[News] Greenwashing Provides Cover for Zionist Settler-Colonialism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/greenwashing-provides-cover-for-zionist-settler-colonialism/>
Greenwashing
Provides Cover for Zionist Settler-Colonialism
8-10 minutesJanuary 31, 2022
------------------------------
Palestinian residents protest in the Naqab desert. (Photo: via
ActiveStills.org)

*By Omar Zahzah <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/omar-zahzah>*

It is a phrase
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/heritage-uprooted/7126> from a longer
piece <https://www.arabicnadwah.com/arabpoets/sumood-darwish.htm> by the
Palestinian nationalist poet Mahmoud Darwish that has been frequently cited
in standalone translation: “If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted
them, their oil would become tears.”

If the ancient trees were gifted with faculties comparable to those of
humans, they would be so overcome by the oppression faced by their
Indigenous stewards that their biological essence, their live preserving
gifts, would be irreversibly overrun by sorrow and despair.

But the olive trees don’t only need the gift of empathy to suffer the pains
of colonialism. Indeed, if they could bear witness to the insidious cruelty
by which the alien Zionist occupiers have weaponized the very Earth itself,
they would have even more reason to weep. Planting foreign and invasive
tree species has been a standard feature of Zionist settler-colonialism
since the first waves of ethnic cleansing that constitute the ongoing Nakba
began in 1948.

The advantages this process poses to the colonizers are at least threefold:
it provides a means of concealing Zionist war crimes; it prevents
Palestinians from returning to the homes from which they have been forcibly
displaced; and, of course, it changes the character of the landscape,
allowing for the sham Western/religious-colonial artifice Zionists seek to
install over Palestine to take root—literally, as it were.

As Rawan Nabil writes,

“In Palestine, settler-colonialism often appears overt and explicit, as
with the demolition and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and
neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. At the same time, Israel
deploys more subtle, sinister forms of erasure, attempting to replace the
culture and geography of Palestine with a reimagined Zionist ‘homeland’ so
that even the land itself becomes physically unrecognizable to its
Indigenous inhabitants.”

The Jewish National Fund, or JNF, an outsourced arm of the colonial Zionist
state, has been actively facilitating this process since 1948, cynically
fundraising under false pretenses for what they claim are “forestation”
efforts, but in reality amount to providing biological cover for colonial
ethnic cleansing. The JNF also provided political, financial and
intelligence support to the rampaging Zionist militias that slaughtered and
dispossessed Palestinians during the massacres that laid the foundation for
the so-called “founding” of the Israeli state.

As Yara Hawari explains,

“Of course, the primary aim of Israel’s tree-planting projects is not to
help the environment, but to steal and ethnically cleanse Palestinian land…
Indeed, the JNF has been using this tree-planting narrative to push forward
the theft of Palestinian land for decades. Founded before the state of
Israel, the JNF was tasked with acquiring land in Palestine for Jewish
settlement by any means possible. After Israel’s establishment, it worked
in tandem with the state to appropriate Palestinian land across the
so-called Green Line, often designating large swaths of land as national
parks and preventing Palestinians from returning to these lands.”

And this process of eco-colonization is not limited to the past. 46 out of
68 JNF parks and forests are directly on top of Palestinian villages. The
remainder, naturally, rest atop stolen land. Canada Park, a project funded
by JNF Canada, was built on the destruction and depopulation of three
villages: Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalu. The JNF is using fast-growing
invasive trees to actively displace Palestinians in al-Naqab. The newly
named forest of Yatir, fully funded by the JNF, is planted on top of
Al-Attir village in Al-Naqab, a clear embodiment of the Zionist state’s
active campaign to displace the people of Al-Attir deeper into the desert.

Hollow appropriation of variously Left-wing causes is a staple feature of
Zionism, which has reacted parasitically to various freedom movements
throughout history in order to better conceal its core purpose of
Palestinian genocide. Joseph Massad has shown
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190618-the-core-of-zionism-is-settler-colonialism-not-democracy/amp/>
how Zionists systematically appropriated the language of anti-colonial and
Civil Rights movements in order to “re-brand” Zionism as continuous with
liberation-focused political efforts by making a case for the Israeli
state’s non-existent, progressive bona fides. Palestinians are acutely
aware of this Zionist political pilfering. The environment is no exception.
The use of pseudo-environmentalist values to provide a smokescreen for
unmitigated settler-colonial dispossession has a name: greenwashing
<https://www.cjpme.org/fs_210>.

Greenwashing gives ethical cover to colonial Zionist brutality. It also
provides the rationale by which the JNF and various other pro-colonial
Zionist organizations, foundations and non-profits enjoy charitable status.
This charitable status allows the JNF to provide tax credits for donations,
meaning that up to 25% of their budget comes from the public’s tax dollars.
In other words, “charity” is being weaponized to facilitate ethnic
cleansing and genocide in real time.

For these reasons, it’s imperative that all of us living in North America
do our utmost to agitate for the revocation of the charitable status
enjoyed by organizations such as Regavim, the MZ Foundation, and the Hebron
Fund. Such organizations that fund Israeli settler communities (really,
colonizer communities are far more apt) in Palestine are able to do so in
large part thanks to North American donor funding. We, therefore, share a
serious responsibility to bring about an end to this subsidized violence by
virtue of our location.

As I type these sentences, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) is engaged
in solidarity demonstrations across the United States and Canada uplifting
Palestinian calls to Defund Racism and StopTheJNF, refrains from two
campaigns founded in Hebron and Al Naqab targeting the charitable status of
organizations bankrolling the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. On Sunday,
January 30, PYM Boston led
<https://twitter.com/palyouthmvmt/status/1487167251304304644?s=21> a
virtual teach-in and action, “Hands of Al Naqab/Hands off Palestine.” As
the Zionist state continues to displace Palestinians in Al Naqab and all of
Palestine, it is incumbent upon us to reject greenwashing and join the
fight to Defund Racism <https://defundracism.org/> and StoptheJNF
<https://www.stopthejnf.org/>.

Lest we forget, the narrator of Mahmoud Darwish’s “Identity Card”
<https://thepalestineproject.medium.com/the-mahmoud-darwish-poem-that-enraged-israeli-politicians-d7d1124ca05c>
also warned the Zionist regime to “beware” of the impacts of
colonially-imposed starvation, of the “rage” that would follow starvation
leaving nothing to eat but “my oppressor’s flesh.” State-sanctioned
dispossession and dehumanization realize their undoing in the very
limitlessness of their operations, which inspire the colonized to resist
anew in righteous anger.

This past year, Palestinians have risen up in just such righteous anger,
rejecting both the sham Oslo Accords (which liquidated Palestinian
political resistance for the establishment of the so-called Palestinian
Authority which is, despite its name, un-authorized by Israel to do much of
anything besides police and incarcerate its own people while
settler-colonialism continues unabated) and the relentless violence of the
colonial Israeli state. The Unity Intifada
<https://www.arabnews.com/node/1864156> is a proud testament to this.

As the Palestinian Youth Movement, we unabashedly support and uplift the
resistance of Palestinians from Al-Naqab, Sheikh Jarrah, and all of
occupied Palestine. We call on all people of conscience to oppose
greenwashing through the aforementioned initiatives.

The future belongs not to the colonizers, nor the corrupt bureaucrats who
have long since betrayed their people and cause.

It belongs to all of the Palestinians doing the unstoppable work of
securing liberation, stone by stone, chant by chant, from the river to the
sea.

*(Special thanks to May Darwaza for showing me the source of Darwish’s
much-circulated line about the olive trees.)*


- *Omar Zahzah is the Education and Advocacy Coordinator for Eyewitness
Palestine as well as a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and
the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).
Omar is also an independent scholar, writer and poet and holds a PhD in
Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.*
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