Planting and Uprooting Natures: The Judaization of the Arab Landscape in Israel through Afforestation

Abstract: In this thesis I examine the forest as the nexus of social and environmental worlds in Israel. By exploring the history of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and afforestation, I synthesize the given literature using a lens of human ecology to delve into the cultural, social, political, and ecological processes by which afforestation is simultaneously a tool of nation-building and a mechanism of ethno-nationalist dominance. The construction of a symbolic and material world through afforestation plants one nature, the Jewish narrative, while uprooting another nature, that of the Arab social and environmental landscape. This process materializes through relations of power. The case study of the Bedouin village of Al Arakib and the GOD TV Forest in the Negev further demonstrates this socio-ecological relationship where narratives of landscape and identity collide within these afforested spaces. Trees planted by the JNF in Israel are expressions of national territorial belonging and redemption, yet they are also experienced as tools of socio-ecological spatial organization and control.