A walking guide in one of these National Parks
will tell his group more than 200 million
trees were planted in the course of the 20th Century
but won’t relate survival rates as low
as 40%, or that Olive and Pistachio
were grubbed up to make way for fast-growing pines
and eucalypts dropping needles and oil-rich leaves
acidifying the soil, killing undergrowth
and almost all the flowers, reptiles and mammals
that used to grace the native countryside.
Although he might accept mistakes were made
later rectified by the indigenous
Aleppo pines, he won’t acknowledge they
were planted far beyond their previous range,
sustained by irrigation that degrades
underground aquifers; the main river
is down to 10% of its former flow.
Instead, he may boast of how 180
dams and reservoirs have been built that now
brood on the face of evaporating waters.
He may remind visitors from Central Europe
how like these forests are to those at home
and how Carmel National Park was nick-named
“Little Switzerland” by immigrants
but won’t mention half that Park was destroyed
and 44 lives lost in a forest fire
or the photos that showed a wadi
with blazing pines on one side planted by
the Jewish National Forest while
unscathed native trees grew on the other.
But as they wander down bare forest trails,
no matter how carefully he plans the route
there always come questions about the ruins,
particularly the one he dreads the most,
“What is that mosque doing here in this forest?”
Forced to explain there was an Arab village
confiscated, the land put to “better use,”
insidiously he continues stressing
tenuous links to Jewish settlements
abandoned many centuries ago.
He might even cite Bedouin partners in
“Greening the Negev,” without mentioning
they’ve been displaced from their villages
by force more than 100 times,
or that the latest studies have revealed
the heat-absorbing mass of forest plantings
has raised not lowered temperatures in the desert.
But he’ll never acknowledge that more than half
the Arab villages razed in the Nakba
are now hidden by forests in National Parks.
Now, fifty years after Mujaydil village
was ethnically cleansed, olive groves torched,
then hidden by pines, those alien trees,
diseased, dead or dying, fallen were found
split by olive shoots from ancient roots;
a lost sustainability of soil
networked in the ways that a people
have learned to live in and with the land
now holding out an olive branch to those
lost in a landscape they don’t understand.
Dave Wynne-Jones
Dave Wynne-Jones left teaching to gain an MA in creative writing at MMU, then wrote articles for outdoor magazines and organised expeditions for mountaineers. He’s published three books of mountaineering non-fiction and two poetry pamphlets. His poems have appeared in ten anthologies and numerous magazines including PN Review, & Dreamcatcher.