Planting the Promised Landscape: Zionism, Nature, and Resistance in Israel/Palestine
![handle is hein.journals/narj49 and id is 325 raw text is: IRUS BRAVERMAN*
Planting the Promised Landscape:
Zionism, Nature, and Resistance in
Israel/Palestine
ABSTRACT
This article reveals the complex historical and cultural processes that
have led to the symbiotic identification between pine trees and Jewish
people in Israel/Palestine. It introduces three tree donation tech-
niques used by Israel, then proceeds to discuss the meaning of nature
in Israel, as well as the meaning of planting and rooting in the con-
text of the Zionist project. The article concludes by reflecting on the
ways that pine trees absent Palestinian presence and memory from
the landscape, and explains how Palestinian acts of aggression to-
ward these pine landscapes relate to the Israel/Palestine relationship.
I. INTRODUCTION
I have to tell you, and I'm saying a lot here, that reforesting
the land is the iconic image of the Zionist experiment.'
We must plant hundreds of million [of] trees. . . . We must
clothe every mountainside with trees, every hill and rocky
piece of land which cannot successfully be farmed, the dunes
of the coastal plain, the Negev plains .... We must be able
eventually to plant at the rate of half a million dunams a year.2
When thinking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, one rarely
thinks about trees. Trees, along with bees and butterflies, usually fall into
a different classification altogether. They belong to the realm of nature,
which is usually perceived as indifferent to human wars,3 but is rarely
seen as reflective of or as reinforcing these wars. This article offers a dif-
ferent perspective; it demonstrates the process through which a natural
Editors' note on sources & figures: The Natural Resources Journal was not able to verify the
foreign language sources used in this article. For the figures referenced throughout, see the
Appendix following the article text.
. Irus Braverman, S.J.D., Master's in Criminology, LL.B., Associate Professor of Law
at University at Buffalo, State University of New York. The author wishes to thank her life
partner, Gregor Harvey, for all of his help and support.
1. Interview with Phillip Siller, active member of the Jewish community, in Toronto,
Can. (June 30, 2005).
2. JOSEPH WErrz, FOREST AND AFFORESTATION IN ISRAEL 195-96 (Isaac Arnon ed.,
Shlomo Levenson trans., 1974) (quoting Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion).
3. For a description of the 2006 war, see infra Part V.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/narj49&div=16&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Planting the Promised Landscape: Zionism, Nature, and Resistance in Israel/Palestine
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