by Jo Roberts
In addition to giving shade, trees were planted by the JNF for various reasons, all related to the connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, in an attempt to physically put down roots in this land. Tree planting provided employment for new immigrants in the periphery; met agricultural needs; created and demonstrated a presence on the land, while preventing Arabs from using it; and made a connection between immigrating Jews and their homeland. And it strengthened the connection between Israel and Jewish communities abroad, through the tradition of tree donations.
But the main reason, I would say, was to change the landscape, to make the country green, to make it more like Europe. They compared what they found to what they knew — for them, planting pine trees was a way to improve the landscape. Planting was also as a claim for ownership: you plant trees, put down roots in the land that you’ve won — the place is yours.
In biblical times the country was forested all over, but the Turks burned up the trees for coal for the railways, so many areas that were once forested became barren. So the notion here is that the Arabs neglected the country, it deteriorated during the time we (the Jews) were absent, and now we are back to improve it, rehabilitate it, replant it.
Also in some areas the trees serve as a barrier, they mark a border; especially near Arab villages, which Israel doesn’t want to expand. So, where there is a pine grove, it is as if you say: “from this point on, this is ours.”
In the decades after the 1948 War, JNF pine forests grew up through the ruins of abandoned Arab villages and over olive groves: woodlands of pine became associated with Jewish presence as the olive groves had come to be seen as Arab.‡
These new pine forests, guards of the land, were planted over the demolished villages both in order to prevent the return of their former inhabitants, and to erase their memory from the landscape. “Many of the JNF parks are located on lands on which in the past were Arab villages, and the forests are there to cover that fact,”[30] the JNF’s Michal Katorza stated in a 2008 interview. Indeed, Noga’s research shows that close to half of the sites of destroyed villages are located now within the boundaries of some kind of recreation site: national parks, forests, or hiking trails, most administered by the JNF or the National Parks Association.
The orange groves of the fertile flatlands around Jaffa and Tel Aviv play a more ambiguous role in Israeli memory. Before 1948, the groves were a ubiquitous part of the economic life of Jaffa and its environs, and their loss resonates strongly in Palestinians’ collective memory of dispossession.
But for Jewish Israelis, too, the orange groves provoke nostalgia. Cultivation of citrus was the main source of income for the Jewish settlers in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in that Sabra culture the orchards were integral not only to labour but also to communal festivities. “In Israeli-Jewish society, the orange groves carry nostalgic associations with the first Zionists,” explained Noga Kadman. “There are many stories of the early Zionists working in the orange groves, swimming in the pools that watered their oranges, and the social activities that happened there.”
Although crippled by the war, and the neglect and destruction of thousands of dunams of Arab-owned trees, the industry recovered rapidly in the newly formed Israeli state. New Jewish immigrants followed in the footsteps of their predecessors by working in the orange groves. By the 1970s, citrus was Israel’s largest export. But the groves were situated in prime real estate locations, near the ever-growing city of Tel Aviv.
Noga recalls:
In the past, I remember not so long ago, driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, along the way, near the airport — you could smell the orange blossom. Now, no: nothing. And the Sharon area, north of Tel Aviv, that was an area of many, many orange groves; some are there still, but less and less. It became about real estate value, property development. It became better financially to change the usage of the land from agriculture to building and make more profit.
Neither an Arab nor a Jewish farmer from the 1930s would find their land recognizable now. The whole system of land use, and the landscape that it formed, has gone. Patterns of cultivation used for centuries by Arab fellahin were thrown over in 1948 for the modern, European agricultural practices embraced by the Yishuv. Now, the demands of the free-market economy have sacrificed profitable citrus production for even more profitable real estate.
Olive and fig trees spread across the steep, terraced hillside of Sataf, one of the JNF’s historical and recreational sites, on a mountain near Jerusalem. Walking trails wind through the 250-acre site, which reconstructs for visitors the ancient farming practices of Sataf’s first habitation, six thousand years ago. Hikers and tourists pass through the ruins of a settlement, low walls of carved, pale stones marking out the shape of former homes. Children race around the perimeter of a walled pool, its still, green waters the outflow of an ancient spring. The JNF signage focuses exclusively on the village’s more distant past, but in 1948 it was an Arab village of some 165 dwellings, whose people tilled their terraced plots and tended their olive groves. All its inhabitants were expelled, and little is left of their houses. What remains blurs easily into a nonspecific history of the past, the ruins of an ancient village. Sataf’s post-war history has been fairly typical of an abandoned village: briefly inhabited by Jewish immigrants from North Africa, it was left derelict for decades, used by the Israeli army for training purposes until the JNF began its restoration work in 1985.
I visited Sataf with Noga Kadman. She’d been here many times before, exploring as a child and returning years later to see Sataf from a different historical perspective.
As a kid in Jerusalem we used often to go on trips to Sataf or Lifta with school, youth movement, or family. It’s very popular. There are ruins there that can be clearly seen, but as a visiting child you don’t think about it much. You don’t get a sense of what was there just from visiting, without having the knowledge: that is not provided. Only later I understood what was there before.
What brought you to study the history of the abandoned villages? I asked.
I was working with B’Tselem, a human rights organization, documenting human rights in the Occupied Territories. I became very interested in understanding more about the sources of the conflict. Gradually I was exposed to more and more information regarding the refugees. I realized that the Palestinians in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza are all one people, all originated from here. It was a revelation.
Another thing was that I was travelling a lot in Israel, and doing a lot of hiking, and I saw these ruins everywhere. And then I realized that these places used to be villages, and not so long ago they were vibrant places with people, families, and now there was nothing.
I asked Noga what she had heard about the Nakba when she was growing up:
We learned a lot about the ’48 War, and our independence. I knew that the other side had lost, that people left their homes. It is common knowledge in Israel. When I was sixteen we moved to the Baka’a neighbourhood in Jerusalem, which used to be an Arab neighborhood, and the Arab houses that were left there are considered desirable property, as in other parts of the city. Of course we knew that their occupants were there before and they’re not there anymore. But I said at the time: we were a refugee people, we had no choice, we had no place in the world, we had to come here. It’s too bad they had to pay the price, but there was no choice. Growing up I could not see things from the other side. There are several levels of knowledge: I knew of the facts, but I had no sense of what it really means. Only later were my eyes open to know and to feel their tragedy and our responsibility to it.
I’m always aware, too, and it’s important for me to remember, that it is not just about a colonizing power invading a foreign country. It’s not only about ancient Jewish history and the connection to the land, but the fact that Jews were in a big distress in Europe and the people who came here were mostly refugees, even those who came to live in Arab houses and villages. They also lost their homes
, lost their world, and often their families, and they were trying to build something new; they expelled somebody else, for sure, but still, it is a complicated picture.
I wondered how Noga thought that the Holocaust, and the two thousand years of Jewish-Christian history that preceded it, had shaped Israel’s existence.
I don’t know if Israel, or Zionism, would have emerged if there was no anti-Semitism, no prelude to make the Jewish people in the diaspora feel that their existence there was very, very shaky. Of course it is not only this, because there were nationalist movements everywhere, but I don’t think Jews would have wanted to become a nation, unless they were persecuted and excluded from the European nations. I think that’s the driving force behind Zionism, I don’t think otherwise such a huge revolution could have happened.
Noga believes that Israel should acknowledge the Nakba. For her, it’s a moral issue.
I think we have to be aware that we are enjoying the fruit that others have planted. All the things that people are so proud of, the development of Israel, we built mostly on the property of others. We took it from them and didn’t allow them to enjoy it any longer, and didn’t even give them compensation. Morally, it’s important to be aware of that. And out of awareness should also come an understanding that it’s not right. If someone paid a price for something that he was not responsible for, we should try to repair the damage that was done to him, and not try to think that as long as he’s outside of your borders and you don’t see him, he doesn’t exist, and you needn’t care.
Talking with Noga reminded me of an old white photograph I’d seen: a snapshot, taken in 1949, of European-Jewish immigrants in front of their new home in Israel. I remember the foreground of the photo, the smiling, travel-worn refugees who have finally found a place to settle down and start building a new life. The power of this image, charged with my intimation of what they may have lived through in Europe, makes it easy to lose sight of the architecture of their house in the background. The refugees have been settled into an abandoned Arab village.
What we know, or what we think we know, shapes what we see. If I hadn’t been aware of the double displacement the photo gives witness to, I wouldn’t have seen the houses in the background. Even when captured by the solid evidence of a photographic image, the past can disappear.
Like the forests of northern conifers, the re-created landscapes of Sataf and al-Kabri help shape Israeli collective remembrance, as memory and landscape renew each other in a complex exchange. The stories they tell, of Biblical settlement and heroic twentieth-century sacrifice, are part of an exclusive narrative of Israel’s history that renders its Palestinian past as invisible as the abandoned villages.
* * *
* Note the uncomplicated assumption that all Jews supported Zionism’s enterprise in Palestine.
† He made it clear that his comments were made in a personal rather than an official capacity.
‡ In the Arab Revolt that flared up in the late 1930s against seemingly unchecked Jewish settlement, the JNF’s forestry projects had been a prime target, and thousands of dunams were set on fire. Trees are still understood as nationalist markers today: destruction or removal of Palestinian olives trees, or blocking villagers’ access to their groves during harvest, is a routine form of settler violence in the West Bank; JNF forests were also targeted during the Palestinian Intifada.
Chapter Five
Knowing the Land
The old map of Mandate Palestine reminds me of the Ordnance Survey maps my father and I took with us as we explored the hills of southwest England when I was a child. The fonts and muted colours are the same, but the terrain is different — looping brown contour lines interrupted by Arab villages and the sprawl of their surrounding olive groves, a few Jewish settlements with orchard or forest nearby, and the blue of the Mediterranean stretching away to the west. The names, too, though all in the Roman alphabet, are unfamiliar. Dry riverbeds, ruins, and hills carry their local Arabic names, as do the villages, and the settlements are marked in transliterated Hebrew.
The map is part of a 1:100,000 series produced by the British in 1942. But this particular map was printed in Israel in the mid-fifties, and includes a newly added overlay, a violet web of new roads and settlements, their names marked in Hebrew. Neatly overprinted in violet under the names of many of the Arab villages is a single Hebrew word, in parentheses: destroyed.
The new state needed maps but hadn’t yet had the time to create its own, so the overprint was a temporary measure. Marking the space between two different political realities, this map is unusual in that it gives witness to the process of the landscape’s cultural and physical transformation. When I was walking the fields and hills of north Somerset, I assumed that a map was a mirror of the land, that it was “scientific” and true, that there could only be one way of seeing. I’ve since become aware that it’s more complicated than that, and particularly so when the land you walk is contested. Then a map becomes a weapon, a tool in the making of a “landscape of power.”[1] A “map does not map locations so much as create ownership at a location, it is the ownership … [that] the map is bringing into being…”[2] notes cartographer Denis Wood.
The work of creating a map of the new state carried a powerful political charge. For one thing, Israel was a country with fairly fluid borders. During the war it had spilled beyond the territories granted by the U.N.’s 1947 Partition plan, and was in an uneasy truce with hostile neighbours who did not recognize its right to exist. Conversely, for some Zionists, yearning for a Jewish nation in the whole of Eretz Israel, there was a tension between the borders they held and those they desired; a dissonance that was to be partially resolved for them by the occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in June 1967.
Unlike other societies founded by settler peoples, such as the European colonizations of the Americas and Australia, it was this very particular territory that had drawn Jewish immigrants, and indeed was profoundly enmeshed into the collective understanding of what it meant to be a Jew. In a complex process of national redemption, the Zionists believed their presence in the land of Israel would solidify their claim to it, would convert tenancy back into ownership. The revival of the Hebrew language within the Yishuv was integral to that claim, the language of the past reforged for the new Hebrews of the new Hebrew state. And part of that Hebrew revival was to be a recasting of the map, to reflect the ancient rather than the more recent past. From 1925, names of new settlements had been carefully chosen by a central committee, planting Biblical names back into the earth where they had once flourished, or celebrating contemporary Zionist heroes. The Hebrew map was both a marker of cultural revival and a cementing of a historical claim to the land of Israel.
In July 1949, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion brought together a group of prestigious Israeli scholars and charged them with the (re)naming of the landscape. The Commission consisted of “prominent experts in the fields of geography, cartography, history, archaeology, Hebrew language and Jewish culture,”[3] according to geographers Maoz Azaryahu and Arnon Golan, who have studied its work. The commissioners began with the Negev desert, and after the successful completion of this project their work was extended northward to encompass the whole country. The mandate of the official Government Names Commission was “to Judaize the map of Israel and to affix Hebrew names to all geographical features in the map of Israel.”[4]
Many of the Hebrew names are Scriptural, even though only 174 geographical locations are specifically referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures; for example, while the Bible cites 16 rivers west of the Jordan, 220 rivers were given Biblical names by the Commissioners. The principle animating their work was that after the Arab conquest of the seventh century C.E., original names had been Arabized. Their task was to dig down through layers of language, peeling away the Arabized names and revealing the Hebrew root underneath. The commissioners, one of whom was the JNF’s Joseph Weitz, consciously saw their role as one of
national revival. Coordinator Hannah Bitan explained in 1992, “The work of the commission gives a tangible expression to the strong link between the Jewish people and its land. … according to the geographical-historical truth of the Land of Israel.”[5]
In his book Sacred Landscape, Meron Benvenisti records the Commission’s process of (re)naming:
“The remaining sites, and they are the overwhelming majority,” stated the committee report, “have still not been identified [from sources of antiquity], and their Hebrew names have been determined in accordance with the meaning of the Arabic name or its similarity in sound, or derived from the surrounding landscape or nearby geographical features.”]
Gradually, across the country, the geography of each locale was renamed. A hill or a spring would receive a Hebrew place name, and from that the names of other nearby features — “gullies, plains, caves, hills and crossroads” — would be derived.
Analyzing the detailed reports of the Commission, Benvenisti writes:
Bir al-Haramis (Thieves’ Well) became Be’er Hermesh (Scythe Well); Khirbat al-Sneineh (… Little Tooth) became Horbat Snunit ( … Swallow); Wadi al-Kana (Wadi of Reeds) became Nahal Elkana (a Hebrew proper name). And so it went, on and on and on: thousands of names changed meaning, erasing an entire universe and replacing it with “similar sounds.”[6]
By 1994, 6,865 places or geographical features had been (re)named in Hebrew.
While some destroyed villages are marked with a generic “Ruins” on the Hebrew map of Israel, very few are given their Arabic names. Ben-Gurion had been adamant: “No names of places that existed should be included in the new map.”[7] For the prime minister, the destruction of the villages and their cartographical erasure were of one cloth. In 1950, he had written to the commission of their early work mapping the Negev: “You have banished the shame of foreignness and of an alien language from half of Israeli territory and completed the job begun by the Israeli Defense Forces: to liberate the Negev from foreign rule. I hope that you will continue your work until you will redeem the entire area of the Land of Israel from the rule of foreign language.”[8]