The project to plant trees in Palestine

By Manal Shqair with introduction from Eurig Scandrett, Friends of the Earth Scotland member

At Friends of the Earth Scotland’s AGM, members voted unanimously to support the Plant a Tree in Palestine project of the Stop the JNF campaign. Stop the JNF is an international campaign against the Jewish National Fund, an organisation that claims to be environmental but uses greenwash to cover for its central purpose: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Friends of the Earth Scotland has supported Stop the JNF for ten years and is a signatory to the petition to keep the JNF out of COP26. Exposing greenwash and international solidarity has always been part of our work, and through our links with Palestinian activists and Scottish solidarity groups, we have been keen to expose the JNF. Here, Manal Shqair, a Palestinian activist with Stop the Wall campaign (a member of Friends of the Earth Palestine), writes about the JNF and the value of the Plant a Tree campaign.

The Plant a Tree Campaign was launched in 2011 as a joint effort between Palestinian grassroots activist groups and international solidarity organisations.

The project is part of Stop the JNF Campaign, an international campaign that aims to hold the Jewish National Fund accountable for its complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and in greenwashing Israeli apartheid settler colonialism.

The JNF was established in Britain in 1901 for the purposes of obtaining land in Palestine as a custodian for ‘the Jewish people’, expelling the Palestinian population. It is now formally connected to the state of Israel where it exerts significant influence over Israel Lands Authority, operates in the occupied Palestinian territory, and has branches in over 50 countries, including Scotland (KKL Scotland) and the UK (JNF UK).

The JNF is one of the key organisations enabling the operation of Israeli ethnic cleansing, apartheid and the illegal settlement enterprise through acting as a fundraiser for Israeli crimes against humanity It raises funds internationally to ‘plant a tree’ for its afforestation projects on the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages and other (unsustainable) environmental activities, and so wears an environmental garb to greenwash Israeli apartheid

The Plant a Tree in Palestine campaign aims to challenge the JNF’s colonialist and apartheid activities through active involvement in the struggle of Palestinians to protect their land on the ground.

In the last couple of years, we have planted thousands of trees in areas threatened by illegal Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank.

It is not possible to replace what is lost when people are displaced, land and a way of life is destroyed, 1,000-year-old olive trees uprooted. In Palestine scores of 2,000-year-old cities and historical sites are buried under JNF planted forests and parks. Rebuilding and replanting are acts of daily resistance in Palestine.

This project seeks to support the ongoing struggle of Palestinians to sustain and rebuild their land by providing resources for villages to plant trees that are indigenous to Palestine’s natural environment and agricultural life.

The campaign acts as a sustainable and anti-colonial tool to reinforce the sumud (steadfastness) of Palestinian farmers

Through emphasizing the intertwinement between sustainable environmentalism and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the Plant a Tree campaign also challenges Israeli greenwashing narrative positing Israel as an environmental steward to legitimise and naturalise its apartheid settler colonial structure