Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Some three-quarters of the villages of Arab Galilee had been emptied of their populations, and nearly all those of central and southern Israel.[8] In the early months of the new state, and even during the war itself, the Israeli government-in-waiting had debated what to do with them. Riding through the Galilee in late 1948, Joseph Weitz, forestry director of the JNF, wrote in his journal:

  … the Galilee is revealed to me in its splendor, its hidden places and folds, its crimson smile and its green softness and its desolation. I have never seen it like this. It was always bustling with man and beast. And the latter predominated. Herds and more herds used to descend from the heights to the valleys of the streambeds, their bells ringing with a sort of discontinuous sound, which vanished in the ravines and hid among the crevices, as if they would go on chiming forever. And the shepherds striding after them like figures from ancient times, whistling merrily … and now the picture has disappeared and is no more. A strange stillness lies over all the mountains and is drawn by hidden threads from within the empty village. An empty village; what a terrible thing! Fossilized lives! Lives turned to fossilized whispers in extinguished ovens; a shattered mirror; moldy blocks of dried figs and a scrawny dog, thin-tailed and floppy-eared and dark-eyed.

  Sites of Arab Villages Abandoned During the 1948 War

  For Weitz, this elegy for the empty land is but the prelude to celebrating a deeper rebirth.

  … at the very same moment — a different feeling throbs and rises from the primordial depths, a feeling of victory, of taking control, of revenge, and of casting off suffering. And suddenly the whispers vanish and you see empty houses, good for the settlement of our Jewish brethren who have wandered for generation upon generation, refugees of your people, steeped in suffering and sorrow, as they, at last, find a roof over their heads. And you knew: War! This was our war.[9]

  Over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs had left, and in the next three years a similar number of Jewish refugees would arrive in Israel. Using the abandoned villages to house the newcomers seemed an obvious solution. But there were problems.[10] Some of the villages had already been too damaged during the implementation of Plan D, particularly those close to Israel’s fragile borders. In 1949, international pressure, especially from the U.S., on Israel to facilitate peace negotiations with its Arab neighbours by allowing some of the refugees to return led the state to order a further spate of demolitions.

  The refugees could not come back. Israel had made that clear even during the war. Planned or not, their exit allowed the possibility of a Jewish state, and that was not something that was about to be given up. Yet while there was no major, or organized, return, Arab Palestinians did come back, tens of thousands of them. Villagers from the Galilee who had crossed into Lebanon would return to their former homes: to retrieve belongings, or harvest from orchards or fields the crops they’d cultivated, or in hopes of staying. Others made the journey to see family members who remained in Israel. The borders were porous for several years. Such returnees were deemed marauding “infiltrators” who, if caught, were shot or expelled. Although the vast majority came without weapons or violent intent, the war of 1948 had not ended neatly with the armistice in 1949. Armed gangs of refugees attacked Jewish settlements, and Israeli troops crossed into neighbouring countries on retaliatory raids. This all added to the general sense of instability, of living in a nation under existential threat, and made the village demolitions seem to the Israeli government like a good tactical move.

  In any case, the villages weren’t really what the new Israelis wanted. In many ways, Zionism had always been an essentially utopian project. Now, here was a unique opportunity: to build a new society from scratch. “Everything must be systematically settled beforehand,”[11] Theodor Herzl had declared in his 1896 vision for the Jewish state; and indeed, the micro-engineering of Israeli infrastructure[12] outclassed even Roosevelt’s New Deal and Stalin’s Five-Year Plan in scope and detail. By December 1948, Bauhaus architect Arieh Sharon had been charged with conceiving a Master Plan, by which five essential areas of the new state (agriculture, industry, transportation, forestry and parks, and the new “development” towns) would be designed. “The new ownership of the land thus makes it possible to put in order and re-arrange the space and to ensure the people’s physical and mental well-being through central planning,” he told the first meeting of the Government Districts and Zones Planning Committee. “The ‘Old World’ … is already sick, degenerate, spawning urban monsters. Here there exists an opportunity for a fresh start, on a tabula rasa, as it were.”[13]

  Urban projects were strongly influenced by the Garden City experiments of British socialism, but it was agricultural settlement, the kibbutz and the moshav (collective and co-operative farming communities, respectively), which lay at the heart of the Zionist movement’s project. These had formed the foundation of Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine, and over four hundred new farming communities were established during the first decade of Israel’s existence. As for the Arab villages, their sprawling, agglomerated layout didn’t fit with the Zionist vision of rural settlement. They had grown out of an utterly alien culture. They were seen as dirty and decrepit. And they had belonged to the enemy.

  Perhaps the strongest reason for the razing of the villages was the desire to purge their ghosts. The presence of the exiles still lingered in the architecture and the carefully tended olive groves and the pots and pans hastily buried in the yard. It was easier simply to bulldoze the villages and start afresh.

  And so the Arab villages were demolished, or left to fall into disrepair, and the construction of new kibbutzes, moshavs, and development towns reshaped the landscape of Israel. Wajeeh Sama’an remembers watching stones from his village, Suhmata, being trucked off to the work-sites of Hosen, the new moshav being built nearby on Suhmata’s farmland.[14] This was common practice. Rafters, bathroom fixtures, anything useful that remained was stripped from the empty houses. For the few villages and urban quarters that remained intact, their past was erased as they became home to new families.

  “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villagers are not there either…. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population,”[15] Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan told an audience at Israel’s premier technological institute in 1969.

  The Absentees’ Property legislation of 1950 transferred the property of absent villagers into the custody of the state. New arrivals from Europe and North Africa, given temporary shelter in the abandoned villages, moved on into new towns and settlements. In 1965, the Israel Land Administration (ILA) began the systematic demolition of over one hundred of the remaining villages. The stated aim was to “level” them for the purpose of “clearing” the country. As a senior ILA official told researcher Aron Shai, “this would prevent Arab villagers from claiming one day: “That is my tree. This was my village.’”[16]

  Historian Hillel Cohen has another perspective on the demolitions:[17]

  When you analyze such steps by the state — we are in the early 1960s, okay, it is some years after the war — there are many ruined Arab villages, what is to be done? We know they will not come back. We want to have a better landscape. Why have all these ruins all around the country? It’s not exactly to erase the Arab past.

  Don’t you think there was a very real danger that people might come back? I asked him. And if their villages weren’t there, that was a good way of getting rid of their claim?

  Danger that they would come back? How could they come back?

  As the years passed, the returnees’ visits dried up. For most Palestinians, living in permanent refugee camps in Jordan or Lebanon, memories of their homeland, and their homes, took on the quality of a profound nostalgia. They deeply longed to return, but they were refugees, largely unwelcome stra
ngers in a strange land, and had no political agency with which to make their dream a reality.

  The land they had left was already changing. It wasn’t just the villages themselves that disappeared, it was an entire way of life. “In just two years, Palestine’s traditional Middle-Eastern rural landscape was transformed into a Jewish-Europeanized landscape formed according to modernist and socialist conceptions,”[18] writes geographer Arnon Golan. Farming methods that had been practised for centuries with little change were swept away as backward and primitive.

  The terraced slopes of the hilly Galilee region were left to return to wilderness, their small plots rendered obsolete by the demands of modern agricultural progress. The new Jewish kibbutzes focused their labour on land reclamation and intensive cultivation in the plains. Tens of thousands of dunams [see glossary] of olive trees were uprooted, and thousands more were left in neglect. The olive had been the signature tree of Arab Palestine: the root of its economy and the source of its chief exports, soap and oil. The Israeli planners saw the careful stewarding of olive groves as too labour-intensive for the relatively meagre profit. And, while the olive was respected by the Sabra as a native tree with a solid Biblical pedigree, it had also been the mainstay of the Palestinian Arab economy, and the Arabs should be left no reason to return. “Most of all,” says Golan, “the olive groves, which were uncommon among Jewish settlements, signified the ‘otherness’ of the Arab: the alien, the enemy.”[19]

  Trees grew large in the Zionist vision of Israel. In that vision the land, left desolate by its alien occupiers, was yearning not only for the return of the Jewish people but also for the tending, planting, and fecundity that settlement would involve. Richly wooded in earlier times, over the centuries Palestine had been largely denuded of its forests, which were cut for fuel and then stripped by the Ottoman overlords for coal to run the new railways. Afforestation was seen as part of the “redemption of the land,” the restoration of the right order of things.

  These goals were manifested in the Jewish National Fund (JNF — Keren Kayemet Le-Yisrael, or KKL, in Hebrew). Theodor Herzl’s impassioned plea at the 1901 Fifth Zionist Congress had led to the establishment of the Fund, whose pre-1948 mission was to promote Jewish settlement and land purchase in Palestine. The work encompassed both land reclamation for agriculture (which included tree-planting) and the establishment of outposts and towns. By recreating the landscape, these diverse yet twin projects marked the Zionists’ rapidly expanding territories, part of the Jewish patrimony of Israel, as “facts on the ground.”

  Land acquisition and agricultural research were funded by the diaspora. “JNF-KKL’s Blue Box stood in hundreds of thousands of Jewish homes, schools, synagogues, public buildings and businesses. JNF-KKL made it possible for every Jew — whether man, woman or child — to become a partner in the Zionist enterprise and be personally involved in the development of the land,”[20] states the JNF website.*

  The Jewish nation was often imagined as a tree, and in the secular nationalist culture of the Yishuv, tree-planting became an almost sacred activity. The JNF itself “acquired a halo,” as Joseph Weitz put it, “through its work of redeeming the soil and its development, settlement and afforestation, with the last, the precious stone in the crown.”[21] The kindergarten birthday ceremony illustrates how deeply the JNF was interwoven into the national psyche. Each Yishuv kindergarten had its JNF corner, with a blue box, a Magen [Star of] David flag, plants, books, and pictures. In her birthday ritual, the child received a card from the JNF, and donated small coins into the blue box, one for each year of her life. Kindergarten inspector S. Fayens-Glick wrote in 1942:

  The symbolic way toward the idea of the KKL passes through the contributions and presents offered to the KKL during the child’s birthday, when he has become the focus of attention, and all eyes are staring at him while he lets fall, one by one, his handful of coins corresponding to his age into the box of the KKL. How many invisible threads are weaving an invisible network between his soul and the box? How many rays are emanating from it and caress his soul? How deep is this experience? When the child grows older and understands the link which exists between the tilling of the soil and the redemption of the land, the symbol, and the thing it symbolizes, will be fused together to express one single idea: the man who resurrects his land and brings about its redemption also resurrects his own self and achieves his own redemption.[22]

  The conceptual framework of redeeming the land is unabashedly present on the JNF’s website, which recounts the history and current environmental achievements of the organization. “When the pioneers of the State arrived, they were greeted by barren land. To claim the land that had been purchased with the coins collected in JNF blue and white pushkes [charity boxes], the next order of business was to plant trees among the rocky hillsides and sandy soil.”[23] Such language gives little hint of the many centuries of Arab settlement and land cultivation in historic Palestine.

  According to the website:

  Over the past 109 years, JNF has evolved into a global environmental leader by planting 250 million trees, building over 210 reservoirs and dams, developing over 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1,000 parks, providing the infrastructure for over 1,000 communities, bringing life to the Negev Desert and educating students around the world about Israel and the environment.…[24]

  After the [1948] war, JNF concerned itself with enterprises that were central to the building of the State: settling new areas; absorbing immigrants and providing them with employment working the land; reclamation for agricultural purposes; afforestation and development projects.

  In the Fifties, [a period characterized by the website as “a jubilee of redemption,”] intensive afforestation began in the Upper Galilee and development continued in and around Jerusalem, where the Martyrs Forest was planted in 1951 in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.[25]

  There six million pine and cypress trees, described on a tourist website as a “living memorial,”[26] stand in witness to the Jews who perished in Nazi Europe. Many of the JNF’s thousand parks and recreational spaces similarly celebrate aspects of Jewish history; specifically, Jewish history in the land of Israel. In the first decades of the state, the anchoring of national memory to a specific physical site through the naming of a park played a significant role in the (re)claiming of the land. Although the Holocaust had taken place in Europe, even in 1951 it was understood as part of the history of the Israeli state.

  From the early days of the Yishuv, physical land reclamation has been central to the project of Zionism. Around one-third of the territory that the JNF had purchased by the 1930s was swampland, requiring backbreaking manual work to render it fertile. An iconic image of an early pioneer would show him stripped to the waist, reaching down through several feet of fetid water to plant the sturdy young eucalyptus trees that would drain the land for farming. After the creation of the state, the scale and capacity of these enterprises increased. The draining of Lake Hulah in northern Israel in the 1950s was seen as a major national achievement. But as environmental awareness has grown, such projects have been reassessed more critically. Soil depletion and the near-extinction of the original ecosystem have led to some areas of the Hulah Valley being reflooded.

  Similarly, in the early decades of the state the JNF’s mass plantings were of hardy “pioneer” European species of pine and cypress, to the exclusion of native trees. This was accompanied by the burning and bulldozing of the forest floor to remove any indigenous vegetation, creating an environment some ecologists compared to desert.[27] In recent years, a more bioregional approach now integrates indigenous species.

  I arranged a meeting with Yshay Shechter, the JNF’s Director of Strategic Planning, who invited me to his house to talk. Yshay had been a member of Israel’s delegation to the U.N. 2007 climate change conference in Bali. Amiable and easy-going, he was boiling up a batch of sabra-fruit jam that needed tending, and the conversation took place at his kitchen table.[28] ,† I aske
d him, what was the original purpose of tree-planting for the JNF?

  I think because Zionism came from Europe, and forestry was part of the European tradition. And forestry was very much a part of the British tradition of government land use. It wasn’t traditional in the Middle East, but in British colonies — Mandate Palestine, Jordan, even India — forestry was very important. This was continued by the JNF.

  The agency was established to make a home for the Jewish diaspora in Israel. After 1948, when there was no need to buy land for that purpose, the task changed to developing the land.

  The first trees that were planted were European; pine, juniper [part of the cypress family]. This was a continuation of British policy. But now we have diversified, and plant indigenous species. [These include native oaks, carob, redbud, almond, pear, hawthorn, and cedar.] We mix European and native species because the native species take a long time to grow. After ten years we cut 50 percent of the European species, then after thirty or forty years we cut more. Not all. In forestry, you can’t work in this year. You have to think for the next fifty years.

  The value of the forests lies not in their economic worth; early plans for an Israeli wood industry petered out. Even so, a quarter of a million acres of trees have been planted by the JNF. They provide “green lungs” for Israel, and raise the quality of life in less tangible ways: “Our task is to make it more and more attractive to live there,” said Yshay.

  I also discussed the role of the forests with Noga Kadman, a Tel Aviv–based political geographer whose book, On the Side of the Road and in the Margins of Consciousness: The Depopulated Villages of 1948 in Israeli Discourse, had recently been published in Hebrew. Noga gave me her perspective on why the forests were planted:[29]