The Jewish National Fund and Afforestation as Ecological Colonialism in Palestine
By Alison Cohen-Moule
Editors’ note: Three days ago marked the Jewish agricultural holiday Tu BiShvat, known as the Rosh Hashanah (or New Years) for the trees. Traditionally, this holiday was identified by the rabbis of the Talmud as “the date for calculating the beginning of the agricultural cycle for the purpose of biblical tithes.” However, since the nineteenth century Tu BiShvat has been associated with, in the words of the author, the “afforestation” (i.e. planting trees “in an area where there was no previous tree cover”) and “ecological colonization” of Palestine. This eloquent piece grapples with the Jewish National Fund’s unfortunate colonial legacy and our own complicity in it. A message that is particularly timely given the recent revelations by Independent Jewish Voices Canada, a sister organization of Jewish Voice for Peace, that JNF Canada is using tax-deductible funds to support illegal settlements in the West Bank and human rights violations perpetuated by the IDF- all in violation of Canadian law.
In the front hall closet my mom keeps an old shoebox of collected badges, pins and buttons. Among the 1960s brownie badges, various ribbons with her high school crest and miscellaneous buttons she acquired in university, I found a tiny brooch that appeared older, distinct from the rest of the accumulated objects in the box. A silver-coloured piece of metal about the size of my thumbnail, in the shape of an acorn (or maybe a leaf?), with embossed shapes of branches and three symbols that stood out slightly from the tarnished surface. My mom told me it belonged to her mother and the letters were hebrew, but she wasn’t sure what it signified.
I put the pin on the collar of my jacket with the stem of the acorn (leaf?) facing upwards. A while later I asked my little sister’s friend Sarah, who spoke Hebrew at home, if she could read what the pin said. She informed me I was wearing it upside-down, but she could not decipher the letters. “It could mean lots of things…I can’t say for sure,” she told me.
The next time an opportunity arose to consult a Hebrew-speaker, it was my track and field coach Mr. Tepper. On the bleachers at the first meet of the season, I showed him the pin (now set with the stem facing downwards and the letters right-side-up) and asked him if he could tell me what it said. He squinted at it for a while but could not translate it for me. “My Hebrew is a little rusty,” he apologized.
I wore the pin for several years without knowing what it was. I liked the shape, the details and the delicacy of it. I liked that it belonged to my Grandma Barbara, who, like all my other grandparents, had died before I was born. I liked that it had a Jewish history, a small piece of material culture found in the archaeological deposit of my parents’ house.
For two years I have identified myself as an anti-Zionist Jew. I’ve been reading up on the history and the making of the settler colonial State of Israel. I’ve been keeping up-to-date on news from Gaza, trying to read Edward Said and Judith Butler in my leisure time. I won’t go to Aroma Espresso Bar or buy Sabra brand hummus! Yet all this time, I realized, I’ve been wearing the logo of the Jewish National Fund, the Hebrew letters for “JNF” on a tree-shaped pin.
The slogan “make the desert bloom” echoed in my head as I discovered that my grandmother’s brooch was likely a small reward for a donation to the JNF, towards planting Israeli trees on Palestinian land. It represents the Zionism enforced in 20th and 21st century Jewish culture that I have tried to distance myself from. I was unable to find the exact year of the object’s production, but I found a similar pin listed on an antique Judaica website dated to the 1950s. It was likely made in Israel and then sent to donors around the diaspora, or it could have been acquired by my grandmother on a trip to Israel. The object, which is no larger than 2cm in width and 1cm in length, embodies a history of settler colonialism, nationalism and Zionism.
The Jewish National Fund, like many other organizations, gave out pins to thank donors and advertise their cause. The somewhat militaristic practice of receiving a token for an honourable deed can be seen outside grocery stores and metro stations around Remembrance Day, as passers-by are offered red poppies for their donations. The symbols can be worn to represent support of a cause: pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness, red ribbons for HIV/AIDS. Such symbols are medals for monetary acts of charitable service, and allow wearers to perform as good samaritans, or to “show awareness”. Pins form a language with which likewise supporters of a cause can identify. In the example of Remembrance Day poppies, these symbols are commonly understood to represent support of war veterans but also display connotations of militarism and nationalism. Despite this, they are distributed in elementary schools where children are not given the choice to understand or question this institution. The JNF’s tree-planting pins present a seemingly positive exploit. This guise of an environmental mission, however, hides or “green-washes” Israel’s extended military occupation of Palestine.
The name, Jewish National Fund or Hebrew, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (KKL), implies the validity of Israel as a Jewish nation. It was created in 1901 as a non-profit organization but has developed into a sort of disguised corporation, in the control of the World Zionist Congress. By 1948, the JNF was the second largest land owner in Palestine, after the government. The Fund was created with the goal of buying up land for the Jewish People in Palestine and Syria. During the 20th century the iconic blue tin donation boxes bearing the JNF logo and slogan “Redeem the Land of Israel”, were distributed to Jewish families around North America, Europe, and Palestine. The blue JNF box became a part of Jewish households, and Zionist ideas entered into mainstream Jewish culture throughout the diaspora.
Between the years of 1881 and 1914, there was a mass migration of Jewish people from Eastern Europe to North America and Palestine. This migration, largely due to the pogroms and persecution they were victim to in Europe, converged with the beginning of modern Zionism. The reoccurring archetype of the Wandering Jew, a figure created by the age-old trend of Jewish flight from persecution in addition to the tendency of Jewish men to work as pedlars, unable to find stable work or own property, entered into Zionist discourse. The goal was to create (or redeem) a nation that would be home for the “lost” Jewish People. The Wandering Jew had no roots, he had no home, he had no permanence. The creation of Israel would provide him land that in Zionist view, was rightfully his. Here the Wandering Jew would settle, wandering no more.
The desire for an ethno-national Jewish state was shared by early Zionist organizations. The 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1919 presentation of the World Zionist Congress at the Paris Peace Conference continued to put this desire into action, as WZO president Chaim Weizmann said “to make Palestine as Jewish as England was English”. The JNF brooch falls into a political context specific to a period somewhere between Israel’s creation in May 1948 after the British withdrew their rule over Palestine, and the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel took control of more land including the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, the West Bank and Jerusalem. It is a product of the immense growth in support for Israel that resulted from the events of the Second World War. The Shoah (or Nazi holocaust) is commonly used to excuse the occupation of Palestine, and to legitimize the existence of a Jewish Nation. While many equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, Zionism itself is partially rooted in antisemitic thought, as much of its support has been provided by non-Jewish individuals and governments who wish to be relieved of their “Jewish Problem”. This Problem pertains to the anxiety that Jewish people own all the businesses and/or are plotting to gain control, as well as the issue of what to do with Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe, and where to put those who had survived the Nazi holocaust.
The design of Jewish shtetl communities of Eastern Europe forged a framework for the Israeli settlements in pre-1948 Palestine. Early Jewish settlements (like modern-day Kibbutzim) in Palestine were communal, agricultural, and constitutionally Jewish. The desert landscape of Palestine was seen as vacant, untouched, and ripe with unharvested potential. Early twentieth century maps of Palestine represented the “empty landscape” in order to validate Zionist colonization and Palestinian dispossession. The JNF’s tree-planting campaign fills the empty landscape with donated trees, most commonly pines, standing in for the Jewish people putting down roots in Palestine. Biblical, nationalist, and physical metaphors of afforestation in Palestine connect back to the story of the Garden of Eden as a beginning of civilization. Tree-planting in Israel has been described as an emotional, familial, and even sexual experience. The act, like planting a flag on unclaimed territory, is symbolic of “home coming” or fulfilling a “birthright” for many Jews. In Irus Braveman’s article Planting the Promised Landscape, she interviews a former JNF director, Yechiel Leket, who says, “When you plant the tree there is a physical connection. If you take the metaphors of land and forests you will find out that there are many sexual metaphors…. [Indeed,] many people say “I want to hug the trees,” or “the trees hug me.” . . . You take a tree and put your hand in the soil — it’s a physical intimacy, all of these things”.
The pine trees, reminiscent of the lush forests of Eastern Europe, are symbolically Jewish trees, whereas olive trees are Palestinian. There have been many cases in which Palestinian villages and olive groves are demolished and in their place illegal Jewish settlements are built, with tree filled gardens and yards. The ecological colonization of Palestine has caused Palestinian lives to be uprooted and replaced by mighty, Israeli pine trees. There is a national park in Israel called Canada Park, which was built over 3 Palestinian villages and expands illegally onto part of the West Bank. It was created by the JNF and paid for by 15 million dollars in charitable donation from Canadian Jews. The park, much like Canadian national parks, offers hiking trails through pine forests, picnic areas, lookouts and archaeological sites. The archaeological sites, of course, only present evidence of Roman, Jewish and Christian civilizations, with no mention of Islamic history despite its presence in the area.
The attempted erasure of Palestine by Israel is in part due to the land that was acquired (purchased and stolen) by the JNF. Edward Said, in his canonical book The Question of Palestine wrote, “…just as no Jew in the last hundred years has been untouched by Zionism, so too no Palestinian has been unmarked by it.” This statement illustrates the prevalence of Zionism in everyday Jewish and Palestinian life, a reality that propels me to be critical and learn about Jewish and Palestinian history in relation to my own family history. The fact is that like many Jewish families, my own had and continues to take part in the colonization of Palestine. My grandmother’s JNF pin is an artifact of this process, material evidence of Zionist ecological propaganda. The tree, symbolic of the JNF and Israel was used as a weapon of colonialism. Many describe the Israel/Palestine conflict as a complicated issue (and in some ways it is) but in overall view it is as plain as any colonizer/colonized situation, wherein the colonizers had no rightful motive for colonizing an existing country and its population
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