This is the second of two reports on the work of Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, who is an authority—and maybe the authority—on the West Bank environment and the environmental consequences of settler colonialism. Qumsiyeh is the founder and director of the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at the University of Bethlehem.
Part 1 of this series can be found here.
—C.M.
6 MARCH—The Jewish state’s creation was accompanied by a profoundly destructive transformation of the historic land of Palestine, including the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Calamitous damage to watersheds, a topic I took up in Part 1 of this report, was among the graver consequences of what amounts to another aspect of the catastrophe that has befallen Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist regime.
As Professor Qumsiyeh and I conversed, he commented on three additional areas of environmental degradation: harmful impacts to plant and animal species, including species extinction; damage to fragile ecosystems caused by a cynical project of planting non-native trees, and the introduction of invasive species.
I could hear in Dr. Qumsiyeh’s voice and all that he said the love he holds for the land of Palestine. Although a respected scholar with hundreds of published papers to his credit, there is dirt beneath the professor’s nails—metaphorically, at least, if not actually.
Indeed, the Institute’s grounds are a living laboratory where experiments in hydroponic gardening coexist with a garden of endangered indigenous orchids. A man-made pond provides habitat for local and migrating birds. One corner of the property is dedicated to animal rehabilitation for injured birds and small mammals. Honey is harvested from well-tended bee hives and sold to raise money to support the Institute. Olives are harvested from the many trees on site and turned into oil for the same purpose.
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When Qumsiyeh spoke about species extinction, he used the tragic example of Lake Hula. The drainage of Lake Hula and surrounding wetlands in the 1950s offers a stark illustration of the decimation of wildlife—indigenous and migratory—that began when the first Jewish immigrants arrived in the last decades of the 19th century and accelerated after the founding of Israel in May 1948.
The Zionist project was to turn these wetlands—located in the northeastern corner of Palestine and encompassing approximately 177 square kilometers—into the fertile farmland Israelis never cease boasting of. In truth, the drainage and conversion operation, carried out by the Jewish National Fund from 1951 to 1958, is one of the better documented casualties of colonial exterminatory policies.
Dr. Qumsiyeh:
They called the project “draining the swamps.” Twelve Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed. A total of 48 villages used to live off the wetlands fishing and making items with reeds—mats and baskets, fishing rafts and dwellings. At least 219 species disappeared, including plant and animal life, some of them becoming extinct.
Lake Hula, directly north of Lake Tiberias and through which the Jordan River used to flow, was a vast and ecologically diverse wetland, home to a rich variety of indigenous animal and plant species found nowhere else. Numerous fauna became extinct when the area was drained, including several fish varieties unique to Lake Hula. A fish called the Galilean Stone Loach and another called the Hula bream were completely extirpated—made extinct locally. The Stone Loach can still be found in Lake Tiberias, but the Hula bream no longer exists in Palestine.
The lake and wetlands were also an important stopover and feeding ground for birds migrating from Africa to Europe, including thousands of pelicans, storks, herons, cranes, and various birds of prey. This marshy land, which Zionist settlers had no understanding of or appreciation for, served as a natural filtering and purification system for the river as it continued downstream.
Although the importance of wetland ecosystems was not well known at the time—wetland ecology emerged as a distinct field of study in the 1970s—many people, Zionist and non-Zionist, raised an alarm in advance of the project, warning that the peat soil beneath the marshes would not be usefully fertile. The Israelis were sensitive to none of this as they single-mindedly proceeded.
The Zionist state diverted the Jordan River above Lake Hula, while below it they created drainage canals and dredged and widened the river. In this way they drained the entire lake and surrounding ecosystem to create settlements and farmland. An estimated 10,000 to 12,000 Palestinians—conservative figures—were violently expelled from their villages and lands. They were dispersed into neighboring countries or displaced within their own—all of them becoming refugees.
The disaster arriving Jews brought upon the West Bank ecosystem was soon enough evident. The exposed peat, as predicted, proved to be poor soil for agricultural purposes. Worse: As the peat dried it began spontaneously to combust. Fires smoldered underground for days, giving rise to vast plumes of smoke and ash that settled over the region. The burned and blackened soil was then blown away by high winds, causing dust storms that damaged agricultural crops and clogged the drainage canals.
The environmental damage was so great that Israel had to re-flood part of the former lakebed to restore some of the wetlands. It was an effort for which they received recognition in the mainstream U.S. and Israeli press. This, the reversal of a disaster for which they alone were responsible, was portrayed as an admirable project of environmental restoration. Much in the same way, the original drainage of the wetlands was praised as an example of Israeli ingenuity.
Never is there a mention of the original Arab inhabitants cleansed from the land. I read this but one way: It is a typical example of the West’s limitless indulgence of the Zionist regime. Is it not another dimension, rarely considered, of the Western powers’ “unconditional support” of the Jewish project? I see no other way to interpret the crude distortions we find in the official version of the events Dr. Qumsiyeh discussed with me.
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From their first arrival in Palestine, well before the creation of Israel, Zionists worked feverishly to Europeanize the Holy Land and thereby erase all evidence of the Arab presence. They did this in part by creating new forests using the European pine tree, a process known as afforestation.
Israel used afforestation and the accompanying destruction of native forests as a weapon of settler colonialism to advance land theft and the erasure of Palestinians. Along with the diversion of water resources, afforestation was one aspect of the greater Zionist project to “make the desert bloom.”
Qumsiyeh, in full professor mode, explained the process as I hunched over my journal and scribbled notes:
Large-scale transformation and destruction of the land of Palestine began in the 1920s, when European immigrants began uprooting trees and destroying the landscape. They replaced indigenous trees with the European pine tree. This species was used because it grows quickly and gives a European look to the land. It’s also a monoculture and makes the replacement of indigenous forests cheap and easy.
Between the 1920s through the ’60s, Zionists uprooted domestic forests, destroying 10 million to 20 million indigenous trees, domestic and wild. These included olive, fig, almond, pistachio, carob, hawthorn, and oak trees, among others. The European pine replaced a polyculture with a monoculture, eradicating species diversity.
Pine trees shed needles, making the ground acidic and preventing the establishment of undergrowth. The European pine also requires more water than native trees. It is susceptible to disease and to fires during the dry season. As a consequence, we’ve seen large wildfires in recent years that were previously unknown.
In my own travels through the West bank I saw large stands of European pines in the governorates of Hebron and Bethlehem, many of them turning brown from disease. Even when green, these imported forests appear strangely quiet and dead. Nothing else appears to grow in them. Indeed, I saw no visible undergrowth. As already suggested, the European pine has played a significant role in destroying biodiversity in Palestine. Native plants can’t grow in the acidic soil and shade; the imported tree is unable to provide habitat for indigenous animals and insects.
These scraggly and diseased stands of European pines aren’t forests in any meaningful sense. They look precisely like what they are: large expanses of strange and alien plantings standing alone and isolated in an open and arid land. Much has been written about the disaster created by the introduction of the European pine and the Zionist project of transforming the desert into a garden while, at the same time, cynically and strategically erasing the presence of Palestinians from the land.
On my return from the West Bank late last autumn I began conducting further research on the environmental questions I discussed with Dr. Qumsiyeh. In time I came to work by Max Blumenthal, the noted journalist, published as far back as 2011. Here is an extract from Chapter 5 of a report titled, Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund's Environmental Cover Up:
The pine trees themselves were instruments of concealment, strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund on the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the Zionist militias evacuated and destroyed in 1948. With forests sprouting up where towns once stood, those who had been expelled would have nothing to come back to. Meanwhile, to outsiders beholding the strangely Alpine landscape of northern Israel for the first time, it seemed as though the Palestinians had never existed. And that was exactly the impression the JNF intended to create. The practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists referred to as “redeeming the land” was in fact the ultimate form of greenwashing.
Blumenthal’s work raised a reality one confronts from time to time in the Global South. Whenever a dominant power dedicates itself to the removal of a population, destroying the environment—the natural environment, the built environment—it is a way of also destroying memory, and so, over time, identity, the coherence and strength of the local population. This is the very essence of the Zionist project in the Occupied Territories.
To this day, the J.N.F. continues to promote tree planting in Occupied Palestine. The organization, which boasts of having planted more than 260 million trees, is deeply implicated in much of the environmental destruction caused by Zionist settler colonialism. The devastating 2010 Carmel Forest fire—which occurred on Mount Carmel in the northwestern area of historic Palestine, and in which 44 people were killed—destroyed more than 12,000 acres of pine forests, trees planted by the J.N.F.
In sum, the creation and maintenance of a Jewish state has been an unceasing environmental disaster as well as a human rights disaster. There are features of this calamity one is very unlikely to see unless one draws close and speaks to those who have witnessed various of these developments—those whose lives these calamities have changed. The presence of the myna bird in the Occupied Territories is one such case.
In the 1990s Israel introduced the myna bird into Palestine, so precipitating yet another environmental disaster. The bird, popular for its melodious singing and its ability to mimic human speech, is commonly kept in cages for amusement and entertainment. But the common myna is among the world’s worst and most invasive species.
Here Professor Qumsiyeh describes the stark consequences of colonial ignorance and folly:
In the 1990s, myna birds were kept in a small park near Jaffa. They either escaped from their cages or were released. Since then they have destroyed the bird fauna in Palestine and in areas of Lebanon, Jordan, and the Golan Heights. Myna birds are unusually aggressive and mean. They kill other birds and destroy their eggs. They eat much of the available food. Other birds can’t compete with them.
The myna is known to cause significant damage to fruit as it ripens, so threatening important agricultural crops such as grapes, dates, and mangoes. How oddly the myna mimics, in its way, the presence of Zionists altogether, who frequently destroy the orchards and vineyards of indigenous Palestinians.
Zionism is a “mentality of destruction,” Qumsiyeh told me. And he closed our conversation by speaking briefly about the environmental damage caused by the Israeli Army.
Creating and sustaining a Jewish supremacist homeland in an historically Arab country has, from the beginning, required force and the creation of an immense military state. The environmental impact of Israel’s army and the almost ceaseless warfare it engages in are also immense.
Here, again, is Qumsiyeh:
Colonization requires violence—violence and armies—and armies are the biggest destroyers of the environment. The burning of jet fuel from the Israeli bombing raids over Gaza contributes more greenhouses gases than many countries produce in a whole year.
We know many of the bombs being used in Gaza contain depleted uranium. These are supplied by the United States, which has admitted to the use of depleted uranium in these weapons in other contexts. Studies done in Iraq confirm high incidents of birth defects caused by exposure to the depleted uranium in the weapons that were used by the United States during and after its 2003 invasion.
All that I report here, and in Part 1 of this series, are the consequences—Qumsiyeh would likely say “predictable consequences”—of European settler colonialism in Palestine.
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Indigenous Palestinians co-evolved with the land and environment in the course of millennia. Zionists settlers didn’t have millennia. Their project was to seize land as quickly as possible and make a new home where they had none and had no right to one. And so they imposed upon the land of Palestine an “imagined reality”—this was the term Qumsiyeh used—based upon what they were familiar with and had left behind in their countries of origin.
Settler colonialism is always driven by an imagined reality in which the very land is made to conform to a fantasy. The creation of artificial European pine forests to make the land look something like Switzerland is a perfect expression of an imagined reality. As was the draining of Lake Hula.
But one imagined reality can be replaced with another. Let us imagine another reality in the land of Palestine. Let’s call it a post–Zionist reality—a reality based on international law, as imagined in Qumsiyeh’s book Sharing the Land of Canaan (Pluto, 2004).
In this new reality, the original marshy ecosystem of Lake Hula is reestablished, European pine forests are replaced with indigenous flora, native forests and species flourish, Jews, Christians, and Arabs again live side-by-side as equals, as they once did, and Palestinian communities are restored in “the 48 lands.”
Thanks, Cara. Another subtle, informative and hard-hitting piece.
Outstanding article! If only it wasn’t true!