By Mohamed El Mokhtar

Today, the pines of oblivion that were meant to bury the Nakba are themselves ablaze. What burns is not only forest, but the illusion of a landscape born without violence.

More than 700,000 olive and citrus trees have been destroyed by Israeli forces. “It is a pure act of vandalism,” said Ronnie Kasrils, then South Africa’s Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, in a 2002 speech in London. “It is appalling, it is a disgrace!” Kasrils was not merely condemning deforestation — he was identifying a strategy of domination disguised as ecology.

The Jerusalem Forest was the idea of Yossef Weitz, a key Zionist official and architect of land policy. In 1956, he complained to the mayor of Jerusalem about the “desolate” appearance of the hills west of the city. Eight years earlier, those very hills had been alive with homes and cultivated fields belonging to Palestinian villages — full of life, voices, and memory.

In 1967, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) began planting over 4,500 dunams with a million trees, which, according to its website, would “encircle Jerusalem with a green mountain.” That forest now covers the ruins of numerous Palestinian villages, including Deir Yassin.

On its official website, the JNF promises visitors “unique sites and unforgettable experiences.” One of its most celebrated attractions is Sataf, a destroyed Palestinian village. The main appeal of the site, according to the JNF, is its reconstruction of “ancient” (kadoum) agriculture.

The JNF blended the presence of ancient terraces (built by Palestinian villagers only one or two generations earlier) and several preserved Palestinian buildings to coin a new concept: the boustanof — from bustan (orchard) and nof (Hebrew for panorama) — which might translate to something like “orchard-viewpoint.”

These boustanof terraces overlook bucolic landscapes. They are popular among Jerusalem’s young professionals and intellectuals, who come to experience ancient farming methods on plots that yield “biblical” fruits and vegetables. Needless to say, the plots, the methods, and the land itself are Palestinian.

There has always been in Israel a flourishing literature dedicated to internal tourism — where environmental consciousness, Zionist ideology, and historical erasure coexist seamlessly. In this way, the JNF “ecologizes” the crimes of 1948, allowing Israel to tell one story while erasing another. “Those who win a war have both the spoils and the version of events,” wrote Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi.

Today, the pines of oblivion that were meant to bury the Nakba are themselves ablaze. What burns is not only forest, but the illusion of a landscape born without violence. A hot spring wind fans the flames and revives the buried memory. The trees were silent. But the earth speaks.

These forests are not ancient. They did not rise from the land — they were laid upon it, like a shroud. They are political instruments, acts of concealment covering a destroyed world. Beneath the burning pines lie the ruins of more than 500 Palestinian villages razed after the 1948 expulsion of over 750,000 people. This was not merely ethnic cleansing — it was cartographic violence.

At its birth, the Israeli state seized over 250,000 acres of land declared “abandoned” — a legal fiction created by the very forces that expelled its owners. This figure would rise to more than 600,000 acres, much of which was transferred to the Jewish National Fund — not for restitution, but for redesign. Not to return the land, but to rename it.

Founded in 1901, the JNF presents itself abroad as a charitable organization. But historically, it served as the land acquisition arm of the Zionist movement. Through the iconic blue boxes distributed in synagogues and diaspora homes, it raised funds to buy and enclose land — not to protect nature, but to transform ownership. These boxes became almost sacred, liturgical objects. Kamala Harris, in her campaign speech before an applauding AIPAC audience, recalled them with pride — as if the memory of a donation could justify the disappearance of a people.

Before 1948, less than 4% of historical Palestine had been legally acquired by Zionist institutions. The rest was taken through mass dispossession. Green became a weapon. The slogan said: “making the desert bloom.” But the land was never barren — it was emptied. Reforestation served as camouflage, covering ruins, erasing evidence, turning destruction into leisure. The American Independence Park, built atop the ruins of seven Palestinian villages, is emblematic. The tree chosen — the European pine — betrayed the intention: not to root in Palestine, but to Europeanize it. To replace a Levantine geography with a Northern fantasy.

This artificial landscape — an early form of greenwashing — was a political aesthetic. Life used to cloak absence. Trees planted not to remember, but to forget. Not to offer shade, but to bury voices. Under glossy donation campaigns and celebrity endorsements — from Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor to Kamala Harris — lay a slow, methodical, and patient expropriation.

Today, the fire exposes what trees were planted to obscure. Pines burn poorly, but they still burn. And what is consumed is not only a forest — but the mask of a narrative. A history of substitution, of silenced memory, of systematic forgetting.

Behind each park, each forest, each trail across these smoldering hills, there lies an absence. A promise broken. An injustice still unfolding. The flames around Jerusalem remind us — perhaps unintentionally — that no people can be uprooted with impunity. That the land, sooner or later, will speak again.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.