Sunday, March 19, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
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.
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%.
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!
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.
And as for cypress trees:
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.
