Since 2000, Israel has “uprooted, poisoned, burnt and bombed” over three million fruit trees in Palestine, according to the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), which launched an awareness-raising campaign on Monday concerned with safeguarding Palestinian trees.Under the hashtags #TreesforPalestine and Palestine’s Trees, the six-week campaign will use social media platforms to narrate the Palestinian agricultural struggle using a variety of visual, audio and written material based on extensive research efforts and including testimonies from Palestinian farmers, according to an APN statement sent to The Jordan Times.
That is an astoundingly improbable statistic. But when I went to the website of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, I saw that the claim was even more ridiculous:
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, more than 3 million trees, mostly olive and citrus trees, were uprooted by Israeli forces between 2000 and 2012.
That would mean that Israel destroyed nearly 700 trees every single day for 12 years!
I cannot find here the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture made that claim. If they did, one would expect them to have widely publicized it. But a 2013 talk by that ministry in Europe on the "Forests of Palestine" doesn't say a word about this.
I did find a 2006 report by the ministry that said that since 2000, "23.2% of the tree horticulture holdings were subjected to damage due to Israeli measures in the Palestinian Territory; in the West Bank the percentage was 22.5% and in Gaza Strip, 33.7%." No source is given and neither is the definition of "damage," which might mean "within three miles of tear gas." Anyway, if that was the source, the number of damaged trees would be closer to four million!
The usual statistic that Israel haters use is 800,000 trees destroyed - but since 1967, not 2000. See this poster (detail) from Visualizing Palestine:
The source given is "Olive Harvest Fact Sheet October 2011, page 2" which they claim is from Oxfam but it is really from OCHA.
Guess what? Even that source doesn't say anything close to what they claim!
To be sure, Israel has uprooted thousands of trees - mostly while building the security barrier and by creating a buffer zone in Gaza where terrorists couldn't hide. Nobody mentions that when Israel uprooted olive trees for the security barrier, they replanted them!
Farmers who cultivate olive and other fruit trees growing within the Security Fence can designate a new site to which the trees will be relocated which has no free access constraints. Contractors assigned by The Ministry of Defense to build the Security Fence are responsible for carefully uprooting and replanting the trees. So far over 60,000 olive trees have been relocated in accordance with this procedure. It should be noted that olive trees require scarce treatment, only three weeks a year.
The haters pretend to count the trees uprooted - but they don't count the trees replanted!
As usual, this propaganda doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Sources are made up or wildly misquoted. And no reporter bothers to do even a modicum of fact-checking.
Which means that Palestinians have learned that lying pays.
