Image 1: The JNF Compound and Image 2: The GOD TV Forest, Author Photos 2011
Degree of Master of Science (Two Years) in Human Ecology:
Culture, Power and Sustainability
30 ECTS
CPS: International Masters Programme in Human Ecology
Human Ecology Division
Department of Human Geography
Faculty of Social Sciences
Lund University
Author:
Supervisor: Richard Langlais
Term: Spring Term 2011

Department:
Address:
Phone:
Supervisor:
Title and Subtitle:
Human Geography, Human Ecology Division
Geocentrum 1 Sölvegatan 12 223 62 Lund
+46-46-2228417
Richard Langlais
Author:
Examination:
Planting and Uprooting Natures: The Judaization of the Arab
Landscape in Israel through Afforestation
Jessica C. Marx
Master’s thesis (two year)
Term of defense:
Abstract:
Spring Term 2011
In this thesis I examine the forest as the nexus of social and environmental worlds in
Israel. By exploring the history of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and afforestation, I synthesize the given literature using a lens of human ecology to delve into the cultural, social, political, and ecological processes by which afforestation is simultaneously a tool of nation-building and a mechanism of ethno-nationalist dominance. The construction of a symbolic and material world through afforestation plants one nature, the Jewish narrative, while uprooting another nature, that of the
Arab social and environmental landscape. This process materializes through relations of power. The case study of the Bedouin village of Al Arakib and the GOD TV Forest in the Negev further demonstrates this socio-ecological relationship where narratives of landscape and identity collide within these afforested spaces. Trees planted by the
JNF in Israel are expressions of national territorial belonging and redemption, yet they are also experienced as tools of socio-ecological spatial organization and control.
1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the support of many people. First, I would like to thank my friends and family for their love and support over the past two
2 years. Thank you to Jason W. Moore and Diana Gildea who provided an invigorating intellectual space, and a home away from home, during my first year in Lund.
I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Richard Langlais for his constructive feedback and guidance. Special thanks to Andreas Malm, acting as my “unofficial” secondary supervisor, for his encouragement and suggestions throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank Holly Jean Buck and Vasna Ramasar for reading drafts of this thesis and providing insightful comments and suggestions.
And last, but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to Haia Noach and Al
Arakib for welcoming me into their community and relaying their story.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………………………...4
3
1.1. Topic…………………………………………………………………………………5
1.2 Research Questions…………………………………………………………………6
1.3 Purpose of Study…………………………………………………………………….7
Chapter 2: Framework of Study……………………………………………………………….8
2.1. Relations of Power………………………………………………………..……….10
2.2 Literature Review…………………………………………………………………..11
Chapter 3: Research Methodology…………………………………………………………...13
Chapter 4: Findings and Results………………………………………………………...……17
4.1 The Rise of the Jewish National Fund……………………………………………17
4.1.1 The Jewish National Fund………………………………………………18
4.1.2 Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael: Making Expropriation Legal……………22
4.1.3 KKL-JNF Expansion……………………………………………………..28
4.2 The Final Frontier: Making the Desert Bloom…………………………………..32
4.3. Al Arakib, the JNF, and the GOD-TV…………………………………………...34
4.3.1 Planting Natures: The GOD-TV Forest………………………………...35
4.3.2 Uprooting Natures: The Struggle for Al Arakib……………………...38
4.3.2.1 Field Visit: Findings……………………………………………39
4.3.3 Responses to Opposition………………………………………………...47
Chapter 5: Discussion………………………………………………………………………….49
5.1 Research Question 1……………………………………………………………….49
5.2 Research Question 2……………………………………………………………….51
5.3 Research Question 3……………………………………………………………….52
Chapter 6: Conclusions…………………………………………………………………..……54
References………………………………………………………………………………………56
Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………..61

Appendix 1: Data sources for Figure 2: Number of Trees Planted by the JNF…………..61
Appendix 2: Dukium Background Paper about the Al Arakib Demolitions…………….61
4
Appendix 3: Explanation of 1921 Mewat Land Ordinance...................................................69
Appendix 4: GOD TV Statement/Response to Al Arakib………………………………….70
Appendix 5: Jewish National Fund Statement/Response to Al Arakib…………..………71
List of Figures
Figure 1: Dunams of Land Purchased by the JNF, 1920-1950……………………………..22
Figure 2: Number of Trees Planted by the JNF, 1948-1994…………...……………………29
List of Images*
Image 1: The JNF Compound………………………………..………….…………Cover Page
Image 2: The GOD TV Forest……………………………………………..….…….Cover Page
Image 3: Bulldozing the Negev for the GOD TV Forest………………..….…………...….40
Image 4: Terraces constructed for planting trees…………….……………………………..41
Image 5: Olive trees planted along JNF terraces……………………………………………46
*All photographs within this thesis were taken by the author and cannot be reproduced without permission.
List of Abbreviations
JNF - Jewish National Fund
KKL - Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael
ILA - Israel Lands Administration
Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Topic
Every year on Tu B’shvat, the Jewish holiday of planting trees, the Israeli Knesset
(Parliament) celebrates its birthday. The First Knesset opened on Tu B’Shvat 5709
(February 14, 1949) as delegates spent part of the day planting trees, signifying the
“return and symbolic rooting of the Jewish [D]iaspora in the very soil of the national homeland” (Long 2008, 65). As both Jews and Arabs have come to claim the same space
5 as their homeland, forestry in particular has become a national icon in both Israeli and
Palestinian politics and memory (Zerubavel 1996). While olive trees have come to symbolize Palestinian steadfastness, pine trees planted by the Jewish National Fund
(JNF) symbolize the “rooting” of Jewish identity and statehood.
As a child one of the first connections I made between myself as a Jewish person and my supposed “homeland” was by donating money to the Jewish National Fund for planting trees in Israel.
1 Yet, it was a shock to learn that in the summer of 2010 the organization my Jewish community and I supported was being accused of demolishing
Bedouin villages in the Negev in order to plant a forest. I thought to myself, ‘Do Jews around the world know that their money is going toward the destruction of people’s homes? Why and at what cost were these forests being constructed?’ My inquiry led me to an in-depth study of the various actors and narratives in this story.
From my personal query emerged the topic of my thesis: Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael
(Perpetual Fund/Capital for Israel; KKL), the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and
1 Israel was declared a nation-state after the 1948 War of Independence as a political territory and homeland for all Jewish people in the world.

afforestation.
2 While land is central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, my topic focuses on one aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian landscape – the connection between people and
6 trees. While this relationship of people to land and their ownership claims is usually examined from a political and cultural standpoint, the lens of human ecology provides a fresh framework to examine this decades-long conflict. Human ecology, the connection between humans and the environment, shows how cultural, social, political, and ecological processes are intertwined in a complex relationship. The history of the
Jewish National Fund and afforestation reveals the development of a profound connection between the Jewish people and Israel through tree planting. This relationship evolved from not only a political and cultural process, but a relational meshing of ecology with society that shaped the way trees have become “totemic symbols” of people in this region (Braverman 2008).
The topic of this study presents an opportunity to further delve into a contested space where narratives of landscape and identity collide – the forest.
1.2 Research Questions
This thesis focuses on two main questions:
1. How has Israel has utilized afforestation to materially produce and plant the ideology and concept of nationhood and a Jewish state?
2. To what extent does this narrative of Jewish nation-building and afforestation collide with other narratives of landscape and identity in Israel?
2 Within this thesis JNF is also used in place of KKL, the Israeli version of the JNF, unless otherwise noted
(such as JNF-US, meaning the United States branch of the JNF).

To further delve into these questions, I ask a third question regarding my case study of
7
Al Arakib:
3. What is the socio-ecological relationship between the Bedouin village of Al Arakib, the GOD-TV Forest, and the Jewish National Fund?
With these questions guiding my research, my aim is to contribute to the existing literature within a new framework while inquiring to what extent afforestation became a means of planting the Jewish narrative - and what other narratives this collides with.
From this discursive analysis, I narrow my focus through a material analysis of what is happening in the Bedouin village of Al Arakib as it relates to the ongoing planting of trees by the Jewish National Fund and other actors.
1.3 Purpose of the Study
The powerful imagery of “a land without a people for a people without a land” 3 encapsulates the foundation that contributed to the construction of the state of Israel in
1948, yet some scholars argue it was a vision that diminished the presence of one population while planting another. The birth of the State of Israel was both miraculous and violent. The physical and human landscape dramatically changed due to, but not limited to, agricultural settlement, expansion, and war. This dual moment of expansion and destruction altered the physical landscape simultaneously with the transformation of the human landscape, as one community was uprooted from its space while another community replanted its claimed historical roots. One perpetual objective before and
3 See Muir (2008) for a thorough historical analysis of this phrase.

after the creation of the state of Israel in altering the physical landscape was afforestation – planting trees in areas previously not forested. Yet, I argue that another
8 objective of afforestation was to, and continues to, control the social landscape as well.
The purpose of this study is to inquire into the role of the forest as the nexus of a social and environmental world as part of the collision between the Jewish narrative of afforestation and territorial belonging with other narratives of landscape and identity.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often examined from the perspective of controversy between Arabs and Jews as a complex of relations between peoples. I pursue an integrated inquiry that includes both the human and ecological worlds in order to question how politics, culture, landscape, and identity collide, merge together, and relate in what I call a synergistic form. I question the way that nature is engaged in producing the State and Jewish nationhood by specifically examining the relationship, and the repercussions of this relationship, between people and trees.
Chapter 2: Framework of Study
The historical relationship of how human societies have transformed nature for their use reveals continuations and rifts over time (Wolf 1982). Ecological transformation is described by some scholars as being the result unequal relations of power negatively affecting the environment “out there” (Hornborg, McNeill, and Martinez-Alier 2007).
Yet ecological change such as deforestation, soil erosion, and land degradation are coupled with uneven social transformation as well. Some ecological ideas of society and the environment have evolved from Cartesian perspective (Worster 1994). Instead,
I view the social and the environmental as relational entities.

“Nature” in my thesis title “Planting and Uprooting Natures” serves as a concept encompassing both human and extra-human nature - or in other terms the social and environmental world. This recursive relationship encompasses the biophysical and socio-cultural worlds. Human ecology is a framework that views humans as embedded
9 in the surrounding environment (Harvey 1995). Hornborg posits that “humans relate to their environments as persons, not merely as organisms,” but humans also relate to their environments through culture (Hornborg 2001, 195). The social and environmental worlds are in constant relation with one another.
In the context of afforestation, the forest - the environment - is a space produced by the human world. The “environment,” according to Harvey, “is whatever exists in the surroundings of some being that is relevant to the state of that being at a particular place and time” (1995, 118). The forest in my study is an external space produced for cultural and political reasons. Afforestation by the Jewish National Fund was, and continues to be, influenced by specific historical periods related to the rise of the Jewish
State. The forest in one view is seen as “nature” - a place set apart from the material world, yet it is intricately connected to the human world. Although nature “is used empirically to mark off that part of the material world that is given prior to any human activity, from that which is humanly shaped or contrived,” afforested spaces in Israel are a humanly shaped landscape (Soper 1995, 16). Thus, the delineated discursive spaces of “society” and “nature” become intertwined for nature “dialectically shap[es] us as much as we shape it” (Soper 1995, 39). A synergistic theory of the social and environmental world as one is utilized for looking at the forest as a nexus of the relations of many fields of study.
From this synergistic theory of human-environment relations, we can explore how the social-ecological relationship of people and trees developed though the production of a

material and symbolic landscape. Greider and Garkovich provide the second theoretical framework guiding this paper - the social construction of nature and the environment. Landscape is defined as a symbolic environment that can reflect selfdefinitions ground in culture (Greider and Garkovich 1994). The social construction of
10 nature and the environment also materially constructed. While a forest may just appear to be a cluster of trees, it embodies political, cultural, and social meaning. This cluster of meanings is also imbued with power, “the capacity to impose a specific definition of the physical environment, one that reflects the symbols and meanings of a particular group of people” (Greider and Garkovich 1994, 17). The “Jewish” forest is just this - a hegemonic materialization of the social and environmental world to fulfill certain needs of the State. Yet, from this dominant landscape that alters the physical space emerge conflict and struggle with other discourses of landscape and identity.
2.1 Relations of Power
From the social-political-ecological relationship of trees to people, and vice versa, I see trees as emblems of power. Afforestation in one regard is seen as a colonization project that furthers the process of Judaization of Arab spaces (Yiftachel 1999, Pappe 2006, Long
2008, Braverman 2009). Other concepts used to describe this process are “colonial ecologies” or “territorial ethno-nationalism” (Braverman 2009, Yiftachel 2008).
Alternatively, afforestation is a national, ecological project that provides economic development, national security, and “green lungs” for human spaces (Cohen 1993, Tal
2002, 2007). Power resides in the sovereign State as afforested spaces represent the control of spatial and temporal spheres over political, social, and ecological activity.
Through the lens of Foucault, this spatial phenomenon of power is a form of control, what is referred to as “biopolitics” - “the control over relations between the human race,

11 or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live” (1997, 245). Within my study, Israel is the sovereign power that controls people through the regulation of their lives and their environment. More specifically, afforestation is the tool through which this regulation is manifested both materially and symbolically. This power is manifested in three ways. First, through the layers of Jewish, Christian, and Bedouin narratives and discourse of Jewish nationhood as it relates to the creation of the Fund itself and the construction of the GOD TV Forest. Second, power is manifested through legal instruments that control social and environmental spaces. Third, power resides in the
State and the Jewish National Fund as it transforms the physical landscape.
Afforestation is an entanglement of landscape, space, and identity influenced by social, cultural, and political ideologies imbued with power.
Oren Yiftachel’s concept of “Judaization” informs much of this paper as I utilize his theory of territorial ethno-nationalism (1998, 1999, 2003). Territorial ethno-nationalism is when “one ethno-nation attempts to extend or preserve its disproportional control over contested territories” (Yiftachel 1999: 265). The dominance of Israel as a Jewish state is manifested through spatial and territorial power and control.
2.2 Literature Review
The following literature review is by no means an exhaustive treatment of every source within my thesis, but rather provides a concise overview of the key scholars providing the foundation for my research questions.
Historians Benny Morris (2008), Meron Benvenisti (2002), and Ilan Pappe (1999) provide the historical foundation for my framework of the history of Israel/Palestine. Alon Tal

12
(2002) provides a thorough environmental history of Israel in Pollution in a Promised
Land, a vital text for understanding the environmental dimensions of the rise of the state of Israel and the repercussions of accelerated growth and development over a short time period, in addition to a foray into the environmental movement in Israel. The classic text on the political and cultural implications of tree planting is The Politics of
Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery by
Shaul Ephraim Cohen (1993). Focusing on planting as a form of territorial reclamation,
Cohen delves into the role of afforestation as a strategy of land acquisition surrounding the Jerusalem municipality and how it affects four Palestinian villages. A critical approach to the history and policies of the KKL and the JNF is thoroughly undertaken by Walter Lehn and Uri Davis (1978, 1998) and Dan Leon (2005). Zvi Shilony (1998) and
Shlomo Shva (1991) provide a general overview of the history of the JNF and KKL.
Scholars such as Irus Braverman (2008, 2009), Joanna C. Long (2008), and Yael
Zerubavel (1996) research the relationship between afforestation, Zionism, and landscape. Braverman merges a legal framework with politics to illuminate how trees provide the link between imagined space and imagined community, as “the tree’s physical presence stands in for the Jewish presence” (2008, 326). This constructed landscape is sustained through a legal framework defined by the power of the State.
While much of Braverman’s work provides an analysis of tree politics in the West Bank, the analysis of the relationship between landscape, power, and identity provides a thorough foundation for understanding the political ecology of the Jewish National
Fund.
Zerubavel’s analysis focuses on the relationship of memory and ritual to power, as planting forests in commemoration of historic or person events strengthens the ties between Jewish identity and (home)land. This relationship is also constructed through

13 loss of landscape in the Palestinian context as memory is fueled by longing and nostalgia. Zerubavel (1995) also provides an understanding of the Jewish reconstruction of the Biblical past into the Zionist present through labor and tree planting in the early 20 th century. Carol Bardenstein (2008) similarly describes this relationship of symbol and identity where multiple memories are layered in the same physical space, which are “contested and in explicit conflict with each other” (2).
Layers of memory, nationhood, and rootedness in Israel collide with one another, especially within forests. These scholars all purport that afforestation is a literal method of planting Jewish rootedness to the physical landscape, and from this a symbolic connection and personal identity grows from this action.
Avinoam Meir (1998), Ismael Abu-Saad (2008), and Deborah Shmueli and Raseem
Khamaisi (2011) provide the history and cultural analysis regarding the relationship between Israel and the Bedouin population. Ronen Shamir (1996) and Havatzelet Yahel
(2006) provide opposing views on the legal framework surrounding the Bedouin population, as Shamir provides a legal analysis of power and Yahel provides a legal analysis on behalf of the State.
Chapter 3: Research Methodology
The research methodology for this thesis is a qualitative approach that includes semistructured interviews, secondary data collection, discursive analysis, and participant observation. In order to interpret the given historical knowledge with a human ecological framework, I synthesize various kinds of empirical material on the Jewish
National Fund and afforestation based on new questions. This empirical material includes key literature, as discussed in the previous chapter, in addition to data concerning land purchases and tree planting (measured in the unit of dunams, which is

¼ of an acre) acquired from a plethora of texts and sources. The interpretation of what can be called the environmental history of the Jewish National Fund is merged with a
14 human ecological framework of the social and environmental world. This method of
“synthesis” allows for a new understanding of the history of the Jewish National Fund as not only an “environmental organization,” but a socio-ecological entity possessing power that transforms both society and the environment.
For my second and third research questions, I took an “intensive approach” to my research by examining a single case study for inquiry (Clifford and Valentine 2003, 10).
4
This study is not meant to be representative of an entire population, but rather serves to illustrate the layers of relationships between society and the environment in light of afforestation in Israel. Primary data collection was gathered through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and utilizing the JNF and KKL websites as primary sources. Secondary data collection included the use of newspaper articles written on Al
Arakib as it currently serves as the primary means for the public to readily access information about the Jewish National Fund and Al Arakib.
The JNF and KKL online websites are utilized as the voice of these organizations, a research method employed by other scholars within the field (Long 2008, Braverman
2009). The links to these websites are as follows: 1. http://www.jnf.org and 2. http://www.kkl.org.il/kkl/ (Hebrew) http://www.kkl.org.il/kkl/kklmain_brown_ eng.aspx (English). Within these websites, I looked for the narrative of the rise of the
Jewish National Fund and what information they disclose about nationhood as it relates
4 Another case study intended for my research included the Palestinian village of Al Qabu, which is a
Palestinian village located outside of Jerusalem. Villagers were expelled in 1948 during the Nakba and fled to Bethlehem and the Hebron Hills. The village is now covered by the KKL-Menachem Begin Forest.
Due to the scope and limitations of this thesis, I chose to only utilize the case of Al Arakib.

to afforestation. I also examined the methods by which Jews in the Diaspora can plant trees in Israel.
15
I conducted several semi-structured interviews conducted in person and through
Skype 5 beginning in March 2011 lasting through May 2011. I, as the interviewer, prepared a list of pre-determined questions for each interview. Although I prepared these questions, the interviews unfolded in a conversational manner that allowed for new questions to be raised. The transcripts from these interviews are typed and in my possession.
6 I chose my interviewees based on personal research, a “snowball sampling,” and “cold calling.” 7 These interviewees are not representative of an entire population, but rather are chosen through a targeted sampling method “on the basis of their experience related to the research topic” (Longhurst 2003, 123). The answers of the interviewees are subjective to how each individual experiences and makes sense of his or her life within the context of the interview and research questions (ibid).
I contacted Haia Noach, the (Founder/Director) of Dukium, the Negev Coexistence
Forum for Civil Equality, due to the fact of her involvement with the struggle of Al
Arakib. At the recommendation of Haia, I interviewed Aziz Abu Madigam, the son of
Sheikh Saya Al-touri of Al Arakib.
8 Both interviews were conducted in English. Other interviewees included Professor Clive Lipchin of the Arava Institute and Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev in addition to Professor Alon Tal of the same institutions.
Professor Tal is also on the board of the Jewish National Fund. I also interviewed Eitan
5 An internet based calling service that allows one to talk to another person using a webcam.
6 As I did not have a tape recorder, I wrote down quotes and information as the interview progressed.
7 Cold calling means “calling on people (usually strangers) to ask if they would be prepared to be interviewed” (Longhurst 2003, 124).
8 A Sheikh is a village leader.

Bronstein, the director and founder of Zochrot, meaning “To Remember” in Hebrew.
Zochrot is an Israeli NGO working to raise awareness in Israel about the Nakba.
9
16
My visits to Al Arakib included taking field notes in the form of participant observation. The spatiotemporal frame of my research included two visits to Al Arakib with Haia Noach, in addition to two visits on my own to Al Arakib which included attending an olive tree planting demonstration day and attending a demonstration for
Land Day. My presence at the Olive Tree Planting Day was a role of both active participation and observation. Data collection included field notes and participant observation which included several informal discussions with activists and supporters attending the event. One group of people present that day was the Christian
Peacemakers Team, a group that “seeks to enlist the whole church in organized, nonviolent alternatives to war and places teams of trained peacemakers in regions of lethal conflict” (2010).
Due to the fact that no published works in academia exist relating to Al Arakib, I also utilized online web content in the form of newspaper articles and blog entries as secondary data. The primary means for the public to access material regarding Al
Arakib is through these sources. Articles have been published in Ha’aretz, The Electric
Intifada, Tikkun, and The Guardian, to name a few. The voices of these various articles express a common thread of analysis concerning afforestation in the Negev. I found only two pieces in rebuttal to the majority opinion: responses to Al Arakib published by
GOD TV and the JNF, which can be found in the appendices.
9 Eitan Bronstein, the director of Zochrot, maintains that the destruction of villages, expulsions, and killings of Palestinians have been erased from Israeli memory through the education system, culture, politics, and public discourse – but especially through the transformation of the landscape. Zochrot offers “open tours” to Palestinian sites occupied by Israel in the Nakba (“Catastrophe” of 1948), and places signposts demarking the village itself, in addition to signs indicating houses, mosques, and cemeteries as a means to bring awareness to what happened during and after 1948.

Chapter 4: Findings and Results
The following chapter is a discursive presentation of my findings and results. Within
17 section 4.1 I synthesize the given literature of the history of the Jewish National Fund within a human ecological framework to provide historical context of the case study.
Within section 4.2 I provide a short historical backdrop to frame the field study. In section 4.3 I present the findings of my field study and research involving the Bedouin village of Al Arakib and the GOD TV Forest.
4.1 The Rise of the Jewish National Fund
In the early 20 th century, the narrative about humans, early Jewish settlers, and the environment, the physical landscape of Palestine, was heavily influenced by Zionism.
This ideology centered on the Jewish belief in the return to Zion (Eretz Yisrael or the
Holy Land) and creating a Jewish state. Zionism “is a strand of Jewish thought that considers how and when the Jewish people will return to Zion (Jerusalem and the land of Israel) having been expelled by the Romans in 70 CE and scattered throughout the world over the ensuing centuries” (Long 2008, 64). Jews living outside of Eretz Yisrael are labeled living in the “Diaspora.”
Zionism was fueled by the Enlightenment and was a response to anti-Semitism in
Eastern Europe. The political Zionist movement led by Theodor Herzl “argued that settling Jews in Palestine and establishing a Jewish nation-state there would ‘facilitate’ a messianic miracle and effect the return of all Jews to Israel” (Long 2008, 64). The First
Zionist Congress in 1897 brought this ideology to the world stage. Political Zionism would facilitate the rebirth of the Jewish people in their homeland “after 2000 years of

wandering” (Tal 2002, 20). The first wave of settlers, or the First Aliyah, brought 30,000
Jewish settlers to Palestine from 1882 through 1903 (Morris 2008, 2).
10 The Second and
18
Third Aliyot brought approximately 10,000 Jewish settlers from 1904 until 1923. The
Fourth and Fifth Aliyot followed in 1923 lasting until 1939 (Tal 2002, 27). Renewed
Jewish identity emerged through both a physical connection to the land through labor, as settlements would expand on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund with financial capital from the Jewish Diaspora.
A counter-argument is that Zionism is also as form of colonialism, one that brought rise to ethno-nationalism and the spread of Judaization in Israel/Palestine. According to political geographer Oren Yiftachel, Judaization is the “territorial restricting of land through settlement and expansion” that constructs a space for one ethnic group over another (1998, 9). These ethnocentric social formations of constructed indigenous identity of the Jewish people as a nation create a “national sense of territoriality” for a homeland (Schnell 2001, 213). The reconstruction of a territorial identity constructs a hegemonic discourse that collides with other narratives of landscape and identity, such as Palestinian nationhood and territorial belonging.
11
4.1.1 The Jewish National Fund
At the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Switzerland, Zvi Hermann Schapira, a mathematician and Zionist from Russia, proposed a national fund to purchase land in
Palestine (Shva 1991, Tal 2002). Land would be owned by the entire Jewish people,
10 “Aliyot” refers to the waves of immigration – the settlers arriving in Palestine - which means “going up.” To make “aliyah” means attaining citizen to Israel if one is Jewish.
11 “Hegemony” is a dominant socio-cultural system that becomes naturalized within a society. In this case, the Israeli narrative of Jewish nationhood and territorial belonging is the hegemonic discourse prevailing through society and politics through the State apparatus.

rather than privatized, as Schapira stated that “acquired territory shall be inalienable and cannot be sold even to individual Jews” (Tal 2002, 71). Although the Jewish state
19 hadn’t been created yet, the land purchased by the JNF was for all Jews in the world as a nation.
Most of the financial capital would come from donations, but the JNF would be the sole manager of acquired lands. Disagreements over the legal status of the fund delayed its formal conception until the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. With Herzl’s influence, the
Congress voted 105 to 82 in favor of establishing a Jewish National Fund for purchasing land in Palestine for the entire Jewish people (Shilony 1998). The first collection of money totaled 200,000 British pounds. The first land purchase took place in 1903 with the acquisition of 200 dunams in Hadera. By 1921, the JNF purchased 100,000 dunams, which doubled by 1927. By 1935, the JNF planted 1.7 million trees over an area of 7,000 dunams (Jewish National Fund 2010).
The JNF utilized afforestation as a tool for nation-building by three main methods prior to 1948: 1. The Blue Box and its selective cartographic representations of Palestine to raise financial capital from the Jewish Diaspora, which simultaneously fashioned a connection between Jews and Nation; 2. The construction of a specific narrative about the physical and human environment depicting Palestine as desolate, barren, and sparsely populated – waiting for redemption; and 3. The ideology that redemption of the land materializes through labor - i.e. planting trees.
In 1902, a bank clerk named Haim Kleinman suggested placing a box in every Jewish home to collect donations for the Jewish National Fund (Shlomo 1991, Bar-Gal 2003).
Boxes were painted blue and white (national colors) with the banner of the JNF, the Star of David, and the initials of the JNF. The Blue Box was a symbol of Zionism and

“particularly of the redemption of the Land of Israel” (Bar-Gal 2003, 2). The Blue Box continues to be a symbol of Israel for Jews in the Diaspora today (Long 2009).
Central to the Zionist narrative was the connection of Jewish people to the land, which
20 was not only the belief that they had a historical connection to the physical space itself, but that they, the settlers, could redeem the land through physical labor. The yishuv, the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine, “served as the foundation for the Israeli state” whose purpose was to fulfill the mission of Zionism (Peled 1995, 14). The mission of
Zionism was for Jews to replant their roots “in a single land, the land of their forefathers” in order to “reclaim their status as ‘indigenous people’” (Tal 2002, 20). Ben
Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, stated in his 1963 memoir,
“From the start, Zionist ideology was ruled by the thesis that the return of the Jews to their Land was bound up with a lofty mission to make the
Middle East bloom again and to establish friendly co-operation between two Semitic people which, in the Middle Ages, had together been the torchbearers of progress and science” (13).
This irony of this quote should not be missed, as the aforementioned status of
“indigenous people” is disputed, as there was an Arab population already living in
Palestine at the time. After the 1948 War, friendly cooperation dissipated as hundreds of thousands of Arabs either were expelled or left due to the threat of war, and became refugees.
12 Making “the Middle East bloom” would soon be the very ideology by which the State controlled, and continues to control, socio-ecological spaces.
The dismal perception of Palestine by settlers in the early 20 th century fluctuated between adoration and alienation, as they were welcomed by a new landscape that
12 This statement is not meant to suggest the War was one-sided.

differed greatly from biblical expectations of Eretz Yisrael. Mark Twain is commonly quoted from his travelogue The Innocents Abroad, “Of all the lands there are for dismal
21 scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are un-sightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent”
(1869, 606). As another travel writer described the “grand beauty” and “quiet calm” of
Tiberias and Lake Kinneret in northern Palestine, Twain responds that “no ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful – to one’s actual vision” (1869, 509). This Western worldview is reflected in many of Twain’s writing, which was influenced by American and European ideas of “development” and “progress.” Ben-Gurion’s, the first Prime
Minister of Israel, vision of “making the Middle East bloom” emerged from these same ideologies, which will be further described in Section 4.2.
Although the afforestation activities of the Jewish National Fund were limited before
1948, the vision and construction of a Jewish narrative of the land is vital to understanding the power of this organization after the creation of the Jewish state. By
1948 only 1 percent of all JNF lands were covered by forests, which was approximately
12,000 dunams (Tal 2002). Yet, in Shilony’s historical account of the JNF he writes that
“reading between the lines [of the JNF and the Zionists] one can hear the call for devoting every inch of land not being used for agriculture to the planting of forests”
(1998, 135). By 1948, the Jewish National Fund was the largest landowner in Palestine, owning 900,000 dunams (out of 1.8 million dunams of Jewish owned land), which would triple by the early 1950s (Benvenisti 2002, Lehn 1974). Figure 1 below represents the dunams of land purchased by the JNF from 1920 until 1950.

22
Dunams of Land Purchased by the JNF, 1920-1950
2 500 000 n a
D u m s
2 000 000
1 500 000
1 000 000
500 000
Dunams
0
1920 1930 1940
Year
1948 1950
Figure 1: Dunams of Land Purchased by the JNF, 1920-1950 (Data from Lehn 1974)
4.1.2 Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael: Making Expropriation Legal
In 1947 the UN Resolution on the Partition of Palestine divided the Mandate into a
Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem designated as an international area under special protection. Although the plan was accepted by Jewish leaders, it was rejected by
Arab leaders. Civil war lasted until May 14, 1948 when the Mandate ended, and on the same day Jewish leaders declared the State of Israel as the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq,
Jordan, and Lebanon invaded (see Morris 2008, Pappe 2004).
The 1948 War created a tremendous socio-ecological shift in both the human and physical landscape. From December 1947 until May 1948, approximately 380,000 Arabs fled their homes resulting in 207 abandoned villages within the area allocated to the
Jewish state (Benvenisti 2002, 124). While the Partition Plan gave Jews 14,000km 2 , by the end of the war Jews were in control of 20,000km 2 . Another 120,000 people fled their villages from outside the borders of the Jewish state (ibid, 141). Simultaneously, waves

of Jews in Arab countries were also uprooted from their homes, and came to Israel in the hundreds of thousands. From 1948 until 1951, over 700,000 immigrants arrived in
23
Israel (Benvenisti 2002, 212). This monumental shift in the landscape was a simultaneous movement in uprooting and planting, as the exodus of both Jews and
Arabs would forever change the Middle East.
The Declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 deemed Israel a Jewish state for not only those within its borders, but for all Jewish people in the world (emphasis added). As a sovereign state, Israel became the central authority of control, which leaders saw as a
“symbolic stamp of legitimacy to the ongoing process of the fulfillment of Zionism”
(Benvenisti 2002, 145). Forest management was transferred from the British Mandate to the State of Israel Afforestation Department. Afforestation became important for security reasons, in addition to providing an economic livelihood to the thousands of
Jewish immigrants arriving in the newly formed state.
After 1948 the role of the JNF became not only to plant trees and purchase land, but to settle the land for Jews only, which was the most important legal decree relating to the
Jewish National Fund after the creation of the State (emphasis added). Additionally, the JNF became the owner of what the State called “abandoned” Arab property, the legality of which is highly contested.
13 One obstacle facing the newly formed state was the question of Arab refugees. Josef Weitz, Father of the Forests and once director of the JNF Lands and Afforestation Department for 35 years, was the most prominent
13 For a discussion on the topic of “abandonment” versus the concept of “ethnic cleansing” see Benvenisti
2002 and Morris 2008. This language of abandonment by the State suggests the Arab, or Palestinian, population simply left their homes, but a plethora of research contends the Arab population was expelled. Benvenisti posits that following the declaration of the State of Israel, a second phase of war did constitute “ethnic cleansing,” which is the premeditated expulsion of an undesired population (2002,
123). For the scope of this thesis, I am not examining whether or not “ethnic cleansing” took place as it is a highly contested and value-ridden term, but one cannot ignore the fact that 750,000 Palestinians left or were expelled from their homes in 1948.

voice in preventing their return. Even Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, stated in
1948, “I do not want those who flee to return. Their return must be prevented now.
Because after the war, everything will depend on the outcome of the war – I will be in favor of their not returning even after the war” (Benvenisti 2002, 150).
24
Weitz argued that the JNF should pay for the abandoned property, against the government who wanted to keep the land for the state. In order for the JNF to continue to exist, Weitz saw an opportunity that would continue its vision – buying abandoned land for Jewish settlement. Ben-Gurion agreed to sell him 1 million dunams, but Levi
Eshkol, chairman of the Settlement Department of the Jewish Agency, questioned this exchange. Eshkol questioned, why would the Jewish National Fund be kept in place if the state could take over purchased lands and territory acquired through war (Leon
2005)? For Weitz, the payment would guarantee the status of the Jewish National Fund, but more importantly, “it was also insurance against the claims of the land’s legal owners, the Arabs who had abandoned it” (Benvenisti 2002, 172). At the time, the
Jewish National Fund was a company registered in London, but was also affiliated with the World Zionist Organization. It held “quasi-government status” even though it
“acted in the name of the Jewish people and not that of the State of Israel” (Leon 2005).
In 1950, the sale of 1 million dunums to the Jewish National Fund was approved by the
State, which meant that the JNF now owned “40 percent of the total area of the abandoned property” (Benvenisti 2002, 177). The JNF purchased another 2,373,676 dunams of land in 1950 (Lehn 1974). In 1952, the World Zionist Organization-Jewish
Agency Law was passed, which gave legal status to Zionist institutions, which included the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund (which were the administrative arms of the World Zionist Organization). One year later, the Keren Kayemeth Leisrael Law
5714-1953 passed which created a governing body similar to that of the Jewish National

25
Fund, Limited in England. This law gave legal status to a Jewish National Fund in
Israel, to be called Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael (KKL). By May 1954, the KKL-JNF was formally established, while JNF, Ltd. continued to exist in England. The English company transferred all property within the armistice lines of 1949 to the KKL, while the JNF in London kept lands outside state borders (Davis and Lehn 1978). Activities of the KKL would focus on land reclamation, road building, infrastructure such as dams and irrigation systems, and afforestation (Lehn 1974). Today, there exists a Jewish
National Fund in over 40 countries with most of the financial contributions coming from the United States.
Questions arose regarding the leasing of land only to Jews, as it stated in an internal
JNF document titled “The Organization of the JNF as an Israeli Association” in 1952:
“Although the object of the JNF will continue to be to assist in the settlement of Jews only, through the allocation of lands for their settlement, the need may arise to lease tracts of land to non-Jews or to an international company; further, should we allow this explicit prohibition to remain, the undesirable impression might be created of so-called racist restrictions, which are opposed by Jews throughout the world” (Davis and Lehn 1978, 9).
While modifying other clauses to amend or remove the prohibition against leasing land to non-Jews, the document states, “One can assume that even without these explicit prohibitions, the JNF Board of Directors will know how to administer the work of the institution in accordance with the explicit object as specified in the aforementioned clause which remains unchanged” (Davis and Lehn 1978, 9). To put it clearly, the JNF
Board of Directors will know how to administer land to only Jews.

In 1955 at the 24 th Zionist Congress, the Israel Lands Law was amended to clarify the role of the KKL, which included three laws: Basic Law Israel Lands, Israel Lands Law,
26 and Israel Lands Administration Law. This amendment now extended the KKL’s ownership to all state (national and Jewish) lands. The 1960 Memorandum was passed in what Davis and Lehn call “conscious ambiguity,” as the manipulation of words such as “person” and “nation” are understood to mean “Jewish,” but seem equal without close scrutiny (1978). Now it would appear that the state had two owners – the KKL and the Israeli government. In a review of the new laws passed, Minister of Finance
Levi Eshkol summarized that “the mission of the JNF was transformed; the redemption of the land from people became the redemption of the land from desolation” (Davis and
Lehn 1978, 18). The themes of “redemption” and “desolation” continued to fuel justifications for implementing these laws, and most importantly, that lands purchased by the KKL-JNF were, and continue to be, owned by “the Jewish people in perpetuity”
(ibid). The Basic Law was justified from a verse in Leviticus, “the land shall not be sold forever, the land is mine,” legitimizing the belief that the land belongs to Jews only
(Davis and Lehn 1978, 20).
14
National lands, owned by the state and the JNF, would be concentrated into the Israel
Lands Administration (ILA), which would “administer, lease, and supervise the lands and execute the ownership rights” (Davis and Lehn 1978, 19). The 1961 Covenant between the government and the JNF covered all publicly owned lands which was over
90% of the area included in Israel’s borders at that date, whereas less than 7.4% of lands were privately owned – the majority of which by Arabs (Davis and Lehn 1978, 2). The
ILA’s director would be subordinate to the Minister of Agriculture, and the board
14 Land could be leased for a period of 49 years with possibility of renewal (Davis and Lehn 1978, 21). But it was clear the land was for Jews only, as the JNF lease, article 23, states, “The lessee undertakes to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labour” (Lehn 1974, 93).

27 would consist of 7 members of government and 7 JNF members. A Land Development
Administration was also formed, and the director would be subordinate to the JNF, consisting of a board of 7 members from the JNF and 6 government members (Lehn
1974).
From this it is important to understand the role of the JNF in constructing the legality of land ownership and claiming abandoned lands. The creation of Keren Kayemeth
L’Yisrael (the Israeli Jewish National Fund) formally instated the KKL-JNF as a Zionist institution within the Israeli government. This garnering of legal power was a key shift toward state building processes that facilitated a new level of ownership over spatial territory to construct Jewish spaces. After the 1948 War, Arab lands were taken over by the “Custodian of Absentee Property,” who then sold it to the “Development
Authority,” which then sold the land to the Jewish National Fund (Leon 2005). By selling this land to the JNF through an ambiguous and contested legal framework, it guaranteed the JNF “would not be held liable in any way as a result of any eventual settlement with the Palestinian Arabs” (Lehn 1974, 85).
Leon writes that in 1954, “more than a third of Israel’s population lived on property” belonging to “present refugees” – the 300,000 Arabs who fled or abandoned their homes that now had Israeli citizenship (2005, 121). These laws concerning property and ownership, especially since the Jewish National Fund would not lease land to non-Jews, effects ownership and property rights of the minority population in Israel until the present day. As of 2006, Israeli Arabs, who also self-identify as Palestinians, make up
20% of the population of Israel yet only own 3.4% of the land (Tal 2007, 237). This legal framework constitutes the ethnocracy described by Yiftachel, one that attempts to preserve ethno-nationalist statehood by reserving land for Jews only (1998).

4.1.3 KKL-JNF Expansion
From 1948 to 1954, JNF land holdings tripled from 936,000 to 3,396,333 dunams (Tal
2002). Afforestation became a significant tool of nation-state building, as Ben-Gurion stated in the at the Second Knesset in 1951,
“We must plant many hundreds of thousands of trees over an area of five million dunams, a quarter of the area of the state. We must wrap all the mountains of the country and their slopes in trees, all the hills and stony lands that will not succeed in agriculture…We must also plant for security reasons, along all the borders, along all the roads, routes and paths, around public and military buildings and facilities” (Cohen 1993,
61).
15
The Jewish National Fund was given the task of “making the wilderness bloom, improving the soil, planting gardens and forests, laying irrigation lines and exploiting
28 nature’s riches” which Ben-Gurion called “the people’s most reliable and efficient agent in greening the wilderness” (Shva 1991, 82). Planting trees became one of the primary factors in the transformation of the landscape. The total area within the armistice lines was 20.5 million dunums, of which Josef Weitz estimated 3.5 million dunams were appropriate for afforestation (Cohen 1993, 62). While afforestation was used for defense and economic purposes, it was also used as a method to prevent “grazing or cultivation on land that the government (and the JNF) did not want to fall into or return to the hands of Arab agriculturalists and pastoralists” (Cohen 1993, 63).
In 1949, 2,910 dunams of trees were planted, followed by 12,650 dunams the following year, and 56,400 dunams in 1951 (Cohen 1993, 64). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Jewish
National Fund’s afforestation program added 20,000 dunams of forest each year (Shva
15 For an alternative Hebrew translation see Amir and Rechtman 2006, 43.

29
1991). By 1960, 48,000,000 trees were planted which increased to 95,000,000 by 1968
(Stemple 1998, 16). By 1971, trees planted by the JNF reached 100 million.
Simultaneously, extensive settlements were built as the JNF paved roads and reclaimed, or according to the Palestinian population, expropriated land. Figure 2 below shows the number of trees planted by the JNF from 1948 until 1994. In the literature, there is no differentiation made between the JNF and KKL for these tree planting figures.
Number of Trees Planted by the JNF, 1948-1994
250 000 000
200 000 000
Number
150 000 000 of Trees
100 000 000
50 000 000
Number of Trees
Planted
0
1948 1951 1960 1968 1991 1994
Year
Figure 2: Number of Trees Planted by the JNF, 1948-1994 16
After the 1967 Yom Kippur War, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the
Golan Heights, and Sinai, dozens of settlements expanded in the Galilee and Judean
Hills. Widespread coniferous forests, what Amir and Rechtman call “one of the physical expressions of Zionist ideology” soon became criticized for lack of biological diversity, and thereby were labeled “pine deserts” (2006, 44). By 1987, pine and cypress trees made up 65 percent of all forest trees (Tal 2002). Afforestation policies shifted to include multi-use forestry, recreational infrastructures, and preservation of the
16 See Appendix 1 for sources of data.

30 environment to counter the mass production of pine deserts (Amir and Rechtman 2006).
By 1991, 190,000,000 trees were planted and the JNF owned 2,600,000 dunams of land – compared to 900,000 dunams in 1948 (Shva 1991, 106). Mixed forests came to replace the monoculture of the Aleppo pine. Today, over 150 forests have been built by the
Jewish National Fund, with over 80 species of trees. The JNF’s website further summarizes,
“Over the past 107 years, JNF has evolved into a global environmental leader by planting 240 million trees, building over 200 reservoirs and dams, developing over 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1,000 parks, providing the infrastructure for over 1,000 communities, bringing life to the Negev Desert and educating students around the world about
Israel and the environment” (JNF 2010).
Yet beneath this narrative of development and success lies another history of Israel, where those in power used afforestation as a political and social tool to conceal the past in order to expropriate land, which in part prevented the return of Palestinian refugees.
The contested landscape in question is what is considered a homeland to both Israelis and Palestinians, who both feel a “sense of metaphysical belonging to the landscape,” the latter of which is not always recognized (Benvenisti 2002, 246). May 14, 1948 is a day of both celebration and mourning, as one people commemorate the establishment of State for their people, while another mourn the loss of their land.
17
Tal explains that “most Israeli Arabs see the JNF as the perpetuator of systematic exploitation and discrimination against Israel’s Arab community” (Tal 2002, 339). The
Jewish National Fund is seen as a decision making body in favor of Jewish ownership
17 And now they may no longer commemorate their loss of land. On March 22, 2011, the Israeli
Parliament – the Knesset – passed the “Nakba Law,” which legislates the withdrawal of state funding from any institution that commemorates the Palestinian day of mourning (Khoury and Lis 2011).

and land allocation rather than a democratic organization that allocates lands to all of
Israel’s citizens. Tree planting, especially, is seen as a “declaration of Jewish sovereignty” (Tal 2002, 339). To many, forests in Israel appear as natural, “as in, it should be natural that the land be developed, and it is natural that Jews are the only residents/citizens of that land” (Long 2008, 70). The Jewish National Fund helped construct what Amir and Rechtman refer to as an “institutionalized landscape,” one in which landscape is created to fulfill the purposes of national ideology and statehood
31
(2006). These two narratives – Jewish and Arab – have been at war with one another for over sixty years.
Forests built by the Jewish National Fund are one space in which this conflict is manifested. Many settlements, forests, and recreation sites established by the Jewish
National Fund exist either on the remains of Palestinian villages or where farmland used to be (Khalidi 1992, Wesley 2006, Long 2008). Approximately 71 out of 418
Palestinian villages lie in tourist or recreation spots (Long 2008). As families go hiking on weekends or relax at picnic tables at these forests, within the trees lies the remnants of the Nakba. Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi writes,
“While many of the sites are difficult of access to this day the observant traveler of Israeli roads and highways can see traces of their presence that would escape the notice of the casual passerby: a fenced-in area – often surmounting a gentle hill – of olive and other fruit trees left untended, of cactus hedges and domesticated plants run wild…but in the vast majority of cases all that remains is a scattering of stones and rubble across a forgotten landscape” (xv, 1992).
The forests are seen as natural elements of the Israeli landscape, yet the Arab landscape lies beneath. The growth of the Jewish state through forestry acts as “an allegory for the revival of the Israeli nation,” yet I found that it can also be seen as a method of

banishment and erasure (Long 2008, 65). Fueled by the “redemption of the land” and
“blooming the desert,” afforestation is also met by opposition leading up to the current
32 day.
18 While much existing literature examines the relationship between Palestinian villages and land bought by the Jewish National Fund after 1948, afforestation continues to collide with other narratives of landscape and identity in the present. In asking my second question, “To what extent does this narrative of Jewish nationbuilding and afforestation collide with other narratives of landscape and identity in
Israel?,” it led me into an inquiry of the story of Al Arakib, a Bedouin village in the
Negev.
4.2 The Final Frontier: Making the Desert Bloom
Ben-Gurion’s vision for the Negev Desert in the south is the State’s last frontier.
Although the Negev is considered state land, the acquisition of which is contested, the desert is considered a “vacuum domicilum” – “an empty space that is yet to be redeemed” (Shamir 1996, 232). A continuation of the Zionist ethos of the redemption of
Eretz Yisrael, the Negev is conceptualized as a space that needs settlement and development, of which includes afforestation. In the famous words of David Ben-
Gurion, “For those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands, and even millions” (New York Times Magazine 1954).
19 Yet, there doesn’t seem to be room for the Bedouin population.
18 An example of this was the opposition to the JNF-Canada branch raising money for a forest developed in the Occupied Territories (the West Bank - occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War) on the site of destroyed Palestinian villages. A successful campaign by Zochrot in 2003 forced the park to be renamed from the Canada Park to Ayalon Park. Signs were put up commemorating the two Palestinian villages to complement the donor signs.
19 Ben Gurion, David. “Why I Retired to the Desert.”New York Times Magazine. 24 March 1954.

33
Before 1948, approximately 90,000 Bedouins consisting of 96 tribes lived in the Negev
(Shmueli and Khamaisi 2011). After 1948, the population dropped below 10,000 as many Bedouins fled to Jordan or Egypt. Those who stayed garnered Israeli citizenship.
In 1953, the Israeli military relocated the remaining Bedouins to what is called the seig, enclosure zone, constituting only 10 percent of their former territory (Meir 1988, Abu-
Saad 2008, Shmueli and Khamaisi 2011). The majority of the Negev was declared state land, or closed for military use, except for the 1.5 million dunum enclosure (the entire
Negev is 13 million dunams). The military promised the displaced Bedouins they could return to their land, but this promise was never fulfilled.
From 1951 until 1966, the Bedouin population lived in the enclosure zone until Israeli military rule of the seig ended. In 1966 the first planned Bedouin town was built by the
State, which was the beginning of the semi-urbanization process of the Bedouin population (Yahel 2006, Shmueli and Khamaisi 2011). This “semi-urbanization” process transformed the semi-nomadic livelihoods of the Bedouins as the State forced them to either live in the seig or the planned towns (Meir 1988, Yiftachel 2003). According to
2010 data, 129,000 Bedouins live in towns while 45,000 live in 36 unrecognized villages considered “illegal” according to the 1965 Planning and Construction Law requiring a permit for any buildings (Meir 2008).
20 Any zone or building without a permit is considered illegal by the State.
Mirroring Ben-Gurion’s vision that “the supreme test of Israel in our generation lies, not in its struggle with hostile forces without, but in its success in gaining domination, through science and pioneering, over the wastelands of its country in the south and the
Negev,” the United States branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF-US) is fulfilling this
20 According to Yahel, 100,000 Bedouin live in planned, urban towns, while 59,000 Bedouin reside in illegal clusters (2006, 3).

34 test through its $600 million Blueprint Negev Campaign. From building homes for a
“new generation of pioneers” to promoting eco-tourism and constructing wetlands and parks, the JNF-US Blueprint Negev is “a testament to the creativity and pioneering vigor of the Jewish people” (Jewish National Fund 2009). The “pioneering” narrative from the early 20 th century continues to the present day. Yet one of these “pioneering” projects the JNF (now meaning JNF-US) and KKL create today is the GOD TV Forest, which further exacerbates the struggle between afforestation and narratives of land ownership. While the KKL and the JNF plants trees under the auspices of “greening” the desert and preserving state land, the Israel Lands Administration simultaneously demolished the homes of the Bedouin community of Al Arakib 21 times in order to
“make room” for the forest.
4.3 Al Arakib, the JNF, and the GOD-TV Forest
The story of the Jewish National Fund and Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael reveals a history of the tumultuous relationship between people, and between people and the environment. The Zionist narrative of redemption of the Land of Israel for the Jewish people was realized in part through planting trees –symbolically, as the tree represented the “new Hebrew,” and physically, through land acquisition and afforestation. Yet, with the creation of the State in 1948 the landscape was carved in a fashion that planted new roots while simultaneously covering the memory of the past.
My second research question, “Does the narrative of Jewish nation-building and afforestation collide with other narratives of landscape and identity in Israel?” is narrowed into my third research question, “What is the socio-ecological relationship between the Bedouin village of Al Arakib, the GOD-TV Forest and the Jewish National
Fund?” My findings are presented discursively below.

35
4.3.1 Planting Natures: The GOD TV Forest
The JNF’s website states that it “doesn’t wait for miracles to happen – we create them.”
Yet one “miracle” the JNF creates today is the “GOD TV Forest” in the Negev. A partnership between the KKL-JNF, the JNF-US, and GOD TV, this forest is a contested space of overlapping Christian, Israeli, Jewish, and Bedouin narratives of landscape and identity. I first present my first set of findings on the GOD-TV Forest primarily found through the analysis of secondary data collected from newspaper articles, websites online, and video content.
The mission of GOD TV, an evangelical Christian television channel based in the United
Kingdom, is “to reach the lost through media” (GOD TV 2010). With 22 satellites broadcasting GOD TV’s message from Jerusalem alone, this channel reaches over one billion viewers around the world. On the GOD TV website it states, “This ministry exists to enable every television household to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ so that they may believe in Him, call upon His name, and be saved.” In 2009, GOD TV donated $500,000 to the Jewish National Fund for planting a forest in Israel in order “to participate in dressing the Holy Land for the return to Jesus,” according to their
International Revenue Service 990 form (Silverstein 2010). This donation amounted to one million trees saplings for planting a forest in the Negev. To date, 500,000 trees – ranging from pine, myrtle, acacia, to cypress - have been planted (GOD TV 2010).
In an online video produced by GOD TV, one of its founders Rory Alec calls for viewers to donate money to plant trees in the Negev. He stands in a sapling nursery outside of the hills of Jerusalem. Rory holds a young pine tree saying, “This little fellow is waiting

36 for someone to connect and partner with GOD TV.” Drawing on Biblical verses, he continues,
“We’re not going to stop doing this until, I believe, the Lord comes back because just as you read Isaiah 41 you find out how passionate God is about turning the deserts into a blooming garden and reestablishing pools and planting trees. He himself says that he will do it. Of course how will he do that? He’ll do it through you and I.” 21
Viewers can donate $25 (£15 or €20) toward the planting of one tree sapling either in their name or to commemorate a loved one (GOD TV 2010). To access this video, viewers can click on a link “Israel Trees” at the bottom of the main page leading users to another page with the heading “Join us to make prophetic history as together we commit to plant a million+ trees in the land of Israel.” Four tabs – “Israel Trees,” “Plant
Your Tree,” “Tu B’Shevat,” and “Tree-planting in the Negev” – allow viewers to explore reasons to donate to GOD TV for the purpose of planting trees in Israel.
Not only does GOD TV partner with the Jewish National Fund and KKL, but it also partners with The Land of Promise Foundation, which
“offers the Christian community an opportunity to a. Bless Israel with the water and trees that support life in the Holy Land, b. Invest in life in the Holy Land, blessing the nation of Israel, and c. Have a hand in fulfilling the words spoken by the prophet Isaiah; “Foreigners will plant
your fields and vineyards.” Isaiah 61:5” (Land of Promise Foundation
2009).
21 Acquired from BibleGateway.com, section of Isaiah 41 states, “I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys, I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set junipers in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the LORD has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

37
The Land of Promise Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2007 in partnership with Jewish National Fund and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael.
22 On its website, the Land of Promise Foundation writes that it is a partner with JNF and KKL, yet in the text refers to these funds solely as “JNF.”
Forestry is a main component of the foundation’s work, especially afforestation in the
Negev. The Foundation writes that the “miracle of Israel” will occur once the “land has been reclaimed from the desert and restored to its former bounty.” This “former bounty” is described by Foundation as “the Biblical forests of oak, almond, fig, olive and palm trees degraded by Assyrian, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and for the past 400 years, the Ottomans.” 23 By donating money to plant trees donors can
“touch the soil of the Promised Land by planting a tree in Israel today” even if they do not physically live in Israel (Land of Promise Foundation 2009).
Similar to the message of making the desert bloom produced by the Land of Promise
Foundation, GOD TV’s Rory Alec states in another video that “God will bring his people back to what has become a barren land.” Furthermore, he claims the Negev is “a desert in many respects today, but boy is God changing that place.” It is their belief that tree planting is readying the Holy Land for the second coming of Jesus Christ. On their website, a quote from Roy and Wendy Alec, the Founders, states, "We believe this incredible prophetic action will be a blessing to the Jewish people and the land of Israel.
Through this simple act of obedience God will reward us beyond all we could ask or think, for he who blesses Israel shall be blessed. (Numbers 24:9).”
22 A 501(c)(3) organization is an American non-profit organization or corporation exempt from federal taxes.
23 The Ottoman reign ended in 1916, so it is odd the British Mandate is not included in this historiography.

38
Planting the GOD TV Forest is influenced by religious and national reasons, yet the site of the forest physically clashes with the Bedouin population living within the same space.
4.3.2 Uprooting Natures: The Struggle for Al Arakib
On July 27, 2010, one thousand five-hundred police officers accompanied by riot police and bulldozers demolished Al Arakib on an order from the Israel Lands Administration
(ILA). Forty-six structures, including thirty homes, were destroyed in addition to 1,000 olive trees. The next twenty demolitions took place at least once per month leading up until the last demolition on April 6, 2011.
24 The ILA destroyed building materials and uprooted an additional 1,600 olive trees to prepare the landscape for JNF activities
(Dukium 2011). Encapsulated by Ha’aretz, the editorial board describes the Al Arakib community following one of the demolitions,
“Most of them, citizens of the State of Israel, including many children, were left not only without homes, but humiliated, frustrated and shocked. Both times the police were brutal, and neither time did the state offer an alternative, compensation or assistance, either material or psychological, for the people whose village was demolished and world was destroyed. That's how a country treats its citizens” (2011).
The demolitions by the Israel Lands Administration bulldozers were also accompanied by the Yassam, Israel’s Special Police Patrol Unit. Dressed in riot gear, the Yassam have shot rubber and paint bullets at both villagers and
24 For a more in-depth explanation of each demolition see Appendix 2: “Al Arakib: A Background Paper about the Demolitions” written by Dukium.

39 protesters. As a result, many arrests have been made over the past year and people have been sent to the hospital.
On January 28, 2011, the Be’er Sheva District Court issued a temporary injunction stopping further demolitions by the ILA and planting by the JNF – yet demolitions commenced again on January 31. Residents continued to build temporary shacks yet were met with demolitions and violent clashes that included tear gas, pepper spray, sponge tipped bullets, and arrests. According to Dukuim, the Negev Coexistence
Forum for Civil Equality, the government is expelling Bedouins from the Negev in order to “Judaize” the region (2011). The village of Al Arakib is considered “illegal” by the State since it does not possess the required building permits. They are instead labeled as “unrecognized” and a threat by the government. But Al Arakib continues to build.
4.3.2.1 Field Visits to Al Arakib: Findings
Before the demolitions in July 2010, the village had 30 concrete houses. The community planted olive trees and barley, while also relying on olive oil and dairy products for their economic livelihoods. The village cemetery was built in 1914, even though the residents didn’t physically live there at that time. They moved with herds to their summer and winter homes, fluctuating between permanence and movement.
My first visit to Al Arakib took place on March 10, 2011. Haia Noach, Director of
Dukium, the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, drove me to the village as I conducted my interview. Dukium, or the Form, has been directly involved in supporting Al Arakib. Driving north out of Be’er Sheva, within a few minutes I see green trees rising out of the sand. Eucalyptus and pine trees scatter throughout the

desert, as we pass Goal Forest and the newly planted Ambassador’s Forest. Haia explains to me how these trees are planted, as I ask why pine and eucalyptus trees are
40 chosen to be planted in a water scarce desert. The desert vegetation is bulldozed to make way for terraces for the purpose of collecting rainwater in the winter. Haia tells me, “The JNF doesn’t need permission for agricultural land, yet here we see no fruit trees are being planted.” She continues, “They uproot things for Jewish settlement but not for Arab purposes.” We make a U-turn at the Levahim Junction and continue down
Highway 40 until turning right onto a dirt road toward the GOD TV Forest, shown in
Images 3 and 4 below.
Image 3: Bulldozing the Negev for the GOD TV Forest, Author Photo 2011

41
Image 4: Terraces constructed for planting trees, Author Photo 2011
The forested landscape is a contested space both socially and ecologically as the desert is bulldozed for tree planting on land claimed by the Al Arakib community. Heavy equipment in addition to the bulldozing of the landscape causes severe degradation of the desert ecology. While some scholars purport that afforestation is a means of combating desertification and preventing overgrazing of Bedouin livestock, others find that the production of a new landscape leads to “the rise of biological invasion of species not indigenous to the area” (Rinat 2008). The construction of an afforested landscape simultaneously thwarts Bedouin construction while drastically altering the flora and fauna of the desert.
Both the forest and the Al Arakib community are seen as threats. The GOD TV Forest is a threat to the growth of the Bedouin village and its claim to the land. The Bedouin village is seen as a threat to State activities. Land claims are central to this contested landscape. One line of argumentation purports were no “permanent” settlements in the
Negev until 1900, for before the 20 th century “Bedouins wandered between Saudi
Arabia, the Sinai, and southern Palestine” (Yahel 2006, 2). This train of thought views nomadic people as not considered having a connection to land; therefore they cannot

42 claim historic land ownership. Yet, Haia argues that “the idea of a Bedouin as a nomad is a myth perpetuated by the State” (2011).
Other scholars also claim that in the northern Negev, the Bedouin population was comprised of pastoralist nomads and fellahin (farmers), rather than pure nomadic tribes
(those having no ties to the land). The pastoralist nomads migrated between summer and winter grounds, whereas the fellahin settled on the land as farmers (Orenstein
2011). The acquisition of land after the 1948 War and the resulting changes in ownership and property law counters Bedouin meaning of ownership, culture, and identity. Bedouins are perceived by the State as rootless, wandering nomads who don’t have a physical connection to the soil, opposed to the Jewish redeemer who works the land to fulfill the Zionist dream. While the State conceptualized its narrative of acquiring land for Jewish redemption, it essentially reshaped the laws regulating ownership that erased or ignored other sets of customs and understanding of the land
(Benvenisti 2002, Meir 1988, Abu-Saad 2008).
Historically, Bedouins had their own legal mechanisms for deciding land ownership, which was tied to social stratification. Only 55% of people in a Bedouin community were nomadic, in the sense they were “non-owners” who were not fixed, and attended to pastoral activities when necessary (Shamir 1996). Permanent dwellings, which were owned, were split between winter and summer homes depending on climate. The
Zionist perception of Bedouins is that they lack the “transition of humans in nature to humans in society,” a transition that marks a people as “civilized” (Shamir 1996, 236).
Since the Negev is seen by the State as inherently uncivilized and “an empty space that awaits Jewish liberation,” the Bedouins represent “a nomadic culture that awaits civilization” (Shamir 1996, 236). These opposing cultures of modernity and tradition collide with the model of the nation-state, Israel, and that of the Bedouin population.

While the purpose of this thesis is not to examine whether historic claims exist, it is important to note the division between the State’s views on historicity and Bedouin claims compared to the Bedouins themselves. During the British Mandate, the British
43 required land ownership, which the Bedouins believe delegitimized traditional ownership. Instead, they relied on traditional forms of ownership. Conversely, the
State requires citizens to produce deeds proving ownership dating prior to the 1921
Mewat Land Ordinance.
25 At the core of this conflict is the dispute of land ownership between the State and the Bedouin village, exacerbated by the GOD TV Forest.
My main informant from the Al Arakib community was Aziz Abu Madigem, the son of
Sheikh Saya Al-touri.
26 Aziz was born in Al Arakib in 1974 and given land from his grandfather. In 1995, he began building houses and planting olive trees. According to
Aziz, approximately 500 people and 55 families lived there from the mid-1990s, what he considers a time of general tranquility. He tells me, “In 1999 [it was the] first time [they] destroy[ed] houses. The last demolition was in 2002, until July 27, 2010 last summer”
(2011).
Asking him to recap the events of July 27, 2010, he discloses: “At 4am the soldiers came,
1,500. They cut trees, demolish houses.” I ask, “Why did they demolish your homes?”
He responds, “The JNF wanted to come here and plant trees. They cut our life. Before,
I love JNF. They make parks, forests for the people. It’s good. But when they cut my life, my trees, I can’t love them” (2011). The Al-touri family possesses a traditional deed dating to 1906 stating the transfer of land from al-Uqbi tribe to the al-Touri tribe. Aziz explained the importance of this document as for him it legitimizes the village’s land
25 See Appendix 3 for a brief discussion of the 1921 Mewat Land Ordinance.
26 A Sheikh is a village leader.

44 ownership claims against the State. For Aziz, “It’s [referring to the deed] truth, it’s a key.”
In 2006, Nuri al-Uqbi filed a claim in the Be’er Sheva Court for 1,350 dunams in the name of Suleiman al-Uqbi, of which included two plots of land claimed by Al Arakib
(Zolo 2006). This claim is still being processed by the court system. According to Aziz, the 1906 provides the “key” to claiming land, but as Haia explained to me this deed is a traditional Bedouin deed - not a deed prescribed by the Ottomans or the British
Mandate. As stated earlier, Bedouins must produce a document given prior to the 1921
Mewat Land Ordinance in order to claim land ownership. In the year 2011, these legal boundaries created by the State of Israel follow land codes from the early 20 th century.
This conceptual framework of possession and ownership is what political and legal sociologist Ronen Shamir labels “context blind” for it does not recognize traditional forms of Bedouin land ownership (2006). According to Shamir, “the Negev is seen as a state-owned space where Bedouins can either become invaders [or] subversive lawbreakers,” which is what the State considers Al Arakib (2006, 248). Alternatively, they can accept the compensation package designed by the State, becoming “nomads who wish to be civilized by responding to state requests” (ibid). But the community of
Al Arakib wants to remain on what they consider to be their property.
Much of the public awareness raised from the situation in Al Arakib comes from the media in addition to NGOs and a campaign to protesting the JNF, “Bedouin-Jewish
Justice in Israel.” Headlines such as “God-TV helps Israel oust Bedouin” (Cook 2010),
“JNF using trees to thwart Bedouin growth in Negev” (Rinat 2008), “Reclaiming the
Desert” (Lori 2010), The Jewish National Fund’s Project of Dispossession” (Noach 2010), and “Bulldozers, Trees & Villas: The Expulsion of the Bedouins Continues” (Tarabut
2010) suggest a deliberate project of expulsion by the Jewish National Fund and GOD

TV. Dating from 2002 when the first demolitions took place, the expulsion of the
Bedouin population has been incredibly violent.
27
According to Aziz, the State says, “There’s no way, you must leave the land or sell the
45 land to us.” But he wants to continue his life as a Bedouin, living in Al Arakib – a
“beautiful village with sheep, horses, agriculture.” Planting olive trees has become a means to protest the JNF afforestation activities. He continues, “We cannot build houses. It costs 2,000 shekels to rebuild [the protest tents] and one tree only costs 20 shekels. I want to do 5,000 trees before building houses.” Replanting trees first are a cheaper option to maintain and symbolically display ownership.
On March 12, 2011 I participated in an olive tree planting day organized by Al Arakib.
By planting olives trees in the very terraces constructed by the bulldozers, Al Arakib physically and symbolically demonstrated against the Jewish National Fund. At the start of the demonstration, various members of the village spoke to the hundred or so people who came to join efforts with Al Arakib. From a translation from Arabic to
English provided by various individuals, representatives of the villages stated that they believed their struggle was just. According to speakers at the event, the JNF “flattened the land” in order to plant trees in the name of Jews and Christians. Someone rhetorically asked, “Why don’t they let us live on our land?” From my observations it was apparent the village of Al Arakib feels that they have historic claims to the landscape. In response to the olive trees uprooted by the JNF and replaced with pine trees, this day was both a material and symbolic statement of action and protest. The
27 This project of expulsion is a violent act affecting both the social and ecological realm. Not only does the State demolish homes and arrest citizens, but it uproots trees and sprays crops with herbicide. In
February 2002, 12,000 dunams of Bedouin crops were sprayed with herbicide (Abu-Saad 2008). The Israel
Supreme Court deemed this illegal in 2004 (Cook 2010).

olive trees planted by the Al Arakib community and their supporters can be seen in
Image 5 below.
46
Image 5: Olive trees planted along JNF terraces, Author Photo 2011
I returned two weeks later on March 24, 2011 to interview Aziz. I asked, “What did the olive planting [two weeks ago on March 12] do for you?” He responded, “It made me happy. I could come back to the land. I [came] back to my life.” That same day I arrived, the JNF bulldozer compound was being disassembled. Only one bulldozer remained. The community appeared happy, but no one had a definite answer of why this was happening. Perhaps because of the demonstrations and NGO pressure, Haia suggested. Aziz interjects, “It makes me happy the JNF bulldozers are gone” (2011).
[The compound was rebuilt only a few weeks later near another Bedouin village close to Al Arakib.]
I ask Aziz, “What do you want for Al Arakib?” He responds, “We want [to have] good
[relations] with any people. We love the free life. When the JNF comes here and cuts

47 my trees and the man who gives [the] JNF money, I think he didn’t know the JNF
[made a bad situation for me]. All the world must know the JNF is bad for [us]” (2011).
From the interview, I gather that he wants to return to a semi-permanent livelihood and to continue their life as it was before the demolitions began. He concludes with “I have to be the best here to continue my dream. Here I want to build my house, here I want to plant trees. I want to grow here with my family. [I want to] continue our life with our culture and to [teach] my sons the culture from the Bedouin and to continue life in this way” (2011).
4.3.3 Responses to Opposition
Public opposition to the Jewish National Fund has been heightened over the past year due to the continued demolitions of the village of Al Arakib. The various actors in this story - the village of Al Arakib, GOD TV, the Israel Lands Administration, the Jewish
National Fund, and Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael - all play various roles and have responded in different ways.
Both GOD TV and the Jewish National Fund published statements regarding the conflict.
28 GOD TV stated the following, “It has come to our attention that reports have been posted on the Internet. These reports mislead readers to believe that GOD TV may be responsible for displacement of Bedouin people in the Negev Desert in Israel. These claims are false.” In its statement, GOD TV asserts that “neither the Jewish National
Fund (JNF) nor GOD TV is involved in the decision as to where trees can be planted in
Israel or in the actual planting of the trees.” This is an interesting statement due to the fact that GOD TV blatantly states on its website “Together we are making substantial
28 See Appendix 4 and Appendix 5 for these statements, respectively.

48 inroads to claiming back the Negev desert and cultivating the land that God loves so much.” Therefore, it did choose the Negev Desert for afforestation activities through its own religious narrative. Furthermore, the fact that GOD TV is financing the excavation of a Byzantine church, “a historical gem [that] has revealed buildings and artifacts from an ancient Christian community who lived in the Holy Land over 1500 years ago” illustrates GOD TV’s intentional investment in this specific region of the Negev. The location of this church is beside the GOD TV Forest. This excavation site is GOD TV’s other financial and physical investment in the Negev Desert which allows for the construction of historic land claims (the first being the GOD TV Forest). Moreover,
GOD TV does participate in the actual planting of trees as it states on its website, “on 24
October, GOD TV Israel Tour Pilgrims planted 25 Olive trees (one tree for each of the 25 nations present on the Tour) as a symbol of the rebirth of this region.”
Similar to GOD TV’s statement, the Jewish National Fund responds, “it is important to remember that JNF-KKL is not a part of the discussion relating to the issue of Negev land rights. JNF-KKL has nothing to do with determining whether a village – Jewish,
Bedouin or otherwise – is legal or illegal; that is determined by the Israeli government.”
It continues,
“Israel is a lawful society and land ownership disputes go through its judicial system. In certain cases the Bedouin have won; in others, the courts have not decided in their favor. In either instance, the law must be obeyed. When people build illegally on public lands, the government has a legal right to intervene, just as an individual would not be allowed to pitch a tent in Central Park and call it home.”
First, it is true that the State and the Israel Lands Administration is in charge of settling land claims. But comparing the Bedouin community of Al Arakib to that of a squatter in Central Park only shows one, the disregard for Bedouin’s rights to the land, and two,

frames the Bedouin as an “invader.” Second, it is important to note that the statement was released by the JNF-US, yet it refers to itself and the KKL together as JNF-KKL.
49
The State does offer compensation in the form of a free plot of land for any Bedouin who agrees to settle in a legal town (Yahel 2006). On one hand, in the State’s eyes it is attempting to “fix” the Bedouin “problem” by building planned townships and offering compensation to Bedouins who choose to move. But, in the case of Al Arakib, the village rejects the State’s proposal and instead claims that it has rights to the contested land. Due to the fact much of the Negev is considered State land, unless one proves legal ownership by a deed acquired before the 1921 Mewat Land Ordinance, one cannot be granted a land ownership claim (Israel Lands Administration 2007). There are currently 2,700 claims with 650,000 dunams in dispute (ibid).
Chapter 5: Discussion
From the theoretical framework of power and the construction of symbolic and material landscapes, in this chapter I discuss my findings in order to address my research questions.
5.1 Research Question 1
From my first question, I found the State of Israel has utilized afforestation in three main methods to materially produce and plant the ideology and concept of nationhood and a Jewish state. First, the State continues to utilize the Blue Box, created in the early
20 th century, for the purpose of collecting money from the Diaspora.
29 The Blue Box materially represents the ideology of a Jewish state in addition to acting as a symbol of
29 A majority of the JNF budget actually comes from renter’s fees rather than the Blue Boxes (Tal 2005).

Jewish redemption (Bar-Gal 2003, Long 2008, Braverman 2009). Today, the Blue Box continues to be one means of donating to the JNF, but donations are also completed through online tools. One can either “click to plant” on the KKL-JNF’s website, or set up an “EZTree” account to buy trees in bulk, to commemorate or honor friends or family.
Second, the physical act of planting trees is another method by which the State utilizes
50 afforestation as a tool to plant its ideology, not only for State purposes such as land appropriation, economic incentives, and security, but also for nation-building. The US division of JNF states on its website, “Planting a tree in Israel is the perfect way to show you care. You can plant trees for many different reasons and help green the land of
Israel while sending a special gift to a friend or loved one.” The method of planting trees in Israel has evolved from putting coins in a blue box to that of the click of a mouse, but the ideology behind the idea to “green” Eretz Yisrael remains the same.
Third, the Jewish narrative of transforming a “barren, desolate” nature into a “green” nature through afforestation is another method by which the State plants its ideology within its borders and beyond to the Diaspora. The Jewish narratives about the physical and social environment from the early 20 th century have evolved into 21 st century narratives of making the Negev Desert bloom.
The three findings described above are applicable to both nation-building, the Jewish people as nation, and state-building, the political entity of the state of Israel. Although
Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael and the Jewish National Fund are separate organizations, the narratives within them continuously overlap. From my findings, it is apparent that even in the literature JNF often refers to KKL (as I do within this thesis, unless otherwise noted). The “original” JNF was founded in England, yet on the JNF-US website there is no statement regarding the founding of the US branch. The description

51 of the JNF on the Land of Promise Foundation’s website is taken directly from the JNF’s website. The demarcations between the JNF and KKL are not necessarily clear. The
JNF-US and other branches are the fundraising arms of the KKL while the KKL is the administrative branch in Israel, overseeing projects, land settlement, and afforestation.
For the Jewish National Fund outside of Israel, the tree acts as a symbol for the
Diaspora as a means to attach the Jewish nation to the Jewish State. In Israel, the tree is more than a brand as it also is an instrument of power.
Following the ideas of Foucault, I gather from my research that power is manifested within the sovereignty of the State. In the context of afforestation, Israel controls the social and environmental world in which citizens live. Through the power of legal tools, the narrative of Jewish territorial belonging, and physical transformation of the landscape, the State utilized, and continues to utilize, afforestation as a means of planting its ideology of Jewish nationhood and spatial dominance.
5.2 Research Question 2
In answering my second research question, I found the Jewish narrative of nationbuilding and afforestation collides with Palestinian narratives of territorial belonging.
After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their villages. Those remaining within the borders of Israel were labeled “present refugees” and Palestinian property became “abandoned.” This language allowed the JNF and the State to legally construct a framework to allow the
JNF to purchase millions of dunams of abandoned property. Land purchased by the
JNF was, and continues to be, for Jewish settlement and leasing only. The JNF is under the jurisdiction of the Israel Lands Administration which owns over 90% of state land.
While the Arab population makes up 20% of Israel’s population today, they own less

than 4% of the land within its borders (Tal 2002). This legal framework maintains
Jewish ownership over land while discriminating against minority populations (Davis
52 and Lehn 1978, Yiftachel 1999 & 2003, Abu-Saad 2008).
Afforestation simultaneously produces a material and symbolic landscape, yet also conceals the past (Khalidi 1992, Leon 2005, Long 2008, Braverman 2009). Due to the scope and limitations of this thesis, 30 I chose to narrow my focus on one case by branching from my second research question into my third research question, “What is the socio-ecological relationship between Al Arakib, the JNF, and the GOD TV Forest?”
5.3 Research Question 3
The Negev Desert is a space where the afforestation project of the Jewish National Fund collides with other narratives of landscape and identity. The Negev is conceptualized as a frontier, “a physical space on which this identity can be territorially constructed”
(Yiftachel 1998, 9). The appropriation of land through legal mechanisms such labeling
mewat land as State land and forcing the Bedouin population into the seig, an enclosure zone, are two examples of land and population control that continue to shape the socioecological landscape of Israel.
The GOD TV forest is imbued with symbols, meaning, and power. The trees symbolize both Jewish and Christian narratives. For GOD TV and the Land of Promise
Foundation, the trees are planted in order to prepare the Holy Land for the second coming of Jesus Christ. For the Jewish narrative, the forest is funded by the JNF and
KKL and symbolizes Jewish redemption of the Negev. While the combination of Jewish
30 This is not to say there wouldn’t be a sizeable amount of research to include at this point, but it would involve another study on a larger scale.

53 and Christian identities come together to meet a common aim, the GOD TV Forest, it collides with the narrative and physical presence of the Al Arakib community.
Christians, Jews and the State can make a claim on the land, but the Bedouin population is not allowed to. The planting of trees in the Negev is literally uprooting a population.
Power also resides in the Bedouin community. Al Arakib continues to resist by rebuilding tents and planting olive trees. The Israel Lands Administration continues to demolish the new structures leaving the village with the option of the State solution to move to a planned town. Al Arakib refuses to accept this offer and instead builds, plants, and demonstrates.
Afforestation in the Negev is both a mechanism of control and oppression and a symbolic construction of Jewish and Christian ideology. From my own interpretation of my findings, I argue that the GOD TV Forest is a tool to diminish Arab control of the
Jewish landscape. By demolishing the houses of Al Arakib, the State is making a blatant statement that the Bedouin presence is unwanted. Reminiscent of Edward Said’s
Orientalism, the Bedouin population is classified and framed as “the other.” The domination of this “other” is also mirrored by taming the “wilderness” (1978). By controlling nature, in this sense both the Bedouin population and the desert, the State imposes a systematic ordering of social and environmental relations reflecting its goals.
The Jewish National Fund favors Jewish ownership and land allocation, which perpetuates the ongoing Judaization of the landscape. Judaization, or “territorial ethnonationalism” is the “territorial restructuring of land through settlement and expansion,” such as the Blueprint Negev Plan (Yiftachel 1998). In the Negev, this spatial restructuring began forcing the Bedouin population into the seig, enclosure zone, in
1953. This “ordering of space” is a mechanism of power exercised by the State (Shamir
2006, 252). The GOD TV Forest acts as a mechanism to control space that excludes the

Bedouin population and welcomes the Christian and Jewish narratives and material presence in the form of trees.
The State is carving the landscape in its image, both materially and ideologically. The
54
Judaization of the landscape is also an act of de-Arabization (Yiftachel 2003, 27). The
State dispossesses the Bedouin Arab population through ecological and social means.
Trees act as tools of power as the State plants them in the name of the JNF, GOD TV, and KKL - and for the Jewish nation. Does the State hope that by the next demolition that Al Arakib will give up, accept compensation, and move into a planned town? My findings reveal that this is unlikely, as Al Arakib has continued to rebuild after 20 demolitions.
In sum, the socio-ecological relationship between Al Arakib, the JNF, and the GOD TV forest is one of contestation and resistance. The forest is a contested landscape, which is
“the struggle between two groups with each group claiming ownership of the [same] area (Amit-Cohen 2009, 3). The tree becomes an icon that represents opposing values between two cultures (Amit-Cohen 2009, 6). While the JNF plants pine, eucalyptus, and cypress trees, Al Arakib plants olive trees in resistance. The formation of symbolic landscapes - in this case the GOD TV forest - performs a function to maintain national identity for both Christians and Jews. The JNF tree rallies the members of the Jewish nation, a symbol “where the nation as an ‘imagined community’ meets the state”
(Geisler 2005, xix, Anderson 1980). My findings show how the materialization of national ideology through afforestation clashes with other narratives of territorial belonging.
Chapter 6: Concluding Reflections

55
The ideology of "Jewish redemption" of the Palestinian landscape that emerged from the early 20 th century has continued to evolve during the past century to the present day and is now seeping into the Negev through the State apparatus. This relationship is inherently socio-ecological, imbued with symbols and power. The Negev is the State's final frontier within the 1948 borders for the materialization of Ben-Gurion's vision of
"making the desert bloom." Yet, the desert landscape and the ideology of the State collide with that of the Bedouin population. Al Arakib, the State, the JNF, and the GOD
TV Forest meet in a contested space where the Jewish narrative of afforestation collides with other narratives of landscape and identity. While trees are an expression of ideological redemption and longing, as well as Christian ideology in this case, trees are also being experienced by the Bedouin village as tools of population control, oppression, and spatial organization.
Relations of power planted a Jewish landscape while uprooting an Arab landscape.
While this process slowly began in the early 20 th century, the Negev is the latest example of this act of planting and uprooting natures. The cultural, political, and social struggle over territory in this study collides within the forest. This framework of uprooting and planting natures can be used in other spaces of contested landscape to provide a lens toward understanding socio-ecological processes. In metaphorical terms, my research shows “the forest through the trees.” While the individual trees represent the ideology and materiality of the Jewish nation and State, the larger picture is that of the forest as a mechanism that carries out the Judaization of the Arab landscape within
Israel.

REFERENCES
Abu-Saad, Ismael. 2008. “Spatial Transformation and Indigenous Resistance: The
Urbanization of the Palestinian Bedouin in Southern Israel.” American Behavioral
Scientist 51(12): 1713-1754.
Amir, Shaul and Orly Rechtman. 2006. “The Development of Forest Policy in Israel in the 20 th century: Implications for the Future.” Forest Policy and Economics 8: 35-51.
Amit-Cohen, Irit. 2009. “Contested Landscape and the Spirit of Place, the Case of Olive
Trees and Urban Neighborhood in Israel.” Journal for Geography 4(1): 147-162.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso.
Bar-Gal, Yoram. 2003. “The Blue Box and JNF Propaganda Maps, 1930-1947.” Israeli
Studies 8(1): 1-19
Ben Gurion, David. 1963. Israel: Years of Challenge. Tel Aviv: Massadah-P.E.C. Press Ltd.
Braverman, Irus. 2009. “Planting the Promised Landscape: Zionism, Nature, and
Resistance in Israel/Palestine.” Natural Resources Journal 49(2): 317-366.
Braverman, Irus. 2008. “‘The Tree is the Enemy Soldier’: A Sociolegal Making of War
Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank.” Law and Society Review 42 (3):449-482.
Christian Peacemaker Teams. 2010. “Palestine-Israel: Bedouin Village Demolished.”
CPTnet Digest July 29. Accessed March 28, 2011. http://www.cpt.org/cptnet/2010/
07/29/palestine-israel-bedouin-village-demolished.
Clifford, Nicholas and Gill Valentine. “Getting Started in Geographical Research: How this Book Can Help.” In Key Methods in Geography, edited by Nicholas Clifford and
Gill Valentine, 1-16. Los Angeles: Sage.
Cohen, Shaul Ephraim. 1993. The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for
Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
56

Cook, Jonathan. 2010. “God-TV helps Israel oust Bedouin.” Palestine Chronicle,
December 29. Accessed March 23, 2011.
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/ view_article_details.php?id=16517.
Davis, Uri and Walter Lehn. 1978. “And the Fund Still Lives, The Role of the Jewish
National Fund in the Determination of Israel’s Land Policies.” Journal of Palestine
Studies 7(4): 3-33.
Dukium. 2011. “Al Arakib: A Background Paper about the Demolitions.” Dukium
Website March 3. Accessed March 10, 2011. http://www.dukium.org/ modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=653.
Fields, Gary. 2010. “Landscaping Palestine: Reflections of Enclosure in a Historical
Mirror.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42: 63-82.
Foucault, Michel. 1997. “17 March 1976.” In Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the
College de France 1975-1976, 239-264. New York: Picador.
Geisler, Michael E. 2005. National Symbols, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National
Narrative. Lebanon, NH: Middlebury College Press.
Gordon, Neve. 2010. ““GOD-TV” evangelical Christian channel funds Israeli ethnic cleansing.” The Guardian, July 28. Accessed March 5, 2011. http://www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/28/ethnic-cleansing-israeli-negev.
Greider, Thomas and Lorraine Garkovich. 1994. “Landscapes: The Social Construction of Nature and the Environment.” Rural Sociology 59(1): 1-24.
Harvey, David. 1995. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge and
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
Hornborg, Alf. 2001. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology,
and the Environment. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
Hornborg, Alf, John R. McNeill and Juan Martinez-Alier, eds. 2007. Rethinking
Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change.
Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
57

Israel Lands Administration. 2007. “Bedouin Background.” Accessed April 12, 2011. http://www.mmi.gov.il/static/HanhalaPirsumim/Beduin_information.pdf.
Jewish National Fund. 2009. “JNF Blueprint Negev: 2009 Campaign Update.” Accessed
April 12, 2011. http://www.jnf.org/work-we-do/blueprint-negev/.
Khalidi, Walid. 1992. All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated
by Israel in 1948. The Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.
Khoury, Jack and Jonathan Lis. 2011. “Human rights groups petition High Court to overthrow 'Nakba Law'.” Ha’aretz, May 4. Accessed May 6, 2011. http:// www.haaretz.com/news/national/human-rights-groups-petition-high-court-tooverthrow-nakba-law-1.359802.
Lehn, Walter. 1974. “The Jewish National Fund.” Journal of Palestine Studies 3(4): 74-96.
Leon, Dan. 2005. “The Jewish National Fund: How the Land Was ‘Redeemed.’”
Palestine-Israel Journal 12(4) and 13(1): 115-123.
Long, Joanna C. 2008. “Rooting Diaspora, Reviving Nation: Zionist Landscapes of
Palestine-Israel.” Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers)
34: 61–77.
Longhurst, Robyn. 2003. “Semi-structured Interviews and Focus Groups.” In Key
Methods in Geography, edited by Nicholas J. Clifford and Gill Valentine, 117-132.
London: Sage Publications.
Lori, Aviva. 2010. “Reclaiming the Desert.” Ha’aretz, August 8. Accessed April 15, 2011. http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/reclaiming-the-desert-1.310558.
Madigem, Aziz Abu. 2011. Interview by author. March 24. Al Arakib, Israel.
Meir, Avinoam. 1988. “Nomads and the State: The Spatial Dynamics of Centrifugal and
Centripetal Forces among the Israeli Negev Bedouin.” Political Geography
Quarterly 7(3): 251-270).
Morris, Benny. 2008. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
58

Muir, Diana. 2008. “A Land without a People for a People without a Land.” Middle East
Quarterly 15 (Spring 2): 55-62.
Noach, Haia. 2010. “The Jewish National Fund’s Project of Dispossession.” Occupation
Magazine, March 21. Accessed February 21, 2011. http://www.haokets.org/ default.asp?PageID=10&ItemID=4729.
Noach, Haia. 2011a. Interview by author. March 10. Be’er Sheva, Israel.
Noach, Haia. 2011b. Interview by author. March 24. Be’er Sheva, Israel.
Pappe, Ilan. 1999. The Israel/Palestine Question. New York & London: Routledge.
Pappe, Ilan. 2004. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pappe, Ilan. 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: OneWorld.
Rinat, Zafrir. 2008. “JNF using trees to thwart Bedouin growth in Negev.” Haaretz,
December 8. Accessed March 10, 2011. http://www.haaretz.com/printedition/news/jnf-using-trees-to-thwart-bedouin-growth-in-negev-1.259038.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Vintage.
Said, Edward W. 2000. “Invention, Memory, and Place.” Critical Inquiry 26(2): 175-192.
Schnell, Izhak. 2001. “Introduction: Changing territorial concepts in Israel.” GeoJournal
53: 213-217.
Shamir, Ronen. 1996. “Suspended in Space: Bedouins Under the Law of Israel.” Law and
Society Review 30(2): 231-257.
Shilony, Zvi. 1998. Ideology and Settlement: The Jewish National Fund, 1897–1914.
Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University.
Shmueli, Deborah F. and Raseem Khamaisi. 2011. “Bedouin Communities in the
Negev.” Journal of the American Planning Association 77(2): 109-125.
Shva, Shlomo. 1991. One Day and 90 Years: The Story of the Jewish National Fund.
Jerusalem: The Jewish National Fund Department of Publications and Audio-
Visual Aids Information Division.
59

Silverstein, Richard. 2010. “Isaiah Weeps: Jewish National Fund, GOD-TV Erase Israeli
Bedouin Village to Bring Jesus’ Second Coming.” Tikkun Olam, December 6.
Accessed March 28, 2011. http://uruknet.info/?p=m72571&hd=&size=1&l=.
Soper, Kate. 1995. What is Nature? Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.
Stemple, John. 1998. “Viewpoint: A Brief Review of Afforestation Efforts in Israel.”
Rangelands 20(2): 15-18.
Tal, Alon. 2002. Pollution in the Promised Land. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Tal, Alon. 2007. “To Make a Desert Bloom: The Israeli Agricultural Adventure and the
Quest for Sustainability.” The Agricultural History Society: 228-257.
Tarabut. 2009. “Bulldozers, Trees & Villas: The Expulsion of the Bedouins Continues.”
Tarabut website, November 2. Accessed February 25, 2011. http://www.tarabut.info/ en/articles/article/arakib/.
Twain, Mark. 1869. The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims’ Progress. American
Publishing Company: Connecticut.
Wesley, David A. 2006. State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development
in Arab Towns in Israel. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Worster, Donald. 1994. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Second edition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yahel, Havatzelet. 2006. “Land Disputes between the Negev Bedouin and Israel.” Israel
Studies 2(2): 1-22.
Yiftachel, Oren. 1998. “Democracy or Ethnocracy? Territory and Settler Politics in
Israel/Palestine.” Middle East Report 207: 8-13.
Yiftachel, Oren. 1999. “Ethnocracy: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine.”
Constellations 6: 364-391.
60

Yiftachel, Oren. 2003. “Bedouin-Arabs and the Israeli Settler State: Land Policies and
Indigenous Resistance.” In The Future of Indigenous Peoples: Strategies for Survival
and Development, edited by D. Champagne and Isamel Abu-Saad, 21–47. UCLA,
Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center Publication.
Yiftachel, Oren. 2008. “(Un)Settling colonial presents.” Political Geography: 1-6.
Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. “The Zionist Reconstruction of the Past.” In Recovered Roots:
Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, 13-36. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press.
Zerubavel, Yael. 1996. “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics, and the
Archeology of Memory.” Israel Studies 1(Spring): 60-99.
APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Data sources for Figure 2: Number of Trees Planted by the JNF, 1948-1994
Year
1948
1951
1960
1968
1991
1995
Number of Trees Planted Source
5,000,000 Shva 1991, 106
15,000,000
48,000,000
95,000,000
190,000,000
205,000,000
Shva 1991, 106
Stemple 1998, 16
Shva 1991, 106
Shva 1991, 106
Stemple 1998, 16
Appendix 2: Dukium Background Paper about the Al Arakib Demolitions
The following background paper was produced by Dukium, the Negev Coexistence
Forum for Civil Equality detailing the demolitions of Al Arakib. The most recent update was March 3, 2011.
61

“The purpose of this background paper is to provide an accurate description of events in the unrecognized village of Al Arakib in the Negev-Naqab, the southern desert region of Israel since July 2010. These events mark a distinct turning point in the State of
Israel’s treatment of its Bedouin citizens and the future continues to look bleak.
The Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (the Forum) has supported the Al
Arakib community for almost a decade in their struggle for recognition of land rights and has formed a strong working relationship with the village’s leaders. Thus, members of the Forum are able to provide a first-hand account of the government’s actions. Al Arakib is located seven kilometres north of Be’er-Sheva. It is an unrecognized village and as such does not appear on any map, nor do any official signs mark its existence.
Heavy-handed response during the first demolition (July 27, 2010)
The assault on Al Arakib began during the early dawn of July 27, 2010 when an estimated 1,500 Israeli police, supported by helicopters and bulldozers, surrounded the village. Within three hours, the Israeli Land Authority (ILA) razed the entire village to the ground, leaving 300 people including women and children without shelter or water in the peak of summer in the desert. In total, 46 structures (including 30 homes) were completely destroyed along with sheep pens, chicken coups, orchards and olive groves—the source of the villagers’ livelihood. More than 1,000 trees were uprooted and discarded. Residents were given no time to recover their belongings from their homes and assets such as generators, cars and tractors were seized. All police were fully equipped with firearms, tear gas and stun grenades and hundreds of Special Riot
Police (many of whom concealed their identity) wore full protection gear. There were a number of physical encounters between the police and activists and residents although no one required medical attention.
62

Second and third demolitions (August 4 and 10, 2010)
Following the first demolition, many of the residents refused to leave the land that has been in their family for generations and began to immediately rebuild makeshift shelters despite police threats. Once again, during the second and third demolition
(which was carried just one day prior to the commencement of Ramadan), everything was destroyed by government bulldozers and buried. Building materials were also removed to deter the residents from rebuilding. Further, the road to the village was seriously damaged to impede access and the unofficial road sign to the village was removed. Water trucks and tanks were confiscated. The police were again dressed in full riot gear and supported by mounted police and water cannons to disperse the crowd. During the second incident many residents and activists (including members of the Forum) were severely beaten by the police and seven people were arrested. Four residents, among them the leader of the village, Sheik Sayach Al-Turi, were released under the condition that they do not return to Al Arakib for 10 days. He moved with others to live in the cemetery mosque.
Fourth demolition during Ramadan (August 17, 2010)
This demolition occurred during Ramadan, the holiest month for Muslims when the people of the village were fasting. Policemen and bulldozers arrived at dawn and began demolishing the makeshift shacks built by the villagers. This was an unprecedented act as the State of Israel has never before demolished houses belonging to its Muslim citizens during Ramadan. Historically, this was a period respected by the authorities.
As the demolition took place during an extreme heat wave, many of the residents were forced to break the fast. A government spokesperson declared on August 23 on national news that the attacks on the village would continue once Ramadan concluded.
This did not deter the residents from remaining on their lands and once again rebuilding.
63

Fifth demolition (September 12, 2010)
This demolition immediately followed the three-day Muslim festival Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Dozens of policemen descended again on the village shortly before dawn with bulldozers to destroy the tents and all other structures in the village.
Sixth demolition (October 13, 2010)
During this demolition, Haia Noach, Director of the Forum, was violently assaulted by police and arrested upon requesting to see the court order authorising the demolition of the village. Ms Noach was ordered not to enter the village for a period of 10 days. The
Forum suspects that this demolition was carefully timed to take place following the
Jewish National Fund (JNF) conference in Atlanta, US, to minimise public scrutiny. The conference concluded just one day before the demolition.
Seventh demolition (November 22, 2010)
Following the week-long Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha, Al Arakib was demolished. Four bulldozers arrived with officials from the ILA and police officers equipped with riot gear at dawn to destroy 30 temporary structures. Again, no demolition or eviction order was presented to the residents. Additionally, an estimated
1,600 olive trees located 2km south from the village were uprooted. Many of the residents moved their few possessions to the village cemetery which has not been subjected to the demolitions and remained there until the forces departed.
Eighth demolition (December 23, 2010)
This demolition was carried out by dozens of police and bulldozers just one day before the beginning of a two-week vacation for the children.
64

Ninth and tenth demolitions (January 16 and 17, 2011)
Just before 9am on January 16, the ILA’s bulldozers and police returned to Al Arakib to once again level it to the ground. These demolitions, however, were different to those that preceded them. In order to cleanse the land of any indication that people once lived there, everything was removed to a nearby municipal dump. No building materials or personal items whatsoever remained for the residents to salvage in order to rebuild the village, nor were families given the opportunity to rescue their belongings.
Additionally, the police resorted to the use of tear gas and rubber bullets for the first time which were aimed directly at the residents. Leading Israeli newspaper, Ynet, incorrectly reported that pepper spray was used rather than tear gas and that the bullets fired at the residents were paint balls. Five people were hospitalised as a result including two 13 year old children. The following day, January 17, the ILA and police returned again to finish clearing away the rubble and to destroy the temporary structures that had been erected overnight (with new, purchased materials) to protect the families from the wintry desert conditions. During the day, residents and activists were concentrated into Al Arakib's cemetery. Police prevented anyone from leaving this location and confiscated identification documents. The road into Al Arakib was also closed to prevent further supporters from arriving throughout the day. On the same day, Ms Noach, Mumtaz Khateeb (Forum employee) and a further 10 eight residents and activists were arrested. They were held overnight at ”Ohaley Keidar” detention prison and not released until the afternoon or late evening the following day. Four were released with no charge while the other four (three residents and Ms. Noach) were charged with disobeying a court order against rebuilding in the village (although no one had any knowledge of this order) and holding real estate. One resident was also charged also for attacking a police officer. Over the course of these two days, the area was completely flatten by bulldozers and heavy earth moving machinery to remove any
65

trace of the village and a new road for the JNF's forestation activists was prepared. The
Forum has long held the view that the JNF’s forestation activities are behind the demolitions. This was recently confirmed by the Ynet article of January 16, 2011 (in
Hebrew). The ILA Development Director Shlomo Tsizer is quoted as saying, "We are making an effort to find a final solution to what is happening in Al Arakib,” and that the area is being prepared for planting which directly implicates the JNF in the ongoing attacks on Al Arakib.
Eleventh and twelfth demolitions (January 31 and February 1, 2011)
On January 18, the Be'er-Sheva District Court issued a temporary injunction stopping all further work by the ILA and the JNF in Al Arakib. On January 23, Judge Nechama
Netzer “recommended” to the JNF not to “rush” the afforestation of Al-Arakib, but failed to order the Israeli Government, the ILA and the JNF to stop their efforts to wipe out the village. The judge also awarded 10,000 NIS to the JNF in legal costs.
Predictably the demolitions recommenced on January 31. Shacks built that night were again demolished the next day and JNF continued to prepare the ground for planting.
Thirteenth to sixteenth demolitions (February 7 to 10, 2011)
A period of poor weather gave the residents a brief reprieve before four consecutive days of demolitions. On February 8, a total of 12 temporary structures which had been built the night before were demolished. Several trucks also returned to continue removing rubble. For the first time on February 9, we witnessed bulldozers clearly marked as belonging to the JNF destroying tents that had been erected overnight by the residents. The JNF can no longer claim to have no involvement in the repeated destruction of Al Arakib. On February 10, there were violent clashes between the residents and the police who responded with a heavy hand and resorted to the use of tear gas, pepper spray and sponge tipped bullets despite the fact that there were
66

women and children in the crowd. Several residents were hurt and taken by ambulances to Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva, however, many refused to go. Three residents (including a youth) and three activists were also arrested in the scuffle. The minor and three activists were released at midnight, however, the two residents were detained until their hearing on February 11. They were held until February 13 and another hearing on February 14. All three activists were ordered not to enter the village for two weeks. As a result of this week of demolitions, the place where the village formerly stood is now covered with terraces ready for planting and a number of dams.
Seventeenth and eighteenth demolitions (February 16 and 17, 2011)
On February 16 and 17, the JNF, ILA and Yassam riot police returned to Al Arakib.
After a brief few days of relative peace in the village, the residents had erected approximately 15 temporary wooden structures in between the terraces of earth that had been created by the JNF. These were again demolished by the ILA's bulldozers while the residents, including the children who had not yet left for school, were detained in the cemetery by police. The JNF then continued its work preparing the ground, simply shoving the wreckage to the side. On February 16, even in the face of peaceful resistance, a variety of ammunition (including what is suspected to be FN303 bullets) was used by the Yassam police force on the residents and activists. An 11 year old boy and his grandfather were hospitalized as a result of shock and a fall respectively. Others who were injured from bullets refused to go to Soroka Hospital out of fear that they would either be arrested or not allowed to return to Al Arakib. One man visiting from Rahat was arrested. The following morning, the JNF began earlier than usual to continue its work preparing the ground around the cemetery in Al Arakib under the heavy protection of about 40 Yassam police officers. At around 11 am, approximately 60 residents from the neighbouring Bedouin township, Rahat, attempted to enter Al Arakib to show their solidarity with the residents and pray with them,
67

however, were refused entry by the police. While trying to negotiate with the police at the turn-off to the village from Route 40 (the main road into Be'er Sheva), the police began to shoot at the group (that included women and children) with spongetipped bullets. Dr. Awad Abu-Freich, a well-known resident and spokesperson of Al
Arakib, and five others from Rahat were arrested. A number of charges were laid against Dr Awad including the serious charge of “incitement to violence or terror”.
Current situation and fears about what the future holds
The demolition on July 27, 2010 was the largest mass demolition that has ever occurred in the Negev-Naqab. In the face of increasing hostility towards the Bedouin population, there is now great fear among residents of other unrecognized Bedouin villages in the
Negev-Naqab that the events being witnessed in Al Arakib mark the beginning of brutal and unrelenting campaign to displace them from their ancestral lands. There is speculation that this heavy handed response is a trial run for other villages. In the government’s attempt to compel Bedouins to relocate to government-planned towns
(which suffer from high unemployment and crime rates and a severe housing shortage), it is feared that thousands of other Bedouins will experience the same fate. For months on end, many of the residents, including dozens of children, have been living in the village’s cemetery in temporary shacks covered by tarpaulins. The demolition orders on which the government is relying to level Al Arakib do not extend to the cemetery and thus this is viewed as a somewhat of a safe haven. The cemetery’s mosque remains the only structure left standing and most of the social life now centres around the mosque.
Some of the residents have returned to their tents in the village and continue to live there.
The government’s defence
68

The government has defended its actions by saying that the villagers lost their case before the courts according to Public Land Law (Expulsion of Invaders) of 1981 and that they must evacuate and remove all possessions including the structures which were illegally built. However, the residents of Al Arakib, like the other 45 unrecognized villages scattered across the Negev-Naqab, have no hope of receiving building permits.
As their villages are considered illegal by the government and lack development plans, they have no option but to resort to illegal construction. The Forum believes that the government’s actions against the residents of Al Arakib are connected with a statement by Prime Minister Netanyahu during a cabinet meeting held the day before the first demolition. Netanyahu sounded a warning about "a situation in which a demand for national rights will be made from some quarters inside Israel, for example in the Negev, should the area be left without a Jewish majority. Such things happened in the Balkans, and it is a real threat." The Bedouin citizens of Israel have been branded as ‘a real threat’ in order to legitimize the expulsion of Israel's Bedouin citizens from the Negev and to
‘Judaize’ the region” (2011).
Appendix 3: Explanation of 1921 Mewat Land Ordinance
Until 1969, Israel used mewat land codes from the Ottoman Period. The Ottoman Land
Code of 1858 required the registration of arable lands within five legal categories: mulk, land held in absolute freehold; miri, state or private lands; and mewat, unused or uncultivated lands, in addition to mauqufa and metruka (Wesley 2006, Shmueli and
Khamaisi 2011). Land codes were seen as a way to collect taxes, while still allowing the resident population “access to and control of the land for [their] own use” (Wesley 2006,
116). In 1921, the British enacted the Mewat Land Ordinance, which made it illegal to claim mewat lands without permission. In 1969, all mewat lands were registered “as state property unless a formal legal title could be produced by a claimant” (Shamir
69

1996, 237). Compared to the Ottoman system, where the “owners occupying it could do with it what they please,” the new property laws under the State (as the new sovereign ruler) severed the “connection between the local Arab population and the land they occupied and cultivated” (Wesley 2006, 116). The category of miri shifted from ownership without restriction to sole state sovereignty over miri lands. Since claimants had to prove possession prior to the British Ordinance of 1921, it became easy for the
State to gain title to mewat lands at the expense of Arab possessors (Wesley 2006).
Appendix 4: GOD TV Statement/Response to Al Arakib
The following statement is a response produced by GOD TV on their website under the heading “Trees in the Negev.”
“It has come to our attention that reports have been posted on the Internet. These reports mislead readers to believe that GOD TV may be responsible for displacement of
Bedouin people in the Negev Desert in Israel. These claims are false. Since 2008, GOD
TV has been committed to sponsoring trees to be planted throughout the nation of
Israel in a humanitarian and eco-friendly effort to revitalize desert land, making it more habitable for ALL people, including Jews, Arabs and the Bedouins. For Christians around the world it is also an apostolic, prophetic act to prepare the Holy Land in expectancy of the Messiah showing their commitment to the Land of Israel to and all its people, and to make the deserts liveable once more.
To date, over 500,000 sapling trees, sponsored by GOD TV, have been planted in designated planting sites around Israel, including in the Negev Desert. This is not a political act, and therefore we do not want to become involved in political debate. As such, we cannot comment on any ongoing legal proceedings concerning the Israeli
70

Government and the land. What we can say is that the Israeli Government is responsible for the development of the Land of Israel in terms of any new infrastructure, including the planting of forests as any government would be. As a democracy, the Government adheres to a full democratic process, making decisions that affect its citizens including Jewish, Arabic and Bedouin communities. What the
Government decides becomes law including what rights/possibilities are available to develop particular areas of land. Therefore, no organisation can plant trees wherever they please in Israel, on any land belonging to any Beduouin, Jewish or Arab community. Such decisions are taken by the Government of Israel, according to the laws of the country. As previously stated, neither the Jewish National Fund (JNF) nor
GOD TV is involved in the decision as to where trees can be planted in Israel or in the actual planting of the trees.
The Bible tells us in Isaiah 51:3 that the LORD will make Israel’s “deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the LORD. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of singing.” That is our heart at GOD TV - planting trees in
Israel to revitalize desert land and make it more habitable for ALL people, including the
Bedouins” (no date provided).
Appendix 5: Jewish National Fund Statement/Response to Al Arakib
The following statement is the Jewish National Fund’s response to Al Arakib.
“There has been a lot of noise and misinformation of late on the Bedouin in the Negev and in particular the Bedouin in Al Arakib. Unfortunately, in many cases – in blogs, articles, photos and even videos – authors do not care about the facts. They take license to make the points they want to and ignore much truth. We understand that this is a
71

complicated issue that goes back in time and involves many players. However, it is important to remember that JNF-KKL is not a part of the discussion relating to the issue of Negev land rights. JNF-KKL has nothing to do with determining whether a village –
Jewish, Bedouin or otherwise – is legal or illegal; that is determined by the Israeli government.
Israel is a lawful society and land ownership disputes go through its judicial system. In certain cases the Bedouin have won; in others, the courts have not decided in their favor. In either instance, the law must be obeyed. When people build illegally on public lands, the government has a legal right to intervene, just as an individual would not be allowed to pitch a tent in Central Park and call it home. The same arm of the law removes Jews from the West Bank, and whether one agrees with this policy or not, it is the law. When Gaza was evacuated there were many who disagreed with the government’s actions, but it was the law and it was carried out.
JNF-KKL, in its role as the Israeli forestation organization, executes the policy of the
State of Israel and its planning institutions in all areas related to forestation. The government defines policy and budgets and provides the necessary permits and authorizations for forestation. JNF-KKL does not decide where a forest should be planted, but rather follows Israel’s National Master Plan for Afforestation (NMP22).
Forestation does not alter the zoning designation of the land. JNF wishes to improve the lives of the Bedouin in the Negev and we are very proud of the work we do that benefits this population. Nothing exemplifies that better than our partnership with the
Bedouin on Project Wadi Attir. Watch the video here” (no date provided).
72