Discussion Question: How does settler colonialism view the land? What is it for?
Indeed, as Melissa Weiner shows, the “value” of the Blue Box, according to its framing by the JNF in “Our Bond with Israel,” was that by introducing “the JNF into the Jewish home in its everyday life and across generations…[i]t performs constant and perpetual propaganda work for the JNF wordlessly.” And in “Zionism and Racism,” Abdeen Jabara explains that “During the mandate the JNF became the largest private landowner in Palestine. … This extraterritorialization of land ownership in Palestine meant that the rights of ownership rested not just in the Jews or Jewish settlement in Palestine, and now Israel, but in all Jews everywhere which the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency claims to represent.”
ארכיון הצילומים קקל, פנינה לבני. CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons. Find original image here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_14886_Blue_box.JPG
Zionists in Their Own Words:
“The irrepressible Josef Weitz, as usual, put it most bluntly: ‘If we are to conquer the soil—only the forest, only the tree will lead us to our goal’“
(Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland, 28)
“David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister declared, making tree planting an integral component of the settler-colonial project.”
(Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland, 30-31
“The country [Palestine] was mostly an empty desert, with only a few islands of Arab settlement; and Israel’s cultivable land today was indeed redeemed from swamp and wilderness.”
Shimon Peres, David’s Sling: The Arming of Israel (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 249
Cited in George Alan, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’ A Myth Examined.” Journal of Palestine Studies 8.2 (1979): 88–100. doi:10.2307/2536511. In this article, Alan debunks the myth by showing that by the 1930s the indigenous Arab population of Palestine was already farming the majority of land available to be cultivated (only about half of Palestine is a desert climate), and that the supposed expansion of cultivated land was actually the “reclamation”/stealing of farmland belonging to Palestinians made refugees by the Nakba.
“The Jewish National Fund claims to want to “make the desert bloom” by planting trees on “barren” land. But it is actually planting trees to cover the ruins of Palestinian villages, and planting invasive species of eucalyptus and pine after uprooting olive trees and citrus groves.”
Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland 38
