Showing posts with label Arab Group for the Protection of Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arab Group for the Protection of Nature. Show all posts

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Last week I noted the absurd claim by the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature that Israel has destroyed 3 million trees between 2000-2012. 

It turns out that this group, founded in 2003, just started a major anti-Israel campaign - probably to attract lots of money from the EU which loves funding any anti-Israel organization.

They published a series of infographics to push a lot of lies.

The entire series is based on the lie that today's Palestinian Arabs are related to the Canaanites, so they discuss the thousands of years of history of the olive tree in the region, pretending that this has something to do with modern Palestinians. 

Of course, the Jews in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel also cultivated olive way before anyone ever heard of Palestinians. Olives are a major theme in the Hebrew scriptures. Ancient olive presses built by Jews can be found throughout the Land of Israel. 

They don't want to mention that!


This is not true. The agricultural sector as a whole (including cereals) is less than 5% of the Palestinian GDP, and olives are about 25% of that (Oxfam), so the olive sector is about 1% of the Palestinian economy. That is a far cry from 14%.

In fact, Palestinians spend far more on paying terrorists and their families than they earn from profits of olive trees.




It is true that the Jaffa orange was not a Zionist invention. But the Zionists are the ones to turn it into a major export.

In 1939, the majority of orange exports from Palestine came from Jews, not Arabs! The Jewish sector outgrew the Arab sector starting in 1933. And the exports were always mostly from the Jewish orange growers, as these articles from 1922 and 1935 show.





Most of the forests planted by the JNF were pine forests, and pine forests have been in the region for thousands of years. 

And guess who decimated those forests? The Arabs who lived there!

1881 Survey of Western Palestine:


From Underground Jerusalem: An Account of Some of the Principal Difficulties Encountered in Its Exploration and the Results Obtained. With a Narrative of an Expedition Through the Jordan Valley and a Visit to the Samaritans, by Sir Charles Warren, 1876:

And as for cypress trees:

 The Popular Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature, 1856:
The tall cypress only exists in Palestine, as cultivated by man in gardens, and in cemeteries, and other open places of towns. 


Samih al-Qasim was not an ancient Palestinian poet - he died in 2014. 

Psalms mention olive trees a number of times - and they were written quite a long time before any Palestinian poets talked about them. 

The entire holiday of Chanukah is centered around a miracle of olive oil! 

The lies just keep on coming. 

Of course, this group has nothing negative to say about the current Palestinian penchant for setting fires against Israeli lands they consider to be Palestinian, or the history of their destroying Jewish crops that continues today. Their concern for nature is curiously partisan.

And make no mistake - the desire to separate Jews from the Land of Israel by pretending that they have no history there and that they have no love of the land is pure antisemitism. 







Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, March 16, 2023




I saw this in the Jordan Times:

 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.






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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