Rooted in Ruin: How the Conquest of Palestine Turned the Holy Land to Ash

Only a month into this year’s olive harvest, Israeli settlers and soldiers have already damaged or uprooted 4,500 olive trees in the occupied West Bank. Since January, 100,000 olive trees have been destroyed. In Gaza, 97 percent of the Strip’s two million olive oil trees have been wiped out since October 2023. Between the 1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the 2010s, more than 800,000 were lost.

Every time Israel sends yet another delegation to a conference on climate, biodiversity or desertification to boast of its “unique expertise” in “making the desert bloom” — a myth it has promoted for decades — I think of the ruined trees in my grandfather’s olive grove.

The uprooting of olive trees is only one dimension of Israel’s wider war on Palestinian land: its vegetation, its soil, its water, its ecosystems. Since the 1948 Nakba, Israeli colonial policy has gone beyond seizing territory and displacing its people to remaking the natural landscape itself, weakening its ability to sustain those who have lived on and worked it for generations.

In other words, contrary to its greenwashing, Israel made a blooming Palestine burn.

Re-engineering “the desert”

When the first Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine in the late 19th century, they found what they called a “desert” already in bloom. Palestinian land produced not only enough food for its own people, but surpluses exported to neighbouring regions of the Ottoman Empire and across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Palestinians grew wheat, barley and oats, and tended olive and fruit orchards. Along the Mediterranean coast, lush gardens yielded vegetables and fruit. In the arid Naqab desert to the south, Bedouin tribes raised sheep, goats and camels for meat, milk and wool.

Palestinians lived in step with the ecosystems around them, from wetlands to dry desert, using methods suited to local conditions rather than trying to override them. Drought-resistant crops grew in the drier areas; more water-hungry crops grew in valleys near water sources.

The Zionist settlers who came from Europe wanted instead to reshape the landscape into something familiar. They planted imported trees such as the stone pine, in some cases tearing out native species including olives. They drained swamps, diverted streams and set about afforesting desert terrain.

Some of this caused lasting harm to local ecosystems, not least the introduction of non-native species such as the eucalyptus, which ignites easily and has helped drive more frequent and more intense wildfires.

Israel’s remaking of the landscape was driven by the wish to erase Palestinian presence. Trees were planted over the ruins of looted villages to conceal them. Imported European farming displaced the native Palestinian practices that had fed the land for centuries.

Ecocide in Palestine

The assault on Palestinian land did not stop at the 1948 armistice lines. The moment the Israeli army occupied the West Bank and Gaza, it placed not only the people but their natural resources under military rule.

Water sits at the centre of this process. As illegal settlements spread through the occupied territories, settlers seized local water supplies. Today Israel’s national water company, Mekorot, runs an extensive network that diverts water from Palestinian towns and villages to Israeli settlements, and routinely cuts supplies to Palestinians in summer to guarantee a steady flow to the settlers.

This theft of water has devastated Palestinian farming and ecosystems alike.

Land theft, meanwhile, has involved violence not only against Palestinians but against their soil. For years the Israeli army and settlers have sprayed pesticides over Palestinian fields to drive farmers away. Burning and uprooting trees and other vegetation, along with settler construction, have stripped and eroded the soil.

In Gaza, ecocide has reached its extreme. The genocidal war waged on the Strip has laid waste to farmland, trees, soil and water.

These harms are compounded by bombardment and bulldozing. Israel has destroyed roughly 85 percent of the buildings in the Gaza Strip, leaving an estimated 70 million tonnes of rubble laced with toxins. Its strikes have scattered heavy metals — lead, cadmium, arsenic, tungsten and aluminium — along with explosive residues such as TNT, RDX and perchlorates.

These substances leach into the soil and groundwater, causing environmental damage that may endure for years.

At the same time, the continued bulldozing of buildings and land has removed the topsoil, rich in the organic matter and nutrients that plants need, degrading farmland further still.

A coloniser’s logic

The paradox is that the Israelis who claim an ancient right to the land are the very people destroying it. It is a striking contradiction.

A coloniser sees land as something to seize, possess and exploit. The colonial relationship to land is one of abuse for material gain — not care, not stewardship, not belonging.

Israel’s approach to Palestinian land — poison and destroy in order to control — stands in sharp contrast to the Palestinian one. Since 1948 Palestinians have faced relentless attack, destruction, resource theft and plunder, and yet they have gone on rebuilding, replanting and working the land again and again.

My own grandfather, Hamdan, embodied that spirit. For four decades he tended an eight-dunam olive grove that yielded 1,500kg of olive oil each season.

During the 2008 war the Israeli army bulldozed the grove. He did not give in; he replanted, with my help. Just as the trees began to recover, the army destroyed the grove again in the 2014 war.

For my grandfather the olive trees were more than a living. He called them his children — the fruit of years of labour and his family’s bond to the land. Less than a week after their destruction in 2014, he died of the shock.

We did not give in either. In 2015 my family set about restoring the land and replanting olives, work that took several months; the trees needed three more years before they bore fruit. We harvested for two seasons before the Israeli army bombed the grove in the 2021 war.

The land was so damaged it could no longer support olives. Clearing contamination and filling in the bomb craters took a long time, but we still planted parts of it with seasonal crops such as wheat. Then in December 2023 the army devastated the grove once more.

I would be replanting that land again today, if it did not lie beyond the ever-expanding “Yellow Line”.

That impulse to tend the land runs so deep in Palestinians that even in camps for the displaced, people keep small gardens before their tents, planting mint, basil and flowers.

For all the propaganda and greenwashing Israel deploys, it is becoming ever clearer to the world who can make the Holy Land bloom. It is not those who destroy, poison and bulldoze. It is those who are deeply rooted, who plant, grow and care. They are the true owners of the land.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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