Diana Kruzman writes:

In late April of last year, Israeli officials left three notices informing Bassem Mansour, a farmer from the Palestinian community of Deir Istiya in the northern West Bank, that three of his citrus tree plots were violating the boundaries of Wadi Qana, a protected nature reserve. The notices ordered Mansour to remove the saplings immediately, or he would be subject to “arrest, prosecution, and penalties.” Mansour, like many other Palestinian farmers in the area, was forced to dig up his saplings. Six months later and just a few kilometers away from Mansour’s citrus plots, the Israeli outpost El Matan celebrated its official incorporation as a neighborhood of the larger settlement of Karnei Shomron. When El Matan was founded in 2000, the settler outpost fell within the boundaries of the reserve, in violation of Israeli law, but in 2014, the Israeli government quietly redrew Wadi Qana’s boundaries to exclude the 25-acre parcel of land containing the outpost. And although El Matan regularly releases untreated sewage into the protected valley below, Israel’s environmental protection minister attended the incorporation ceremony, where she emphasized its importance for Jewish expansion in the area. “Our presence in the field will . . . determine the security of the entire State of Israel,” she said at the event.

Israel’s use of land reserves is one element of what is often termed “green” or “eco” Zionism, which posits that caring for the environment is central to maintaining the territory as Jewish. On paper, the purpose of Israel’s nature reserves is to protect native plants and wildlife, both within the country’s 1948 boundaries and in the occupied West Bank. Following a 1970 military order granting the army the authority to set aside land in the West Bank for parks or conservation, the army appointed the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA), a governmental organization under the Ministry of Environmental Protection, to administer the parks in Area C, which makes up most of the West Bank, on its behalf. The INPA’s stated mission is to “preserve and manage the special look of typical landscapes throughout the country for the benefit of all inhabitants,” and Israel has expanded the boundaries of more than a dozen reserves in the West Bank in the last five years, including Wadi Qana, in service of this ostensible goal.

Green Zionism thus allows the State of Israel to cloak its occupation of territory and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the liberal language of environmentalism, pointing to tree-planting initiatives and nature reserves as proof of Israel’s necessary role stewarding the land. Experts and Palestinian rights groups have long claimed that these environmental “protections” are a cover used to justify the eviction of Palestinians from their homes, while illegal Israeli settlements are allowed to proliferate. Wadi Qana, for example, is surrounded by seven such settlements. As Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, of the Israeli planning rights organization Bimkom, put it to me, Israeli authorities’ main goal in creating nature reserves is “to delimit the development of Palestinians and to prevent access for shepherds and their herds . . . They’re using [environmental] planning as a tool to support taking over more land.” [Continue reading…]