Israeli settlers plant non-native pine forests on occupied land, destroying Palestinian olive groves and displacing Palestinians.
Palestinians plant olive trees as they mark the 47th anniversary of Land Day, east of Gaza City bordering Israel on March 28, 2023.Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
A 20-year-old born in Gaza, Khaled has been climbing trees since he was a toddler. He recalls the “beauty and freedom you feel when you climb to the top of an olive tree and see all the greenery.” But Khaled explains that now there are no trees to climb. In May 2021, on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr celebration, Israeli missiles were fired into Gaza.
When thinking about war, many of us rarely think about trees. Trees are placed into a category coupled with the birds and the sky; they are passive and neutral to war, not considered a weapon to enhance it. However, as, when we paint a picture of trees using the brushes of settler colonialism and identity, we see how politics and nature are intertwined. When we tell the stories of the tree, we turn its physical form into something much more.
For hundreds of years, Palestinian families have lived with olive trees — at their doorstops, in their poems, and with every new generation born. Equally, when these trees are targeted, the pain is shared. While narratives like this have a place to be told, it becomes equally as important not to fixate “the Palestinian experience” into a single category in relation to the olive tree.
Practicing the meaning of a tree very differently, Zionism has used the pine tree to serve its nationalist agenda at the expense of many, many Palestinian lives and histories. Zionism here is understood as an ideology which was used to create a Jewish state and has been achieved through decades of Palestinian dispossession and erasure. Poignantly coined by Braverman, the olive and the pine tree have thus become “planted flags” in contested soil.
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