Danielle Amy

The Green Line

Colonial Trees

With more than 240 million planted trees, the state of Israel is one of the few countries in the world that has more trees now than it had a century ago. In 1901 the region had only 3.500 acres of forest, by 2019 more than 250,000 acres had been planted by The Jewish National Fund.

The JNF a nonprofit organization, which was initially founded to acquire land from locals for Jewish resettlement, eventually grew into a dominant force of nature management.

The planted forest in Israel has had a significant role in transforming the geographical and ecological terrain in the region yet that wasn’t the only role it played. Afforestation, mainly done by the JNF had also replaced the local population of the region, contributing to the growing rooted division of two cultures.

The Green Line is a visual project about a story of contradictions. One can explore a forest yet the question is what is perceived.

This project was supported by The New York Times and a scientific chapter has been published in National Geographic.

In 2019 Yale Environment 360 published an article questioning the largest afforestation project in Israel. Planted in the desert, Yatir forest, was created from a vision of one man.

Yosef Weitz, one of the longest-standing directors of the JNF, was commonly known as the father of forests yet, he holds another less public name, the father of the Arab transfer.

During the war in 1948, known for Israelis as the “Independence war” and for Palestinians as “The Nakba”, vast amounts of land were captured by the newly founded Israeli state. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were either ethnically cleansed, deserted or captured, thus creating the Green Line or 1949 Armistice border.

After 1948 the JNF began its most significant mission, maintain the conquered land, and so came Weitz’s idea. Grounded in Jewish tradition the Green Line received another meaning, green forest replaced the native land and all its inhabitants.

More than two-thirds of the JNF forests sit on once Palestinian villages. With a colonial gaze, the land was transformed from low-cut desert vegetation, villages with thousands of agricultural acres to foreign single-species forests mainly of Pine and Cypress since they grew fast and adapted to the geography.

These forests had ecological and societal consequences.

In a time where carbon dioxide levels are peaking at their highest than any point in the past 800,000 years and the region has been waging an unprecedented war it is important to hold value for these growing forests while recognize the actions of our ancestors.

And with that recognition hold ourselves accountable to see clearly on which ground we stand on today so we can understand how we got to the current state and decide what do we nourish next.