Amid the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israeli forces, life sprouts from the branches of newly-planted trees. While the Israeli government might suggest that this is nature reclaiming old habitat, much of this process is unnatural and predates the ongoing war in Gaza. Spaces formerly inhabited by Palestinians and their olive groves have been cleared by Israeli forces in many locations, and new trees — in many cases not native to the area — have been planted by the Jewish National Fund, a nonprofit founded in 1901 to develop land for Jewish settlement.

The Aleppo pine, for instance, is a fast-growing species found throughout the western Mediterranean, Greece and parts of the Levant, including northeastern portions of historical Palestine. But it has now become so widespread in Israel and Palestine that many environmentalists have blamed devastating wildfires on its unnatural proliferation. According to their research, the Aleppo pine's highly flammable leaves and cones have increased the risks of fire. Projects by Israeli nonprofits to introduce this species and other non-native trees, in other words, may not be conducive to their stated mission of "making the desert bloom."

Indeed, some scholars and activists critical of Israeli government policies — and especially of the military campaign that has reportedly killed at least 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza and displaced millions more — view these tree-planting projects as another weapon used by colonists against the native land and people.

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"This idea of 'making the desert bloom,' along with denying access to food and water, releasing toxins in the air by bombing Gaza, is very much rooted in the old colonial logic of enacting indirect death and destruction," said Ameera Kawash, a Palestinian-Iraqi-American journalist. "This is part of a massive state-building project which is also rooted in greenwashing strategies and which goes back to the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people [in 1948] and appropriation of four million acres of land. It's ecocide."

Ecocide is not an officially recognized crime under international law, as is genocide, but activists and activists say its consequences can have similar consequences. Ecocide is defined by experts as a "wanton" act of destruction, carried out with "reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated."

Island nations like Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu have formally petitioned the International Criminal Court to consider ecocide a crime, and many experts draw parallels between the destruction of people and the destruction of nature, arguing that the latter is an integral part of achieving the former. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many scholars argue, the destruction and alteration of the natural environment not only deprives Palestinians of resources they need to survive, but also erases evidence of their historical existence or relegates it to the distant past.

The tactics used during the Nakba of 1948 — deforestation and afforestation, cutting off water supplies, deadly raids on Palestinian communities — are still being applied today.

During the course of the Nakba, the........

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