Tigranes
Armenian
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2008
- Messages
- 10,406
Suppose you are completely neutral about Arab-Israeli conflict. Just a regular guy who carries on with his life and enjoys outdoors, and trees, and life itself. And now you stumbled across the name of this thread. Before reading further ask yourself, what do you feel when you read: "Israeli Forests"? Does it give you warm fuzzy feeling? You know -- trees and stuff. But guess what? Many of these non-native evergreen pine-tree forests have been planted to hide traces of the war crimes -- destroyed and ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages.
Most of this work is done by non-profit Jewish National Fund, which is funded by tax deductible donations collected in Western countries. JNF is portrayed as humanitarian and politically neutral, supporting incontestably worthwhile projects such as planting trees to develop the environment of Israel. It's true that millions of trees were planted by the JNF in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s using donations from diaspora Jews. The narrative promoted by the JNF was that a barren, rocky land was being turned into a green oasis. But the darker purpose of the massive tree-planting project is hidden from many well-intentioned donors. Very few of them realize that wooded parks planted on the sites of Arab villages razed to the ground by Jewish militias in 1947-48.
Here are some examples:
The town of al-Faluja had 5,240 inhabitants. There were shops, cafes, a clinic, a school for boys and a school for girls, with a plot of land for agricultural training. Merchants from the region came to the town’s twice-weekly market to sell their goods. The town was captured in May, 1948. Now it is Plugot Forest.
In early January 2013, the international campaign to Stop the JNF organized its third annual study tour. Activists from the UK, US, and Italy came to Israel/Palestine to learn about the work of the JNF and meet the people organizing to return to or stay on their land. They saw a range or JNF projects from Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin village facing expulsion to make way for a new JNF forest to Silwan East Jerusalem where a JNF subsidiary helps takeover Palestinian homes and transfer them to illegal Jewish settlers to American Independence Park where the JNF simultaneously covers up the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and also proudly displays maps of how Zionist militias attacked these villages in October 1948.
The South Africa Forest is one of 86 public parks across Israel that sit on ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages (in this case former village Lubya). In order to remove any physical evidence of the villages’ destruction, the JNF has long been involved in covering villages with non-indigenous pine trees, which had the effect of making the countryside to look more European. Many newly arrived Jewish settlers were from places like Bulgaria and Romania and they were not used to see palm or olive trees, so planting evergreen trees made the habitat look more familiar for those people.
Obviously JNF denies all these sinister motives behind it's activities and threatens to sue any organizations, like Zochrot, who talk about forests obliterating Palestinian villages, so that modern descendants of the original refugees cannot even dream about returning to their villages. What villages? It is all forests now! In case you never heard of them -- Zochrot (Hebrew: "Remembering"; Arabic: "Memories") is an Israeli nonprofit organization founded in 2002. Based in Tel Aviv, its aim is to promote awareness of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe"), the 1948 Palestinian exodus. The group's director is Eitan Bronstein. Its slogan is "To commemorate, witness, acknowledge, and repair".
Most of this work is done by non-profit Jewish National Fund, which is funded by tax deductible donations collected in Western countries. JNF is portrayed as humanitarian and politically neutral, supporting incontestably worthwhile projects such as planting trees to develop the environment of Israel. It's true that millions of trees were planted by the JNF in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s using donations from diaspora Jews. The narrative promoted by the JNF was that a barren, rocky land was being turned into a green oasis. But the darker purpose of the massive tree-planting project is hidden from many well-intentioned donors. Very few of them realize that wooded parks planted on the sites of Arab villages razed to the ground by Jewish militias in 1947-48.
Here are some examples:
The town of al-Faluja had 5,240 inhabitants. There were shops, cafes, a clinic, a school for boys and a school for girls, with a plot of land for agricultural training. Merchants from the region came to the town’s twice-weekly market to sell their goods. The town was captured in May, 1948. Now it is Plugot Forest.
In early January 2013, the international campaign to Stop the JNF organized its third annual study tour. Activists from the UK, US, and Italy came to Israel/Palestine to learn about the work of the JNF and meet the people organizing to return to or stay on their land. They saw a range or JNF projects from Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin village facing expulsion to make way for a new JNF forest to Silwan East Jerusalem where a JNF subsidiary helps takeover Palestinian homes and transfer them to illegal Jewish settlers to American Independence Park where the JNF simultaneously covers up the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and also proudly displays maps of how Zionist militias attacked these villages in October 1948.
The South Africa Forest is one of 86 public parks across Israel that sit on ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages (in this case former village Lubya). In order to remove any physical evidence of the villages’ destruction, the JNF has long been involved in covering villages with non-indigenous pine trees, which had the effect of making the countryside to look more European. Many newly arrived Jewish settlers were from places like Bulgaria and Romania and they were not used to see palm or olive trees, so planting evergreen trees made the habitat look more familiar for those people.
Obviously JNF denies all these sinister motives behind it's activities and threatens to sue any organizations, like Zochrot, who talk about forests obliterating Palestinian villages, so that modern descendants of the original refugees cannot even dream about returning to their villages. What villages? It is all forests now! In case you never heard of them -- Zochrot (Hebrew: "Remembering"; Arabic: "Memories") is an Israeli nonprofit organization founded in 2002. Based in Tel Aviv, its aim is to promote awareness of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe"), the 1948 Palestinian exodus. The group's director is Eitan Bronstein. Its slogan is "To commemorate, witness, acknowledge, and repair".
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