Theodor Herzl, the co-founder of the Zionist movement, which also established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1901, had a clear goal in mind – to see Palestine without Palestinians. The ultimate goal of establishing JNF was to acquire lands in Ottoman Palestine to establish Jewish settlements.

Land acquisition in Palestine by all possible means and in different forms has continued in the years since then. From massacres to afforestation, and to establishing beach resorts on the ruins of Palestinian villages, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has never stopped.

JNF dedicates February 5 of each year as a day to donate for the planting of trees in Israel – an operation that it promotes in many countries across the world, including the United States. According to JNF USA, “JNF is ‘greening’ the desert with millions of trees, building thousands of parks across Israel.”

In this process, the group says it has “planted more than 250 million trees, built over 250 reservoirs and dams, developed over 250,000 acres of land, created more than 2,000 parks and provided the infrastructure for over 1,000 communities.” JNF owns 13% of land in Israel and it effectively controls the other 80%.

Since day one, Israel, and JNF by extension, have hid behind clichés of making the “desert bloom.” It is the Zionist movement after all that called Palestine “a land without a people to a people without a land” when Palestine was a thriving nation that had cinemas, theaters, newspapers in different languages, industries, railways, airways, thriving businesses, and cultural communities in major cities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa. and Akka.

To materialize ethnic cleansing, the Zionist movement changes this time the landscape of Palestine by planting trees under the claim of afforestation.

Palestinians, who have centuries-old ties to the land, have lived on their land for generations, and land deeds (which they still keep) mattered very little to them as their connection to their land was stronger than papers and documents, which are colonial in essence.

The Zionist movement was built on the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, and for ethnic cleansing to be successful – it is still a failure and incomplete – they needed to erase Palestinian villages, change the names of Palestinian cities and towns, and change the landscape of these communities sometimes by bulldozers and other times by planting trees under the claim of afforestation.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers continue their unbated campaign of uprooting Palestinian olive trees because these tree reminds them of the Palestinian existence. Some olive trees in Palestine go thousands of years back to the Roman period. As JNF brags about planting 250 million trees in Palestine, Palestinian farmers resist the Israeli occupation by planting more olive trees, demand access to their land and harvest, and by teaching their children that a country “that is built on enmity towards olive trees can’t survive in the Levant,” as Palestinian poet Tamim al-Barghouti put it. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers continue uprooting olive trees and Israeli authorities continue taking over Palestinian land.

Not just in the Southern Hebron Hill, where iconic Palestinian elder and leader of popular resistance Haj Suleiman al-Hazalin, 75, was murdered on January 17, 2022, after an Israeli police officer intentionally hit him with his car on January 6, 2021 – the police officer is still at large. Al-Hazalin was a Palestinian refugee from the Negev where his family ended up as refugees in 1948.  In an interview with Aljazeera, he had said, “They [the Israeli forces] tried to get me out of the area several times, but I am a man who does not give up.”

Afforestation to Colonize

A few miles to the south, where al-Hazalin originally comes from, JNF continues its “afforestation” of Palestinian lands. Dozens of Palestinian villages and communities are still to be “recognized” by the Israeli government, which means that these communities do not have access to basic services, electricity, or water, unlike adjacent Israeli settlements built on lands that have belonged to the Palestinians for hundreds of years.

A few years ago, JNF failed to implement the Prawer Plan in the Negev, which aims to push Palestinians out and to give them houses within “recognized” communities. The end goal of the plan was to take over Palestinian land. However, JNF has not given up and is back now with a new “afforestation” plan which sparked huge protests in the Negev and dozens of arrests. A video from the protests of Palestinian activist Aden Al-Hajouj went viral, in which she stated, “This is Palestine and will remain Palestine. This is the Bedouin land; we will not leave.”

Afew miles further, by the end of 2021, the Gaza Strip had become the most densely populated place on Earth with 2,313,000 Palestinians living on 365 square kilometers with a monthly birth rate of 6,000. The Gaza Strip looks much like a concrete jungle with almost no forest areas. The JNF, of course, has no interest in planting trees there.

The Israeli government views Gaza as a threat and thus recently built a wall around it to prevent Gazan refugees from returning to their towns and villages, some of which are visible to the naked eye across the border. The Gaza Strip is not of interest to JNF or the Israeli government, and keeping it less green serves the goal of making it the world’s biggest open-air prison.

The recent revelation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of the existence of a Palestinian mass grave of victims of the Nakba from the village of Tantura under an Israeli beach resort speaks volumes of how the world treats the Palestinian narrative. Palestinian survivors of the Tantura massacre have long spoken of the massacre during which some 200 Palestinians were murdered in cold blood between May and June 1948.

This is not surprising given how the early founders of the Zionist movement viewed Palestinians and Palestine. Bhagat Abu Gharbia, a Palestinian fighter of the 1948 war, quotes Herzl, in his book The Jewish State, as saying, “When we establish our state, we will not use the same method used by Europeans when establishing their own states, none of us will carry spears and swords and hunt bears, killing them here and there. We will not deal with these animals individually; we need to establish a capable authority to gather these beasts in one place and destroy them with one blow.”

But it took Haaretz, an Israeli publication, to get a former Israeli solider to “confess” in order for the Tantura massacre to be recognized. Thousands of Palestinian testimonies of Nakba survivors don’t count, some of whom are still alive and were interviewed by Politics Today. The world only accepts the narrative of the colonizer and the credibility of their archives, much of which are still buried – same as the bodies of tens of thousands of Palestinians who were buried in mass graves in 1948.

After all these years of afforestation, and as protests continue in the Negev against JNF, the only truth is that Israel, with the way it stands today, is a failure and JNF by extension is a witness to this failure. It is an incomplete project which targets Palestinians regardless of where they are. The Israeli targeting of Palestinians will only make them unite and come together, acting as a one nation, and when they do so, no military force, regardless of how mighty it is, can stop them from attaining their rights. The truth is that the entire state of Israel was built on a mass grave – be it covered by a beach resort or a forest planted by JNF.

Over the months of May and June 2021, hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been exposed in Kamloops, Brandon, Marieval, and Cranbrook across what is today called Canada. Many more are sure to be exposed in the coming months. All of them were near the former sites of Canadian “Indian Residential Schools,” which were fundamentally institutions of forced assimilation and genocide, more appropriately called prisons than “schools.”

I want to emphasize the word “exposed” here because none of these stories of children murdered by Canada’s structural violences, abandoned and disposed in unmarked graves, are new to Indigenous people. They have known, lived, and survived these stories for decades. The Canadian state itself also knew about these stories but has been for years actively trying to conceal the horrific crimes it has committed. This story is only “new and shocking” to a Canadian and international public that has bought into Canada’s projected self-image of an enlightened and progressive state and society.

Canada promotes itself on the world stage as a progressive model of “liberal democracy” in which ideals of “reconciliation,” “tolerance,” “multiculturalism,” “justice,” and “truth-seeking” flourish within its state structures. This diplomatic image is misleading though, and Canada’s crimes against Indigenous Peoples are only properly understood, not when they are posited as “dark chapters” or “historical mistakes,” but when they are situated within the historical and ongoing context of the imposition of a genocidal settler colonial sovereignty.

In today’s political discourse, the term sovereignty has become associated with the modern nation-state, where a central sovereign political body practices, at least in theory, supreme authority over a specified land and people. This is especially the case in settler colonial contexts like Canada, where Indigenous people are largely viewed as another minority group that must be assimilated into the supreme sovereignty of the Canadian state, as opposed to what they in fact are: sovereign original Peoples.

Throughout their long history and until today, Indigenous Peoples from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis have developed complex societies with complex systems of social and political organization

Sovereignty did not always follow this Euro-American colonial meaning or practice. Throughout their long history and until today, Indigenous Peoples from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis have developed complex societies with complex systems of social and political organization. Within these rich traditions and societies, multiple forms of sovereignty were imagined, theorized, and practiced.

It is impossible to fully explain what Indigenous sovereignty means in a short piece. But what we can say is that Indigenous sovereignty that flourished prior to colonization and still survives today in the values, praxis, and indeed existence of Indigenous people, is generally layered and shared.

As we learn from the writings of Indigenous scholars like Audra Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Glen Coulthard, decolonial Indigenous sovereignty gleans its authority from living with the land and in openness towards difference and the plurality of people. It asserts a communal type of freedom and a responsibility to each other and to the land. Whereas the settler colonial state sees the self-determination of the nation as exclusive to an imagined homogenized and purified racial identity, Indigenous sovereignty in its foundation is open and attentive to difference, plurality, and sharing.

Foundationally speaking, Canada is an ethnonational state because it refuses to acknowledge the political rights of Indigenous Peoples as sovereign Nations, and asserts instead exclusive sovereign authority for what it imagines as the British and French “founding nations” of Canada.

Under the veneer of Canada’s image as a multicultural liberal democracy is the ongoing operation of structural settler colonial violences.

In short, under the veneer of Canada’s image as a multicultural liberal democracy is the ongoing operation of structural settler colonial violences, which eliminate Indigenous people and sovereignty and replace them with settler colonists and exclusive European settler colonial sovereignty.

Where is Canada’s truth and reconciliation?

Responding to the Chinese government’s call for the United Nations to investigate Canadian crimes against Indigenous Peoples, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had this to say:

“The journey of reconciliation is a long one, but it is a journey we are on. China is not recognizing even that there is a problem. That is a pretty fundamental difference. In Canada, we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Where is China’s truth and reconciliation commission? Where is their truth? Where is the openness that Canada has always shown and the responsibility that Canada has taken for the terrible mistakes of the past, and indeed, many of which continue into the present?”

Trudeau is referring here to China’s “systemic abuse and human rights violations against the Uyghurs.”

It is of course highly doubtful that the Chinese government is genuinely concerned about the well-being of Indigenous Peoples, any more than the Canadian government is genuinely concerned about the well-being of the Uyghurs. It seems to me that both are using each other’s state violences as a means through which they can advance their own state strategic interests.

Putting that aside, and more to the point, is Canada really interested in the truth? And has it taken serious responsibility for its ongoing structural settler colonial violences? The answer for both is clearly, no.

First, it is important to clarify that the Canadian government did not, as Trudeau’s quote seems to suggest, initiate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) because it wanted to do the right thing and uncover the truth. Survivors of the Canadian forced assimilation prisons were successful in forcing the Canadian state to create the TRC, among other things such as issuing a public apology.

After long legal battles, in May 2006, parties which included, legal counsel for former students, legal counsel for the Churches, the Assembly of First Nations, other Indigenous organizations and the Government of Canada approved the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement which began in September 2007. A critical part of this agreement was that the Canadian state would establish the TRC. Thus, it wasn’t Canada’s moral compass that drove the public inquiry into the truth of these “schools,” but rather pressure from Indigenous people and organizations, which forced the truth out of the Canadian state.

Second, many of the TRC’s Calls to Action are yet unfulfilled, and reconciliation remains an empty promise. In a recent analysis, Tom McMahon, former general legal counsel to the TRC and previously executive secretary to the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, lists some of the many Calls to Action that have been completely ignored by the Canadian government, including simple ones, such as creating a monument to honor the Survivors and the victims of “Residential Schools.”

More damning still, scholars Eva Jewell who is Anishinaabekwe and Ian Mosby in a recent special report concluded from their study that “In 2020 … our analysis reveals that just 8 Calls to Action have been implemented, this is down from 9 in 2019. Ultimately, we find that Canada is failing residential school Survivors and their families.” To put it bluntly, that’s a pathetic number: 8 out of 94 Calls to Action. Given this reality, how can anyone take Canada’s proclaimed commitment to reconciliation seriously?

After the state of Israel was established, millions of Palestinians were either displaced or forced to move from their lands – some into refugee camps and others to Arab or Western countries. This uprooting was highly traumatic and has had profound effects on the Palestinian identity. Yeter Ada Şeko speaks about the effects of this trauma to Palestinian political activist and the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Sami Al-Arian, in relation to the Palestinian identity as well as the long struggle of Palestinians for their freedom.

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Ada: After the state of Israel was established, millions of Palestinians were forced to move to different regions such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Some of them also left Arab lands and started a new life in Western regions such as the US and Europe. What is the effect of this immigration process on the Palestinian identity?

Sami Al Arian: There are many effects and great impact which depends on generation to generation, and geography to geography. When the first generation was exiled, many of them lived in refugee camps, whether in Gaza, in the West Bank, Lebanon, and later on in Syria. Some of them went to Egypt even though there were no refugee camps in Egypt, and many of them had over the years immigrated to different places, looking for better living conditions such as the Gulf areas. A few also went to the West, especially after the 1967 war, and lived in different regions in the West including the US and Europe. So when we talk about Palestinian identity, many factors shape that identity.

The first is that this was a collective trauma that the Palestinians faced. When they were uprooted suddenly from their homeland, that they had lived in for centuries, it was very traumatic for many people, especially since it did not happen over time but all of a sudden.

80 percent of the Palestinians who lived in the 1948 areas, approximately 800,000, were uprooted and placed in places that were alien to them, some of them living in very poor conditions. People were living in good conditions in their country and suddenly they faced poverty – that affected the psyche of the Palestinians. That psyche has never really left the Palestinians from generation to generation, and the experience was fed into every generation. My father’s generation, my generation, and my children’s generation – we always talked about that trauma. We always talked about the impact of being uprooted so there was always this strong connection between the Palestinians of each generation with Palestine. It wasn’t something that was forgotten or something that was put away.

The pain, the suffering, and the whole experience of being uprooted lived with them as well as their history of living in Palestine. So that is the first thing.

And it may have differed. Some communities have more affinity than others depending on where they are based, but overall Palestinians do connect and have this connection with the land of Palestine.

Secondly, because the majority of Palestinians, especially those living in refugee camps, were never given citizenship – they were never assimilated in a way that immigrants or refugees could have been.

Being Palestinian has always been part and parcel of suffering because being a non-citizen in these countries meant that you were denied many rights and privileges otherwise given to citizens of a country: the right to work, the right to healthcare, education and so forth, and that also cemented the fact what it means to be Palestinian.

Also, you can see the same in the Gulf areas because they do not give citizenship. The Palestinians lived as communities within a community in these countries, like Kuwait before 1990. Before they left Jordan there were very large Palestinian communities and that cemented their identity of what it means to be Palestinians.

In the West, for example in the United States of America where I lived for four decades, you could see whole villages, especially from the West Bank, relocated to the US, and there they would begin life again and eventually gain citizenship. They would form associations that identify with the land of Palestine. So you have different villages and each village would have their association so that they can maintain the feeling and connection to their land, as well as to their fellow Palestinians of what it means to be a Palestinian.

Also, those who have been a part of the struggle, and that’s tens of thousands of people that are part of the struggle for Palestine, you will see that the struggle also cemented that Palestinian identity, because for many societies if you are struggling for Palestine that is not something that would come easy, as you will become a target. If you are in the US or if you are sometimes in Europe and even some Arab countries – if people work for Palestine they become targets of the security agencies in which they would suffer for being a part of the Palestinian struggle and that would also further cement their Palestinian identity.

Palestine, over the years, has become a symbol. A symbol against racism, a symbol against oppression, a symbol against tyranny, and a symbol against the occupation, therefore many people identify with that issue from that standpoint. This makes Palestinians even more committed to the struggle, cementing their identity further.

So, what I would say is that being part of a Palestinian exiled community, or being part of people under occupation is a struggle, whether in the areas of 1948 or the West Bank or Gaza, and that struggle continues, the suffering continues, and the pain continues, enduring from generation to generation. The collective memory is transferred from generation to generation, therefore there is more commitment and more association with what it means to be a Palestinian – that identity is further cemented.

Ada: Do you think that Palestinians who live in other lands, where they can get citizenship, may lose their Palestinian identity as a result? Do you think this suffering, i.e. not being able to get citizenship, keeps the Palestinian identity alive?

Sami Al Arian: I think it’s true. Historically it’s true that in many of these communities, particularly in the Arab countries (except Jordan), they never received citizenship, and that cemented what being a Palestinian is. However, many Palestinians would argue that it’s not an excuse for them to be denied basic rights as human beings because not being a citizen in a nation-state system puts huge hardship and burden on these communities and makes them non-entities, non-citizens, and non-human beings.

They are denied necessities, basic rights in life: the right to a decent education, the right to a job, the right to retirement, the right to live in dignity, the right to healthcare, and so forth. So not being a citizen did cement the meaning of what it means to be Palestinian and this was the only identity that people could identify with – being a Palestinian. So with that suffering – yes identity was certainly strengthened.

Ada: For Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, being an Israeli citizen is another aspect of their identity. What do you think about the identity issue of Israeli-Palestinians and their relationship with the state of Israel?

Sami Al Arian: Palestinians who stayed in Palestine, after the catastrophe of 1948 and after the occupation of 78% of Palestine by the Zionist regime, never felt they were citizens.

For 18 years between 1948 and 1966, these communities lived under military curfew, under martial law, so they never felt part of society. Though 80% of the Palestinians were exiled the remainder lived under military rule, even though they lived side by side with Israelis. Living under military rule for 18 years brutalized an entire generation. Even after that was lifted and they were given citizenship by Israel, they never became part and parcel of society, and you can see the racist policies and mentality of the Zionist leaders in clear and plain ways. They don’t even try to hide it: a Jewish only state, Jewish only laws, some Jewish only roads in the West Bank, and settlements and so on so forth.

When they were uprooted suddenly from their homeland, that they had lived in for centuries, it was very traumatic for many people, especially since it did not happen over time but all of a sudden.

There is a lot of discrimination against the Arabs inside the 1948 areas, which is manifested in education, in job discrimination, in healthcare, and even in their right to go and pray in the al-Aqsa mosque. If they take a different political position, they will be prevented from praying at al-Aqsa. Most Palestinians outside Jerusalem have also been denied this right for decades.

So, even though the Israeli state tries to portray itself as being a state that respects different religions and ethnicities, the fact of the matter is that it is not the case. Numerous studies will prove that what we have in Palestine today, in terms of the Israeli state, is a state that discriminates against its citizens based on their ethnicity, faith, and religion, and therefore we cannot say that Palestinians inside that state enjoy the privileges and rights of being equal citizens to the Jewish citizens.

Ada: As was mentioned before some Palestinians have Israeli citizenship and some do not. From what you say, it is clear that this citizenship isn’t of equal value. So why does Israel give citizenship to Palestinians?

Sami Al Arian: That was a historical decision that the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, made. Many Israeli politicians regret that decision and the reason that Ben-Gurion made that decision, which is basically to grant the remaining Palestinians a form of citizenship, (which now many right-wing groups and settler movements and others, such as even Lieberman, are trying to undo so that they can maintain the ‘purity’ of a Jewish only state) had more to do with the image that Israel wanted to portray to the outside world than to the actual ideology of Zionism.

One of the strategic imperatives of Zionism is to occupy as much of Palestine as possible with as few of Arab Palestinian Christians and Muslims as possible. So they have a problem now that the Arab population inside the state have ‘citizenship’ whether Muslim or Christian. These populations are approximately 20% of the state, and they grow even faster than their Jewish fellows inside the state and that is a concern to them. That’s why in the so-called deal of the century, there is a clause there that says that part of that final status is to transfer what is called the triangle (these are three villages at the top of the border between the West Bank and Israel) numbering over 300,000 Palestinians.

This population will be transferred and they will lose their citizenship and be transferred to the Palestinian communities in case there is some kind of a deal. So there are concerns about that. As I said, for many it was a controversial decision but Ben-Gurion made that decision to improve Israel’s image in the eyes of the international community, after exiling 800,000 people and refusing to allow them to go back to their original homes.

Ada: It appears that Israel is using some narratives to justify their position over the land, right? How does these narratives effect Palestinian relationship with their history and their identity?

Sami Al Arian: Israel has a different narrative. They try to falsify what happened in 1948. They try to falsify the history of the land; they try to falsify the history of an indigenous people – Palestinians of the land. They even try to falsify what’s happening now on the ground. Palestinians unify and they have their narrative and they would like to talk advocate it in a way that will show the true nature of the conflict as well as the identity of what it means to be Palestinian today. So in this sense, you can also see the Palestinians common identity, regardless of where they are. I mean Palestinians today are in dozens of countries and yet they can identify with each other.

Each Palestinian can identify with the land, with the village, with the town they came from, or their ancestors came from. They can recite each chapter and verse of their history. So that collective memory and common destiny are what shapes what it means today to be a Palestinian even for those who live inside the state under racist policies. They identify with their brethren in the West Bank and Gaza and beyond. They still see themselves as part of the Palestinian people and share this common identity.