How Palestinian soil is rejecting the ecology of occupation | Aloud

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:04]Forests in occupied Palestine may look natural, but many were planted over the remains of Palestinian villages.

[00:00:14]Across occupied Palestine, pine forests now stretch over hills where communities once lived. After the Nakba in 1948, when around 800,000 Palestinians were displaced, large-scale tree planting expanded under the Jewish National Fund, adding initial planting from the 1920s onwards under the British Mandate Forestry Service.

[00:00:38]Over time, these forests became part of the landscape and part of what was erased from it.

[00:00:49]I'm Mazin Qumsiyeh and this is a loud.

[00:00:51]This show brings you articles made for audio.

[00:00:54]In this episode, we've read up to the piece, Why Israel's pine forests are dying in occupied Palestine by Zeynep Chunton published on TRT World on April the 21st, 2026.

[00:01:14]Ecologically, the mismatch is clear.

[00:01:17]Palestine's climate is Mediterranean and semi-arid, shaped over millennia.

[00:01:23]Native species like olive, fig, oak, carob, and wild almond evolved for these conditions. Species that stored water in the bark, that anchored themselves in the limestone soil.

[00:01:36]Pine trees did not.

[00:01:38]Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist, author, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, says this reflects a broader pattern in which imported landscapes are imposed on ecosystems that already carry long ecological memory.

[00:01:55]Israel, on the other hand, argues that these afforestation efforts were vital to restore land they viewed as degraded and largely barren after centuries of Ottoman rule, overgrazing, and erosion.

[00:02:09]The Jewish National Fund has planted over 250 million trees since 1901, helping increase the country's forest cover dramatically.

[00:02:19]Observers also noted it was a way to remind the new migrants of their European homelands that they left behind. Early planners chose fast-growing pines because they could survive in poor, rocky soils where native trees often struggled.

[00:02:38]The consequences are increasingly visible.

[00:02:44]Pine trees consume large amounts of water. Their needles acidify the soil.

[00:02:51]And they are highly flammable.

[00:02:53]In forests stretching from Be'eri to Yatir, researchers recorded severe die-offs, in some areas exceeding half of all conifers.

[00:03:03]Even the Jewish National Fund's own forest management chief described the losses as unprecedented.

[00:03:10]But they argue that climate-change-driven droughts, not the trees themselves, are the primary driver of recent die-offs.

[00:03:18]In other forests, the same pattern repeats.

[00:03:27]Then came the wildfires.

[00:03:30]In April 2025, fires spread across the Judean Mountains, forcing evacuations and prompting Israel to declare a national emergency. It was these dry pine conifers in their unnatural concentrations that accelerated the flames.

[00:03:46]Olive trees, by contrast, are fire-resistant. They store water and are leafy, naturally acting as fire breaks against wildfires.

[00:03:57]After the fire, something else became visible.

[00:04:01]The remains of Palestinian villages, stone foundations, terraces, structures long hidden beneath the forest canopy.

[00:04:10]And in some places, native species began to return.

[00:04:14]Olive trees, fig trees, carob shrubs.

[00:04:18]But the olive tree here is not only ecological, it is cultural infrastructure.

[00:04:25]For Palestinians and much of the wider Levant, the olive tree is deeply embedded in daily life, in cuisine, medicine, and social identity.

[00:04:35]In the kitchen, olive oil is foundational. It is used for cooking, preserving, dipping bread, and preparing traditional dishes passed through generations.

[00:04:46]In traditional medicine, olive oil and leaves have long been used in home remedies for skin care, wound treatment, digestion, and inflammation. Knowledge passed orally through families rather than formal systems.

[00:05:02]Socially and culturally, olive harvesting is a collective practice.

[00:05:07]Families gather in groves during the season, sometimes staying for days, working together across generations. It is one of the few agricultural cycles that brings entire extended families into shared labor and shared memory.

[00:05:24]Olive tree is also closely tied to Palestinian identity because it embodies rootedness. Many groves are inherited with trees older than the houses around them, living markers of continuity across displacement and change.

[00:05:39]Closely linked to this culture is the kuffiyeh, the traditional black and white pattern scarf.

[00:05:44]The pattern itself is often associated with agricultural nets, fishing lines, and olive leaves, reinforcing its link to land-based life. Together, they reflect a way of life shaped by land, harvest, family structure, and seasonal rhythm.

[00:06:00]Because of this deep cultural meaning, olive trees have also been repeatedly targeted.

[00:06:10]According to reports from Palestinian farmers, UN agencies, and Israeli human rights groups, Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank are estimated to have destroyed large numbers of olive trees over the years, including more than 900 during a 2-week period in the 2025 harvest season.

[00:06:30]Some estimates suggest that Israeli settlers have destroyed as many as 1 million olive trees >> [music] >> in a bid to deprive indigenous Palestinians of their livelihoods.

[00:06:41]Dr. Lucas Ferrante says ecological systems often degrade alongside forced displacement as long-standing knowledge of land management disappears with the communities [music] that sustained it.

[00:06:55]He's a researcher at the University of São Paulo with expertise in landscape ecology and land grabbing.

[00:07:03]Soil care, water systems, [music] fire cycles, seasonal cultivation. When that disappears, [music] the landscape changes, too.

[00:07:16]Some of these losses may be irreversible. Species have disappeared, wetlands have been drained, and in Gaza, the long-term environmental consequences of conflict remain uncertain.

[00:07:28]Recovery, where possible, may take decades.

[00:07:34]For years, pine forests were used to shape the visual identity of the land, but they are now under stress from drought, from fire, from conditions they were never adapted to endure.

[00:07:46]And gradually, native species are reappearing in some areas.

[00:07:51]Israeli foresters [music] acknowledge that early monoculture pine plantations had drawbacks, including higher flammability and impacts on local biodiversity.

[00:08:01]In recent [music] decades, the JNF has shifted towards greater diversity, incorporating more native and broadleaf species alongside conifers.

[00:08:17]The story of these forests remain deeply contested. For many Israelis, the pine forests symbolize renewal, resilience, memory of life before, and the successful greening of a challenging landscape. For Palestinians, they represent displacement and the imposition of a foreign ecology over indigenous roots. The climate and the soil, however, are the real deciders.

[00:08:42]The pines were never from here. Olives and others were.

[00:08:46]And in the end, the land knows the difference.

[00:08:54]That's all for this episode of Aloud, based on the piece Why Israel's Pine Forests Are Dying in Occupied Palestine by Zeynep Çonka, published on TRT World on April the 21st, 2026. I'm your host Atsalah Ahmed. Thanks for listening.