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TITLE: Do You Remember the Tree That You Planted? |
AUTHOR: Gideon Levy |
PUB: Ha'aretz |
DATE: February 8, 2001 |
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It's said that God is in the detail. Maybe the devil is as well. Sometimes the tales about the little conquests teach more than do the stories of big atrocities. The seemingly marginal tales reveal Israel's double moral standard.The mass uprooting of trees in the territories in recent months, by the army and by the settlers, does not usually involve bloodshed. Israel's conquest has often been accompanied by cruel actions in which more than just the trees are victims. But on Tu Bishvat, Israel's Arbor Day, last Thursday, the hypocrisy was again apparent. This country, which devotes so much effort to tree planting, that has a special festival for trees, whose children have long been called on to contribute to the exalted cause, whose poets have heaped praise on the tree, at the same time so easily uproots and chops down thousands of trees that belong to others. From the biblical verse, "And you will come to the land and you will plant trees in it" to Naomi Shemer's "Do not uproot what is planted"; from the trees that we planted in our childhood and the weekly Friday donation in the Jewish National Fund's blue box, the tree holds a special place in our hearts. When Tu Bishvat arrives and the country is awash with ceremonies, songs and slogans in praise of trees, while at the same time thousands of trees in the territories have been deliberately uprooted by that same tree-loving nation, the beautiful childhood festival of trees is turned into an ugly adult festival of hypocrisy. "Do you remember the tree that you planted in your childhood?" was the question asked by the announcer with the pleasant voice in JNF's recent broadcasts, to the sound of chirping birds in the background. "It's now become a forest." The farmer Yassin Shamalwa also remembers the trees that his father and grandfather planted. But they're not a forest now. Now they are a pile of dead twigs. A few weeks ago, late one evening, Shamalwa was frightened by the pulsating sound of a bulldozer in his olive orchard. He rushed over to the area, but soldiers with drawn guns stopped him from getting near. He ran to the mosque in his village, Kafr Hares, near Ariel, and used the muezzin's loudspeaker to call out desperately for assistance. It didn't help. The bulldozer uprooted 30 of the trees planted by his father and grandfather. He was given no advance notice, as laid down in the law, and nobody bothered to explain the reasons for the action to him. No one presented him with a written order, he was given no opportunity to appeal, nor did anybody offer him compensation for the state's act of vandalism on his land. "Why do you do this?" he tried asking in English, and according to Shamalwa a soldier answered, "Go to Arafat and Yossi Sarid. They'll explain to you." The official justification, of course, is security: stones were thrown at travelers on the nearby road, and apparently they came from the olive orchard. Now, instead of the trees that could conceal stone throwers, there are piles of chopped trees that are equally able to conceal someone, and an old Palestinian farmer whose world has collapsed around him. For him the trees were much more than a possession. As the JNF says in its announcements, they are "presented with love" and cutting them down entails much more than just the loss of income. The small group of devoted activists from B'Tselem, the human rights organization, who, on Tu Bishvat brought him new olive saplings, made him a little emotional. It should be emphasized that it was B'Tselem and not the JNF that loves the forests so much. A drive along the roads of Samaria shows a depressing picture. There are hundreds of uprooted trees, mostly olive trees, along the roadsides, the fruit of recent weeks' labor. B'Tselem's on-site researchers have counted 2,200 uprooted trees just in the area around Nablus, in addition to 2,100 that have been destroyed since the Intifada broke out. Palestinian organizations give higher numbers. Sometimes trees are dug up with their roots, sometimes only the branches are sawn off. Sometimes plots of land on both sides of the road are dug up, sometimes only one side - which is somewhat puzzling. Sometimes the farmers give up and capitulate, and sometimes, as in the case of the orchards of the village of Dir Isstia, they replant the stumps with stubbornness and devotion. Sometimes the destruction is caused by the IDF and sometimes by the settlers, as an act of retaliation. Tabeth Iyov, a farmer in the village of Nebi Salah, west of Ramallah, had his whole orchard, 146 trees, destroyed when the settlers were venting their anger, the day after the killing of Sarah Lisha from Halamish, in November. Of course, Iyov is not the only farmer to fall victim to such acts of revenge. The settlers, with their pretensions to being the greatest "lovers of the land," are not sickened by the destruction of the landscape. "In the Land of Israel the trees cry. Soldiers of Rome raze dunam after dunam. They have no compassion for the land's covering, for the seven species." So the poet, Aharon Shabtai wrote in a poem published in last week's culture and literature supplement of Ha'aretz (in Hebrew). Shabtai laments the digging up of trees in order "to give building rights to Burger King and to Kentucky Fried Chicken" - which is another matter. But not far away, even more shockingly, Israel is mercilessly chopping down other trees, "non-Jewish" trees; and in so doing it causes not only the trees to weep, but also those who plant them: those who remember the trees planted in their childhood - trees that can no longer grow. © copyright 2000 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved END |