The developer of Rawabi, a new Palestinian city being built in the West Bank, said he will remove some 3,000 trees donated by the Jewish National Fund and replace them with indigenous olive trees, Palestinian news agency Ma'an reported Tuesday.
Bashar al-Masri said that the city's identity is meant to be Palestinian and that Israeli elements are trying "to manipulate the issue," according to the report.
Masri's move came in response to a scathing op-ed published by Ma'an a day earlier by Jewish Israeli-born convert to Islam and member of Fatah, Uri Davis. In the op-ed, he slammed the decision to accept the trees from an organization whose mission "is the 'redemption' of lands in 'Eretz Israel,' including Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza and beyond for Jewish settlement."
Davis further criticized the species chosen to be planted by the JNF. Non-indigenous pine trees, he said "add insult to injury." "Rather than plant indigenous" trees, he added, "the tree saplings planted by the JNF in the area designated for the Rawabi projects are typically political-Zionist pinera (conifers)."
Interestingly, there have been conifers in Israel since the Jurassic era. I think that might qualify as "indigenous."
The Gharqad tree is the Koran's "tree of the Jews" that will protect them when all the other trees and stones tell believing Muslims where Jews are hiding so the Jews can be slaughtered according to the will of Allah. Some identify it as a boxthorn.
But it appears that Davis believes that this heretical tree is the conifer.