga found that of the 418 villages depopulated and demolished during the 1948 war, a third are a part of some kind of park or nature site - and JNF forests are planted over 86[10] such villages.
Noga Kadman: These ruins are 70 years old. They become a part of nature. So it, becomes, like, pretty. But also sad at the same moment when you know what was here. Very difficult. There is this gap, between what you know was here: a village - full of animals, activity - and then very silent, and trees and shade, and then some ruins. It’s a very different reality. It’s hard to bridge.
[another ambi music swell here, to separate the beats]
The link between the pine tree and the Zionist project, as Irus puts it, is well known.[11]
And so the pine forests are sometimes specifically targeted. Like in the first Intifada, or uprising, in 1989. Palestinians have either started fires in the forests[12] or were blamed for them. And more recently, KKL-JNF points to wildfires started in forests, sometimes ignited by kites and balloons carried from Gaza filled with flammable gas or carrying explosives.
KKL JNF practices have been controversial among Israeli environmentalists for decades, and they have changed, in an ecological sense. Actually, Irus was involved in this, when she was working as an environmental lawyer in the late 90s, at an organization called Adam Teva d’Vin, or the Israel Union for Environmental Defense.
Irus Braverman: Basically, we decided to go to the Supreme Court to challenge the practices on an ecological basis.[13]
These pine trees that had been at least symbolically crowdfunded by a diaspora across the world, that were so good at growing quickly and pioneering, were also very good at acidifying the soil, attracting pests and therefore needing pesticides, catching on fire, and outcompeting other plants.[14] Some describe these forests as “pine deserts.”[15]
This has been known for decades, and on its website, KKL-JNF acknowledges the drawbacks of the Jerusalem pine. It writes that while in 2000, “45% [of its trees] were still pine,” alongside these, there were also broad-leafed species and fruit-bearing trees, including olives, carobs, and date palms. “Mixed forests.”
But while the KKL JNF has been forced to reexamine how and what it plants - as far as the villages themselves, they’re barely acknowledged. I did reach out to KKL-JNF asking about this, and while they sent a brief statement about their afforestation mission and their history, their spokesperson didn’t respond to my questions about the villages themselves.
But there are still traces. Here’s Jonathan Kuttab.
Jonathan Kuttab: Uri Davis used to take me around in the Galilee and say, you want to see where the Arab villages used to be? Very simple. Look for any sign that says Jewish National Fund and then look for the cactus trees. They will show you where the villages used to be.
Justine Paradis: Look for the JNF sign. And then look for the cactus. Because while a plant can be a symbol, and can provide legal cover for appropriating land - they can also be monuments. Living witnesses to history. Liat Berdugo again.
Liat Berdugo: One thing you may not know by looking at this picture is that prickly pear is widely used by Palestinians as a natural fence. So it was a way to sort of mark off plots and prevent your herds from grazing past where you wanted them to, et cetera.
So, if the prickly pear was a fence, they become almost an outline of where the village once was, rising up in the forest.
Liat Berdugo: It often signifies the presence of a prior Palestinian village.
In Liat’s article for Places journal - she also included a black and white photo of a prickly pear cactus.
Liat Berdugo: But basically what you see in this picture is this prickly pear, and it’s full of bullet holes. remnants of the massacre of citizens of Deir Yassin, where they were lined up and shot by paramilitary forces in the 1948 war.
I guess I... when I was working on this piece, I began to wonder, like... is my tree still alive? And if it's still alive… this is gonna sound kind of woo-woo, but does my tree feel anything? Like, what traces would it bear of what it's been through? Would it sort of know how I felt about it now? You know, this is all kind of magical realist thinking, and I don’t think that it’s useful to talk about trees in that way all the time, but I don’t know. I couldn't help myself from sort of wondering that...
And so when I found this image of Deir Yassin, where the plants literally held the scars of what had happened to the Palestinians in that village, I was really moved by it. And horrified by it at the same time.
[music beat]
Justine Paradis: That’s the pine tree. Now, the olive. That’s after the break.
// BREAK //
Iyad Hadad: Eh… Olive tree… this kind of tree lives thousands of years. Many centuries. It has very big roots.
This is Iyad Hadad. Last year, Iyad bought a piece of land in the countryside - a plot with five olive trees. And for their first harvest season on the land -
Iyad Hadad: This is our weekend.
He and his wife and children would go out for the whole day -
Iyad Hadad: With our T-shirts, with our shoes, special shoes, and we got special tools, to harvesting the olives.
They laid special covers on the ground, to collect the olives while they’re harvesting. They’d take breaks to eat, making a small fire.
Iyad Hadad: To prepare coffee, or to prepare tea on the fire, on the land. We cook tomato with eggs.
Iyad is not growing olives to make a living. Again their land has five olive trees, and they’re just 25 years old. Each one, he told me, might produce a bottle of oil - but that’s not really the point.
Iyad lives and works in Ramallah, which is near Jerusalem in the West Bank. He works in the field of human rights.
Iyad Hadad: I am a refugee. We, I born in a refugee camp with no land. So I feel how much the difference between me as a refugee with no land or home, comparing with a person who has a land and a home, especially when he has an olive trees.
Owning this land, to be able to go out on the weekend, with these olive trees -
Iyad Hadad: Changed my life! Really! I'm 58 years old. Just in the last year when I own a land with olive trees, I feel that I'm start my life… A magic. A kind of magical feeling. But imagine how much it means for the people who own the land from his father, grandfather, since many, many, many years.
[music]
Irus Braverman: The idea that the olive tree and its rooting into the ground, its hundreds of years of being there, has come to symbolize, and also physically be something that the Palestinian national identity is connected with.
This is Irus Braverman again. And actually this is the frame of her book, Planted Flags. She argues that in the same way that pine trees can represent people, so too can olives.
The olive tree is an embodiment of a specific kind of resistance. In its very presence, an old olive tree with its broad trunk and deep roots, demonstrates longevity and resilience. The presence of a tree points to a human presence that can go back hundreds, thousands years.
The olive tree is steadfast. In Arabic, the word for steadfast is called sumud.
Raja Shehadeh: And that is called sumud. Persevering, holding on, refusing to give up…
This is writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh. He’s Palestinian, and he also lives in Ramallah.
Raja Shehadeh: it is a concept I realized and held onto from early on in my experience with the occupation. In ‘82 I published a book called The Third Way, and described sumud, and said in the book that the Israeli attempt and the occupation of our country is an attempt to encourage people to leave the land. And we have to fight back by staying put.
Staying put, rooting. Ideas symbolized in the olive tree.
Irus Braverman: And we see resistance poetry that refers to the olive tree, we see, we see how the economy is dependent on those periods of harvest.
According to 2015 UN paper,[16] olives account for 15 per cent of total agricultural income in the occupied Palestine territories, supporting 100,000 families.
Irus Braverman: And so the harvest period, which is about two months a year during the fall, is also a social event.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman: In my career, I’ve ended up knowing a lot about things i never thought I was going to know much about. I know much more about how to build a house than I ever thought I would, I know much more about olive trees than I ever thought I would.
This is Rabbi Arik Ascherman -
Rabbi Arik Ascherman: Basically what I do is try to work for universal human rights, starting from the idea in the Torah, in the Bible, that every human being is created in God's image, which means both of Jews and of non-Jews.
Rabbi Ascherman is the executive director of Torat Tzedek, or the Torah of Justice, and for 21 years, he led the organization Rabbis for Human Rights, which organizes volunteers to accompany Palestinians to the olive harvest to act as human shields.
Because the olive harvest can be a time in the West Bank when violence reaches a peak.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman: It’s not just the olive trees. But the fact is, a relatively large percentage of land in Palestine is covered by olive trees. There’s a greater chance than almost anything else that attempting to access their lands will mean going to their olive trees going right up to the fence of a settlement and so that's the line in the sand of sorts. That's the conflict area.
[music begin]
The conflict. Okay. I will try to be brief, but I think that some of us might need some context.
In 1949, after the Arab-Israeli war, the powers came to an armistice. Between Israel and Jordan, They drew a demarcation line - a temporary border, for the sake of the agreement. It’s called the Green Line, named for the color of the marker they used to draw it on the map.
So, in this agreement, administration of what’s now called The West Bank, which includes Ramallah, was left to and later annexed by Jordan.
In 1967, Israel invaded and captured several territories - including the West Bank. This is known as the Six-Day War.
This is why people, including until recently the US State Department, calls it the occupied West Bank.
Following this moment, about 300,000 Palestinians fled the area.
Since 1967, hundreds of communities - Israeli settlements - have been constructed inside the occupied West Bank - plus highways to reach them, some for use only by Israeli citizens. -
These settlements are seen as illegal by the international community - including the UN, the EU, and until recently, the United States.
There have also sustained periods of Palestinian uprisings -- or Intifadas. The first in the late 80s, and the second, much more violent, in the early 2000s.
I’ll also add that I spoke to several settlers, including Miri Maoz-Ovadia, who works with the Binyamin Regional Council as spokesperson + head of the international desk. The Binyamin Region is a region in the West Bank which includes Ramallah. She disputed most to all of what I just said - in her view, the West Bank is not under military occupation, but simply a part of Israel. She would also call the West Bank by a different name - Judea and Samaria -. . And as for the term “settler” -
Miri Maoz-Ovadia: Now I understand why people would call us settlers, and because of my work, I'm used to speaking in this terminology, but in my daily life, I don't define… that doesn't define me. Other things do define me, I'm a mother, I'm a person who is very connected to nature, I'm an Israeli, I'm a feminist.
Miri was born in the region, and her kids are third generation. For her, this connection to the land begins thousands of years ago.
Miri Maoz-Ovadia: I'm an Israeli citizen, I live in a community that is recognized by Israel, legal by Israel. I follow the Israeli law, we pay Israeli taxes here in Israel. Here in Israel, this community is considered no different than communities in other places around the country. And yes, there are differences in the daily life and challenges that we face because Israel has not yet extended its sovereignty over this region. But we very much expect our government to do so. I think it’s not going to happen now. It will happen one day. And we see this area as an. Always been an important part of the land of Israel, an important place for the Jewish people, and will always remain that way.
But while Israel might call the territories “disputed”, their Supreme Court has called it a “belligerent occupation”. I just want to pause here for a second because I think it took me a while to put meaning to those words: occupied. Military occupation.
This is not a perfect metaphor,[17] but I think the closest that an average American person might come to an encounter with being under armed state surveillance - is going through airport security - especially international customs - which is a border.
Standing in line, having all your stuff gone through, needing to be carrying your papers to prove your identity and your ticket, which permits you to be there at all, to pass through the gate. Maybe your body is scanned or patted down..
It can feel a little or a lot scary, depending on how things go - you might feel like you could get in trouble w/o knowing what you’re getting in trouble for. It can feel arbitrary, it can feel dehumanizing.
Best case scenario, it’s inconvenient. Something to complain about.
Imagine having to go through airport security, maybe every day - both when you expect it, when you’re crossing to other side of town to see family, going to the hospital -
And when checkpoints just pop up out of nowhere - as they do in the West Bank, I’m told practically as a matter of routine.
You don’t know that you’re free from surveillance until you’re not.
Iyad Hadad: If I want to summarize to you: my life is an Israeli checkpoint.
That's Iyad Hadad again. This history, that I just have just very briefly laid out, is the context for why Palestinians and Israelis have lived in a state of tension and violence that has lasted decades.
Iyad, by the way, has two masters degrees and a background in international law and nonviolent resistance.
He’s a field researcher for B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights and information center, which means he spends his days gathering eyewitness testimony, medical and government reports... and documenting violence between Palestinians, settlers, and the Israeli Army.
Iyad Hadad: Sometimes we see bloody cases. I sometimes get in the refrigerator, to show bodies. And I attend sometimes autopsy.
Sometimes this means physically verifying the presence of bullet holes.
And that brings us back to the olive harvest - when much of this conflict - the encounters tha Iyad documents - the season when much of this conflict and these encounters - come to a head.
Nidal Waleed Rabie: My name, Nidal Waleed Rabie. I am a Palestinian. I live in a town called Turmus Ayya near Ramallah in Palestine.
Nidal is a farmer and the chair of a Palestinian branch of Via Campesina, an international group that advocates for peasants rights. He’s lived abroad in Panama and Costa Rica and the United States.
Unlike Iyad, whose olive trees are twenty five years old, Nidal’s olive trees have a long family lineage. his olive trees were tended by his father, by his grandfather -
Samera: My grandfather’s trees around 100, from his great-great-grandparents. And they’re around 1000 to 1500 years old.
Nidal, by the way, speaks Arabic, Spanish, and English. but he had his granddaughter Samera translate for him
Nidal: [Arabic]
Some of Nidal’s trees are in his town, Turmus Ayya. But others are much closer to nearby settlements.
Samera: My grandfather has to have a schedule with them, with the settlers.
In fact most of the land in the West Bank - which includes two thirds of agricultural land [18]- is administered by Israel -
Samera: He can’t come or go as he pleases, like the trees that are far away from illegal settlements.
Palestinians olive growers with trees close to settlements can coordinate with the army to access them twice a year: During the harvest in October/November, and to plow, in the winter.
This, according to many people I spoke to, is not sufficient: and, in some places, yields have been falling.
Second, to reach the trees, a Palestinian farmer needs to get a permit. Which requires acquiring proof of ownership - documents held by the Israeli Civil Administration, which, by all accounts[19], makes it very difficult to obtain them.
Plus, the owner of the land isn’t necessarily the one actually picking the olives -
Iyad Hadad: Imagine if he doesn't have children, or youth, they need help from outside the family. So how they can improve that they have a relations with the ownership? It's very hard.
Then, once the farmer has the permit and has coordinated the time to cross into - it comes time to pass through security, which could mean the Separation Barrier the wall between the West Bank and the Green Line.
Iyad Hadad: There is a gate through a barrier.
This process can be slow.
Iyad Hadad: One gate, for the farmers, to get in. through.
Or, farmers might show up at the scheduled time and not be able to get through, as B’Tselem has documented.
Iyad Hadad: Waiting.
Maybe in rain, in the heat -
Iyad Hadad: Half an hour, one hour, two hours, whatever.
And once a grower passes through the gates and gets to their olives - they don’t know what they’ll find there.
Irus Braverman: Israeli settlers… they come, they claim that this is their land, they will burn olive trees, they will vandalize them, they will sometimes harvest them themselves, but usually it's vandalism… Palestinian organizations like ARIJ say that over a million olive trees have been uprooted in this way since 1967
And it’s not just tree vandalism. Sometimes, the settlers themselves will be there.
Samera: my grandfather when he goes to visit his trees that are closer to illegal settlements, with the farmers as well, the illegal settlers and the soldiers come and cause trouble.
Iyad Hadad: Sometimes they attacked by the settlers groups. They came… attacking you, and hitting you, ehh... sometimes killing people..
All the settlers who I spoke with - including, Miri Maoz-Ovadia, spokesperson for the Binyamin Regional Council, told me: they are criminals. No question about it - she condemns the violence.
Irus Braverman writes that who she calls the “New Settlers” tend to represent a more religious, more conservative, and more extremist fringe.
Irus Braverman: For them, they don't see themselves as criminals. They think they're doing the right thing by God. Because it is for them, this is the promised land.
But B’Tselem does not call this settler violence. The organization calls it state-backed settler violence - because of the incidents they’ve documented coming from settlers and the army, and a corresponding lack of accountability.
Because of a 2006 Supreme Court case, brought in fact by Rabbis for Human Rights,[20] Israeli defense forces are legally obligated to protect the Palestinian growers during the harvest, because settler violence is so pervasive. But - that does not always happen.
Samera/Nidal: In fact two months ago, the settlers, they threw pepper tear gras, and the soldiers arrested those two farmers. The soldiers wouldn’t let farmers harvest their land, so they would take them out and they wouldn’t let them come back in.
Justine Paradis: And you yourself, um, came into contact with violence. It’s sort of famously on video. Can you tell me about this encounter?
Rabbi Arik Ascherman: I mean there’s been many cases of violence. I often say I’ve, uh, been attacked by settlers, beaten up by Israeli security forces, and I’ve had my car stung by Palestinians. It can kind of... things come from all directions.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman again, who ran Rabbis for Human Rights for 21 years.
In 2015, there was a coordinated with the army olive harvest, being protected by the army, because of the high court victory, you actually do see palestinians being protected by israeli soldiers to get to the olive trees during the olive harvests.
This was underneath a whole string of outposts connected to the settlement of Itamar.
So, after the farmers left their grove, they turned around, coming down the hill, they looked up and they saw settlers entering the grove and starting to steal olives. And so we called the army, the army came, and didn't arrest anybody, but they did push them out.
But then from the next wadi over, we saw a fire had broken o ut.
[music begin]
And I was trying to contact the army again, not succeeding and so I started heading up the wadi with another volunteer and a reporter that happened to be with us that day. The volunteer decided he didn’t want to go back. He turned back. And while I’m still looking at and focusing on the fire and seeing two settlers up there, or israelis at least, i was kind of blindsided by another man… we had seen one person coming down and looking at us threateningly, but i'd forgotten about him, and all of a sudden there he was
Waving his knife, throwing rocks, and it was of course a very scary situation.
And I'm trying to back off, not turning my back to him, not just running away, but facing him, backing off, slowly, trying to watch his moves.
And then he goes after this reporter - when it started, I said, get out of here, just get out of here - but he didn't, because he wanted it all on film
So I draw the attacker back to me.
And I’m again trying to back down, but I’m going down a steep incline, and I fall.
[music]
And that allowed him to get on my back with his knife hand free - and you see in this video, his hand plunges down three times,
But he didn’t stab the Rabbi. He sort of feinted it - in the video, it looks like he uses the hand not holding the knife.
He could have murdered me, had he chosen to do so. He, somewhere in his heart he was not a murderer, at least not of Jews. And then he throws one more rock at me and runs away.
I actually later met him in a kind of a restorative justice program. You know, he had had his… one of his best friends murdered in a Palestinian terror attack.
In his mind, we were an existential threat to him and his family and his friends.
That's part of what happens when you also have incitement going on in this country against human rights defenders, as that somehow we’re traitors, we’re anti-Israel,[21] whatever.
One of the most interesting things he said though was: I'm lucky this happened to me because it was a wake-up call. I might have ended up doing something much much worse if this hadn’t happened. His family did move out of the settlement into Israel proper. I know he's done a lot of violence therapy. And I actually hope that he gets his life back in the right direction. I mean. He was 17 when this happened.
One of the things that Judaism teaches is we can all change and because we can, we're also obligated to change. It's what we call Teshuva, which is often translated as repentance but it really means to answer God's call to make the effort to turn and to return to our true selves.
Two harvests have been described here. The first, a leisurely family outing in the fall with the aroma of hot coffee and tomatoes over the fire; the second, a harvest reached only after passing through security barriers, accompanied by soldiers, interrupted at the very least by an awareness that something could go wrong, but often, loss, violence.
The olive harvest is coming up in October. This year, there are two new elements: the coronavirus pandemic.
Iyad Hadad: all of us are living under coronavirus circumstances. And it needs special behavior
And second, the fact that earlier in 2020, Israel threatened to officially annex the Jordan Valley in the West Bank. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamen Netanyahu has since backed down, for the moment, but in response to this threat, the Palestinian Authority is not participating in civil coordination with Israel. This means that the whole process of reaching certain olive groves and of coordinating schedules with Israeli Defense Forces...
Iyad Hadad: The situation is more complicated than before.
[music beat]
In some stories, a tree or a forest are a backdrop to human drama - merely a setting.
As Noga Kadman said, under the shade of the pine, even ruins can become part of such a background.
Noga Kadman: THey become like part of nature. It becomes like pretty.
But here, trees are not a backdrop.
Irus Braverman: All this struggle, all these questions, are embodied in this landscape of trees
Irus Braverman again.
Irus Braverman: that just seem to just stand there innocuously but in fact have been constructed in this landscape.
They’re questions. Questions like the ones that Liat Berdugo brought to her family photos, planting the pine in the Jerusalem Forest with her family.
Liat Berdugo: What appears in a frame? What appears in sight? Who can be seen and who can't be seen? Who is free of surveillance, for instance?
How is nature used to change who or what is visible? To tell a certain version of a conflict?
How does trees attemp to communicate the nature of a place? as Biblical, as verdant? Village or forest, wild. empty. inhabited. As a representation of a human being - a child, a colonizer, a guard, an ancestor?
A tree and its seeds, the forest waiting in the soil, can endure past a human lifetime, beyond memory - as Jonathan Kuttab said.
Jonathan Kuttab: So they rise up as a witness to what used to be there.
Outliving and witnessing, generations of conflict.
[theme rise]
So, if you know what to look for… sometimes trees don’t hide the story. They tell it.
CREDITS
This episode of Outside/In was produced by me, Justine Paradis, with Taylor Quimby and Sam Evans-Brown.
Erika Janik is our executive producer.
Maureen McMurray’s roots go deep.
Thank you to Amit Gilutz, Yehoshua Shkedy, Vered Ben Saadon, and Eliana Passentin.
We’ve put a lot of materials for this episode on our website, including Liat’s photos of planting the tree in the Jerusalem Forest and Iyad and his family harvesting olives on his land. We’ve also posted an annotated transcript and links to more reading.
All that on the episode post on our website, outsideinradio.org.
That is also where you’ll find a sign-up for our newsletter and - we’re a production of a public radio station - a link to donate to support the podcast.
Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
[1] Braverman, p73.
[7] Braverman, p39-41.
[8] Pappe, Ilan. Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. p120.
[10] 86 villages = 62 on JNF sites and 24 with JNF afforestation/involvement on INPA sites. Kadman, pages 112-113.
[12] This article makes note of the fire and Canada Forest but none of the villages.
[13] Tal, Alon. Pollution in a Promised Land, p103.
[14] Tal, p95. Correspondence with Yehoshua Shkedy of INPA.
[15] Tal; email with Yehoshua Shkedy of INPA.
[16] “The Besieged Palestinian Olive Oil Sector,” page 5.
[17] Jonathan Kuttab said that the closest comparison is American occupation of post-WWII Japan or the German occupation of Europe during WWII.
[18] United Nations, “The Besieged Palestinian Olive Oil Sector”, page 7.
[19] Raja Shehadeh, interview + Palestinian Walks; Iyad Hadad, interview; Braverman, p134.
[20] Braverman, p155. Ascherman interview.
[21] Conversation with Vered Ben Saadon, conversation with Eliana Passentin.