http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=01/23/00&id=66672
A tree grows in Palestine
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz 01/23/1999
It was one of the favorite holidays of our distant childhood. True, it was a
regular school day, but the tree-planting ceremony in Meir Park in Tel
Aviv, with hundreds of children dressed in white, thousands of saplings,
the small round holes in the damp earth - it was all a great thrill. Together
with the weekly contribution to the blue-and-white tin box of the Jewish
National Fund, a momentary bond was perhaps formed with the land and
the soil, as our teachers and leaders wished.What is left of all that? Meir
Park is now a place where homeless people huddle. No trees are planted
nowadays next to new homes in Tel Aviv (that would interfere with the
parking lot) and this year, because of the bad weather and the teachers'
strike, the tree planting was done by the relief-works corps of the JNF.
What's left, then, is the question of whether we internalized anything of
those festive tree plantings, anything that is still a part of us, other than the
sweet memories. Are we able to evoke those happy memories even
when the Other plants a tree? The answer, unfortunately, is that we are
not able.
The Education Ministry this year distributed a Haggadat Seder Tu
Bishvat (a compilation of passages to be recited during an Arbor Day
meal, based on the format of the Pesach seder) printed on glossy paper,
an "offering of love to the Land of Israel" which was intended "to draw
individuals closer to neighbors, community closer to society and nation
closer to its landscapes." But Tu Bishvat, Israel's Arbor Day, which was
marked yesterday, is the holiday of the Jewish trees exclusively.
As in many other cases, a dual value system is at work here in Israel: one
set of values for the Jews, another for the land's other inhabitants. A tree
represents a value only if it is planted by Jewish hands.
The nation of planters has become the nation of uprooters. "Do not uproot
what has been planted," the Israelis sing, referring, of course, only to what
they have set down in the earth. The Palestinians' trees, which in many
instances are far more ancient than our trees, can become objects of
destruction without anyone protesting - not the organizers of the Arbor
Day festivities, not the authors of the glossy booklets of the Education
Ministry and not the environmental activists.
But by an act of the devil, without Arbor Day and without the tree
plantings carried out by the relief-works staff of the JNF, the tree is
nevertheless a deeply rooted symbol in the rural Palestinian society, and
every uprooting of a tree inflicts pain that is almost as searing as the pain
for human casualties.
Their bond with the land - without moledet (homeland) lessons in school
- is sometimes stronger than ours. Maybe that is why Israel tries to
uproot so many of their trees.
The facts: In the past year alone, a relatively merciful year for the
Palestinians' trees, "only" 15,180 trees of Palestinians were
uprooted, according to the figures of the Canon, the Palestinian
Association for Protection of Human and Environmental Rights. Another
Palestinian organization, Land and Water, says that 13,580 trees were
wrenched from the earth last year by the Israeli security forces and
another 3,200 by settlers. Two other groups, the Palestinian Committee
for Legal Protection of the Land and the Palestinian Council for
Justice and Peace, adduce similar figures. According to these groups,
Israel has uprooted some 50,000 trees in the West Bank since the
signing of the Oslo accord - the exact number of saplings that the JNF
distributed this year for our Tu Bishvat celebrations.
But these statistics do not of course tell the whole story. Two weeks
after last year's Tu Bishvat, when the saplings planted by our
children were still trying to strike roots in the freshly turned soil,
I visited the olive grove of Ayash Abu Hilwan, a farmer from the
village of Beit Dejan, east of Nablus. He had never heard of the
Jewish Arbor Day, but he was painfully aware of what Jews had done to
his trees.
Twelve years earlier, he had planted his olive trees on the rocky
hillside that overlooks his home, a place that had always been
considered part of the village's land. He tilled the soil, cleared
the rocks and pruned and irrigated the trees. For 12 years he worked
his grove. There was no fruit for his labor because in the hard,
rocky soil of Beit Dejan, it takes an olive tree more than a dozen
years to produce fruit. But the farmer waited patiently and believed
that his children would harvest the crop, just as his father had left
him olive trees.
Thirteen days after Tu Bishvat, the destroyers of the Civil
Administration appeared and began cutting. They cut and uprooted,
sawed tree after tree, not sparing a single one. Thirteen days after
Tu Bishvat, 600 trees were cut down, the farmer related; the Civil
Administration says the number was 291. "It is like raising a child
for 12 years and, suddenly, he is gone. Someone killed him," Abu
Hilwan, his eyes moist, told me then in his blasted grove.
The tree choppers invoked plenty of legal arguments, but on that
ravaged hillside all that remained were the scars and the oppressive
questions that no self-righteous legalisms of the Civil Administration
can erase. The struggle being waged by the Civil Administration to
demonstrate who the true master and sovereign of the land is does not
spare a single tree nor a single value.
War has its own rules: uproot, destroy, cut down - only to show the
Palestinians, natives of this land, who the lord and master is. This
is something we don't tell our children on Tu Bishvat. But it was
there, in the devastated grove at Beit Dejan, among the uprooted olive
trees of Abu Hilwan, only 13 days after Tu Bishvat, that I knew for
certain that absolutely nothing remained of our festive tree-planting
in that Tel Aviv park
