Why are there terraces under the forests of Jerusalem ?
Covering up Palestinians’ presence on their land with foreign trees backfired on Israel and the Jewish National Fund, which planted the climate-inappropriate pine forests that burned in Jerusalem last week.
These fires — and the over 400-year-old Palestinian terraced gardens that they revealed — expose the lies that Zionists “made the desert bloom” and settled on a “land without a people.” These colonial myths were used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people and violation of Palestinian land. Zionists ignorantly, arrogantly, and cruelly disrupted the delicate ecosystems with which Palestinians lived in harmony for centuries — and the ripple effects of their disruption will only intensify as the earth’s climate continues to change.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) planted 80 million pine trees for three main reasons:
- To impose a European, “Jewish” notion of beautiful, thriving nature onto the Palestinian landscape, and to literally put down “Jewish” roots as they uprooted Palestinians.
- To provide a “green cover” over ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, obscuring Zionists’ forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba and preventing those Palestinians from ever returning to their homes;
- To physically occupy land, whether to freeze it for future Jewish development or to control Palestinians’ movement around borders and other heavily-policed areas.
But the foreign pine trees have proven to be ill-suited and harmful in the hot, dry Palestinian climate because they are thirsty and highly flammable. After fires, they release seeds en masse, developing into even denser and more combustible forests that impede other plants and animals from thriving in the area.
Alongside Palestinians themselves, the Palestinian environment seems to be rebelling against Zionist interference and domination.