Replacing Olive Trees with Pines: The reality behind Israel’s position as a Middle Eastern ecological leader

“If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them/Their Oil would become Tears”.  

This powerful quote from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish sets the context and illustrates the stakes of the topic of this research—Olive trees hold particular importance within the Palestinian landscape. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation, they have been targeted with destruction, being part of a larger colonial project. Oxford dictionary defines ecocide as the “destruction of the natural environment by deliberate or negligent human action”. This research will explore how the Israeli politics of environmental modifications in the region demonstrate a will to erase Palestinian identity and alienate indigenous populations from their land, while asserting its relevance through what many experts have defined as “green colonialism”. The research will also discuss the relationship between the Palestinian people and olive trees, their symbolic as well as economic and social importance to local populations, and how the uprooting of those trees is part of a larger colonial project. Indeed, the olive trees' importance for Palestinians is, according to ethnographer and legal scholar Irus Braverman, “not only the result of its economic, cultural, and historical significance within this particular culture, but is increasingly a product of the olive’s brutal targeting by the State of Israel and by certain Jewish Israeli settlers”. By Europeanizing the landscape, as well as engaging with “preservation” policies, Israel establishes legitimacy, relevance, and futurity on the geopolitical map. 

“But the roots of the olive/Return and stretch in the depth/Of the soil…/Roots of olive, you have become the model/And man is competing, imitating your root/Olive of the land.”  

This poem by Mahmoud Awad Abbas, written in 1978, highlights similarities between the aspirations of the people and their land. Although the Palestinians have been subjected to violence for several decades, they have always shown a will to survive and a deep bond to their land. Olive trees are not only a landscape surrounding them, and olive oil is not only their product. Rather, they symbolize a way of life and are not to be dissociated from the people. Olive trees have become a symbol of Palestinian resilience and resistance; as anthropologist Omar Qassis points out, “Olive oil is often understood as ‘the taste of the homeland’ for Palestinians.” Olive trees can live up to thousands of years and do not need a lot of maintenance to survive. Ethnographer, legal scholar, and former Israeli prosecutor Irus Braverman compares these trees to the Palestinian people, who demonstrate longevity and independence despite their state of subjugation. However, the importance held by olive trees for Palestinians is not merely symbolic; they are a crucial source of income and economic activity.  

According to Braverman, around 45 percent of arable land in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip, was planted with olive trees. In 2022, the olive industry in the West Bank accounted for “40 percent of the total value of agricultural produce and for 70 percent of the production from fruit trees”, with “more than 70,500 farmers own olive trees, and many more depend upon various activities associated with the trees for their livelihood” (Braverman 6). Another study by social scientist Arnaud Garcette estimated the economic loss to Palestinian farmers caused by the uprooting of a limited number of olive trees and the construction of the “seam zone”, an area in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, close to the separation wall that Israel illegally established after 2002, to be around 138 million dollars per year between 2000 and 2008 (Garcette 129).  

In 2008, it was found that 60% of families who owned land in the seam zone, where around a million trees stand, could not access them anymore (World Bank). The producers in the seam zone are forced to abandon certain fruit trees, such as peaches or grapes, because they need more maintenance than the unstable situation allows, causing another economic loss in 2010 (UN OCHA). As between 75,000 and 80,000 Palestinians lost their jobs in Israel after the second intifada that started in September 2000 (Hanieh), they increasingly and heavily relied on local resources, which mainly consisted of harvesting olives. Israel’s control over Palestinian resources and export of oil impacts its quality, as olive oil needs to be stored in a way that is often not respected due to Israeli restrictions and short deadlines. This affects the rhythm of sales, imposed by a globalized market, leading to the rupture of international contracts. When referring to these contracts, Garcette states that Michel Besson, one of Palestine’s oldest olive oil fair trade partners, was detained and turned away at the Tel-Aviv airport in 2011 when arriving to renew a contract with Palestinian landowners. While these measures clearly highlight Israel’s measures to impact the Palestinian economy, Palestinian resistance has gained magnitude over the years. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship participate in helping olive products circulate. For example, when the Jamaleh checkpoint was reopened for Palestinians living in Israel in 2009, a “strong rebound in the activity of the olive-related market in the region” was observed. Tons of oil were sold in Israel due to these informal channels (Garcette 138). Local and international organizations also offer programs to help harvest the land, making it less costly and discouraging attacks from the State and settlers, who at the time preferred avoiding international condemnations.

The economy is not the only aspect of Palestinians’ lives controlled and altered by Israel. Israel destabilizes Palestinian economic practices partly by depriving Palestinians of appropriating their own space, time, and routine. To access the aforementioned seam zone, Garcette explains that Palestinians must obtain a permit, which imposes the time they need to wake up, the number of hours they are allowed to work, and the amount of time allocated to collecting the products of their trees. In other zones in the West Bank, regulations are imposed by the Israeli army under the pretext of avoiding clashes between Palestinian peasants and Israeli settlers. They also include restricting the number of working hours and days. Even if they do not appear restrictive, as the permit is required for the seam zone, they still impose practices taking over the natural everyday relationship between Palestinian and their land.  

Some of these areas have been hostile environments for Palestinians for decades. Braverman recounts the story of a traumatizing mass slaughter in the village of Kfar Kassem (exactly on the other side of the separation wall) on October 29, 1956, caused by the strict regulations of work and mobility: the Israeli army had shortened the curfew concerning allowed activities by several hours. Around 50 workers, “not realizing that the Israeli army had changed the curfew, [...]returned home from work outside the village and were all shot and killed on sight” (Braverman 12). This Kfar Kassem massacre is remembered when invoking curfews and measures reducing the mobility and the working rights of Palestinians after the Nakba. Long-term effects of these measures and crimes have led Palestinians to organize their own self-confinement and to renounce Israeli exploitation of land, since it puts them under physical threat and endangers them systematically.  

Garcette uses the term “heterochronia”, meaning the modification of the length and speed of the development of an organism, to characterize the ability of Israeli devices to circumscribe the evolution of Palestinian social and economic structures. She draws on a biological concept to make a powerful point: Israeli control doesn’t only squeeze Palestinian space; it also reshapes Palestinian time. Through permits, checkpoints, sudden closures, and a kind of organized uncertainty (what she calls “devices”), daily and seasonal life is broken into stop-start rhythms where waiting becomes part of the machinery of domination. For producers and businesses, this means living on shortened horizons—always planning for disruption. In the olive oil sector, the consequences are concrete: quality suffers, and market access is undermined, making long-term investment and stable economic routines hard to build. Heterochrony, here, names a politics of selective slowdown and acceleration that quietly narrows the possibilities of Palestinian social and economic development over time. 

Palestinian farmers are not only subject to state violence, but are also attacked by individuals or groups of Israeli settlers. According to the director of Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Ascherman, "the summer of 2008 [saw] a dramatic incline in the number of olive trees burnt, uprooted, and stolen by settlers". (Braverman 2). One specific case from December 2005 features a 14-year-old Israeli girl who was tried in court alongside five other girls for attacking olive trees. She confided to Braverman (Israel’s prosecutor in that year) that although she had nothing against the trees, she considers the land to be “theirs” because she was Israeli. Her defense attorney said to Braverman that her attack was a “fair enough […] early warning that now we are harming your trees, but next time we will harm you”. By separating humans and trees, the attorney euphemizes the attack, arguing that it “spares humans from the harsh treatment that is, instead, inflicted on trees” (Braverman 22). When discussing the attack, a Toronto board member of a local chapter of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization established by the Fifth Zionist Congress for purchasing land in “biblical Israel”, stated to Braverman in an interview in June 13, 2005 that “he would ‘gladly’ carpet-bomb a large crowd of ‘Arabs’”, and claims he is ashamed that Jewish people would attack trees. He goes as far as saying that “they should go after the people, not after their trees” (Braverman 23).  

However, as previously stated, there is a strong connection between the Palestinian people and their trees; an attack on the trees is a direct attack on the people. The sacralization of the trees by the JNF board member, alongside the apathy towards and dehumanization of the people, to say the least, begs questions about the settlers’ understanding of the land.  

What exactly is Israel doing to the land? According to Garcette “1,639,030 trees have thus been uprooted in Palestinian territories, among them 547,996 olive trees, between the years 2000 and 2008”. Meanwhile, since 1901, the JNF has planted over 240 million trees, most of which are European pines. While it is important to acknowledge the difference in the time spans between the two and the colonial nature of these actions, there is still an impressive activity of tree-planting the JNF. This has led Israel to pretend being, as political scientist Ghada Sasa explains, the only state in the world with a net gain of trees in the 21st century, and consequently to become the “Middle East’s chief environmental body” (Sasa 228). However, Israel’s pretended eco-friendly measures are to be understood in the context of its illegal occupation of land and its aim to normalize and justify apartheid and colonialism. Thus, their tree-planting activity can be qualified as “sustainability diplomacy” (Hughes et al. 6), rather than ecological advances.  

The planting of trees by the JNF replaces indigenous natural environments, thus rendering the land hostile for indigenous populations. According to essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh, “[w]ars of terraforming were biopolitical conflicts in which entire populations were subjected to forms of violence that included massive biological and ecological disruptions” (Ghosh 55). Terraforming in science fiction is the process of “transforming (a planet) so as to resemble the Earth, especially so that it can support human life.” (Oxford Languages). Israel, by planting non-native pines to Europeanize and Judaize the landscape, aims to terraform Palestine, supporting Israeli life by erasing Palestinian's’. By dehistoricizing Palestine through this form of re-forestation, Israel buries Palestinian identity and memory, curtailing return and resistance from Palestinians since the Nakba in 1948.  

Additionally, Israel has established several national parks and nature reserves within the territory. The infrastructures or “green colonies” are tactically located in regions like Jerusalem, which Israel claims as its capital, while part of it is still illegally occupied; the West Bank and Syrian Golan heights, inhabited by indigenous people and illegally occupied by Israel; the South of 1948 Palestine, where occurrences of massacres of Bedouin Palestinians have been reported; and the North of pre 1948 Palestine, which is again mostly inhabited by indigenous Palestinians.  

Meanwhile, the Central district and the Tel-Aviv district, which are inhabited respectively by 92% and 98% of Jewish and non-Palestinian people, are void of national parks and nature reserves. The strategic locations of the “green colonies” aim, according to Sasa’s analysis, to justify Palestinians’ and Syrians’ dispossession and seizure of their territories. Access to those colonies is limited to Israelis, who are the only ones allowed to build there. The names of the places, and the boards announcing them, are written exclusively in English and Hebrew as a means of impeaching remembrance of indigenous names. As Ghosh explains, the same system of naming was used by English settlers during the colonization of America and the genocide of its indigenous people. In the context of its apartheid, Israel only allows Jewish settlers to use the “reserved” territory.  

Similarly, Israel manages to produce solar energy in the occupied territories. This energy is then only redistributed within the state of Israel, while Palestinian solar panels are being destroyed. Israel also claims to have the best waste disposal system in the Middle Eastern region. Indeed, it has built several waste disposal factories, treating and eliminating toxic waste; it is, however located in the occupied West Bank and exposes Palestinian inhabitants to health hazards.  

Israel also claims to have reduced greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. However, it does not account for the emissions of bombs dropped on Gaza, which, in the first 120 days following October 7th, 2023, exceeded, according to social scientists Benjamin Neimark and Patrick Bigger, the annual emissions of 26 individual countries (Neimark and Bigger 5). While more recent data is lacking, this statistic only accounts for four months out of the 25 months of the ongoing genocide.  

Sustainability, as defined by the UN in 1987, is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Social Scientist Sara Salaza Hughes argues, however, that Israel’s environmental actions are inherently contradictory to this definition, since “Israeli ‘green’ technologies still invariably work to reassert Israeli control over Palestinian people and territory and to undermine their ability to exist into the future” (Hughes et al. 5). The environmental injustice committed by Israel against Palestinians begs the question: who is Israel sustainable for?  

Presenting itself as a leader in green technology globally, Israel ensures its future on the geopolitical map as an indispensable actor, thereby legitimizing its actions within the territory. The unconditional international acceptance of the JNF as an ecological NGO—while, in reality, it is the “principal Zionist tool for the colonization of Palestine” (Pappé 17)— shows how Israel normalizes apartheid through greenwashing and reinforces the sense of its entitlement to the land. This entitlement is justified by the Zionist discourse of “lazy Arabs,” asserting that “native peoples are not using the land efficiently”, thus framing Israel as a “legitimate steward of Palestinian lands” (Hughes et al. 2).  

“The best oils are the ones produced while the tree is under stress, and the stress of the Palestinian landscape creates a unique taste profile” (Qassis 16). 

This quote is an example of how Palestinian nature itself resists occupation and ecocide. Palestinian agronomist Saad Dagher, through personal communication with Braverman, described a picture he took of a fire set by settlers. In the picture, Israeli-planted trees are burning down, while indigenous flora stays intact. In another instance of land resistance, olive trees were able to grow again by slicing through Israeli-planted European pines in the ethnically cleansed village of Mujaydil. 

“In sum, the dismantlement of White supremacy (including Orientalism), patriarchy, and capitalism, as well as erosion of the human–nature dichotomy, are both a moral and environmental obligation” (Sasa 231).  

 Israel’s modification of the natural environment in Palestine stems from a will to erase Palestinian identity and subjugate the Palestinian people through the control of their agriculture, movement, and time management. The replacement of olive trees with pines is not a mere environmental decision; it is a colonial act inscribed within a global context of domination systems. What emerges through the analysis of olive cultivation, destruction, and substitution is a pattern of domination repeatedly used throughout history, which extends beyond the physical erasure of trees; it targets memory, identity, and futurity. Israel’s supposed ecological leadership conceals politics of dispossession that redefine the environment as a tool of control and legitimacy. By Europeanizing the Palestinian landscape, Israel not only seeks to uproot indigenous life but also to root itself symbolically and materially in a land it occupies.  

Works Cited

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