An AWESOME gift! 16 hours of the Golden Age of television with
shows like Johnny Carson, Dick Van Dyke and more! Only $11.83.
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/14703/c/186/a/504
-----------------------------------------------------------

The Carmel wildfire is burning all illusions in Israel
by: Max Blumenthal
writing from New York City, US, Live from Palestine

"When I look out my window today and see a tree standing
there, that tree gives me a greater sense of beauty and
personal delight than all the vast forests I have seen in
Switzerland or Scandinavia. Because every tree here was
planted by us."

-- David Ben Gurion, Memoirs

"Why are there so many Arabs here? Why didn't you chase
them away?"

-- David Ben Gurion during a visit to Nazareth, July 1948

Four days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
announced plans to place thousands of migrant workers in
a prison camp deep in the Negev Desert because, as he
claimed, they pose a "threat to the character of [the]
country," a burning tree trunk fell into a bus full of
Israeli Prison Service cadets, killing forty passengers.
The tree was among hundreds of thousands turned to ash by
the forest fire pouring across northern Israel, and which
now threatens to engulf outskirts of Haifa, Israel's third-
largest city. Over the last four days, more than 12,300
acres have burned in the Mount Carmel area, a devastating
swath of destruction in a country the size of New Jersey.
While the cause of the fire has not been established, it
has laid bare the myths of Israel's foundation.

Israelis are treating the fire as one of their greatest
tragedies in recent years. A friend who grew up in the
Haifa area told me over the weekend that he was devastated
by the images of destruction he saw on TV. His friend's
brother was among those who perished in the bus accident.
Though he is a dedicated Zionist who supported Netanyahu's
election bid in 2008, like so many Israelis, he was furious
at the response -- or lack of one -- by the government.
"Our leaders are complete idiots, but you already know
that," he told me. "They invested so much to prepare for
all kinds of crazy war scenarios but didn't do anything to
protect civilians from the basic things you are supposed
to take for granted."

On 3 December, Netanyahu informed the country, "We do not
have what it takes to put out the fire, but help is on the
way." To beat back the blaze, Bibi has had to beg for
assistance from his counterpart in Turkey, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and
Israel's American and British patrons. Israel is a wealthy
country which boasts to the world about its innovative
spirit -- its US-based lobbyists market it as a "Start-Up
Nation" -- but its performance during the forest fire
revealed the sad truth: its government has prioritized
offensive military capacity and occupation maintenance so
extensively that it has completely neglected the country's
infrastructure, emergency preparedness and most of all,
the general welfare of its citizens.

Beyond the embarrassing spectacle of Turkish supply
planes landing in Tel Aviv just six months after Israeli
commandoes massacred Turkish aid volunteers on the Gaza
Freedom Flotilla, or the confessions of impotence by the
hard-men Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the fire exposed
a terrible history that had been concealed by layers of
official mythology and piles of fallen pine needles.

"There are no facts"

Among the towns that have been evacuated is Ein Hod, a
bohemian artists' colony nestled in the hills to the north
and east of Haifa. This is not the first time Ein Hod was
evacuated, however. The first time was in 1948, when the
town's original Palestinian inhabitants were driven from
their homes by a manmade disaster known as the Nakba.

Most of the original inhabitants of Ein Hod, which was
called Ayn Hawd prior to the expulsions of '48, and was
continuously populated since the 12th century, were
expelled to refugee camps in Jordan and Jenin in the West
Bank. But a small and exceptionally resilient band of
residents fled to the hills, set up a makeshift camp and
watched as Jewish foreigners moved into their homes.

In 1953, a Romanian Dadaist sculptor named Marcel Janco
convinced the army not to bulldoze Ein Hod as it did the
scores of nearby Palestinian towns it had ethnically
cleansed five years prior. He proposed establishing an
art commune to generate tourism and contribute to the
culture of Zionism. Today, the rustic stone homes that
once belonged to Palestinians are quaint artist studios,
while the village mosque has been converted into an airy
bar called Bonanza. Visitors to the town are greeted at
the entrance by Benjamin Levy's "The Modest Couple in a
Sardine Can," a sculpture depicting a nude woman and a
suited gentleman in a sardine can, which was unveiled by
Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2001.

After the catastrophe of 1948, the original Palestinians
of Ayn Hawd set up their own village three kilometers
away from what is today known as Eid Hod. For decades the
villagers resisted attempts to dispossess them and were
surrounded by a fence during the 1970s to prevent them
from expanding according to natural growth. But they
finally won official recognition in 2005. This meant that
for the first time since the establishment of Israel they
could receive electricity and trash service. Meanwhile,
more than forty other Palestinian villages inside Israel
remain "unrecognized." The 80,000 or so residents of the
villages, which lay mostly in the Negev desert, are tax-
paying citizens of Israel. However, they have few rights;
their homes are routinely demolished to make way for
Jewish settlements and they are deprived of basic services.

I visited both Ein Hod and Ayn Hawd in June. When the
residents of the Jewish village Ein Hod saw me filming,
they reacted with a mixture of suspicion and hostility.
"I know what you're doing!" an elderly woman sneered at
me, insisting that I not film her. Inside the bar, I
asked patrons if the place was in fact a converted mosque.
"Yeah, but that's how all of Israel is," a woman from a
nearby kibbutz told me as she sipped on a beer. "This
whole country is built on top of Arab villages. So maybe
it's best to let bygones be bygones."

I provoked another annoyed reaction when I began filming a
tour guide leading a group of elderly Israelis around the
village. Speaking in Hebrew, the guide told the tourists
as she took them through the art studios that they were
inside "third generation houses" -- forget the Arabs who
lived in them for hundreds of years. In the studios I
noticed that much of the art being produced was Judaica
kitsch for sale to foreign tourists -- generic shtetl
scenes from the long lost, distant world immortalized in
films like Fiddler on the Roof.

-----------------------------------------------------------
YOUR VIDEO SNACK BAR
Top Viewed Videos...

1. All the Single Babies
http://c.gophercentral.com/Icgl

2. Celebrities: Before and After Make-Up
http://c.gophercentral.com/lhPb

3. Amos N´ Andy - In the IRS Office
http://c.gophercentral.com/DVhQ

4. The D-Day Invasion
http://c.gophercentral.com/DDAx

5. The Spanish Civil War
http://c.gophercentral.com/3K42

6. The Human Slinky
http://c.gophercentral.com/Wwa9


-----------------------------------------------------------

Later, before taking her group to the town's Hurdy Gurdy
museum, the guide mentioned a "welcoming committee" that
vetted potential residents. Presumably this was how Ein
Hod kept the pesky Arabs down the road from returning home.
That and the Absentee Property Law of 1950 which placed
all "abandoned" Arab property in the hands of the Jewish
National Fund and the Israeli Land Administration, a
provision that consolidated what the exiled Palestinian
member of the Israeli parliament Azmi Bishara called "the
largest armed robbery in history."

During a break, the tour guide pulled me aside and demanded
to know who I was. It was clear the villagers had grown
wary of curious outsiders. Introducing herself as Shuli
Linda Yarkon, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, the
tour guide told me she the leading authority on Ein Hod.
She said I had to allow her to review all the footage I
shot. She claimed that this would ensure that I not
mistranslate words she used like kibbush, a Hebrew term
that means "conquest" but is commonly used to refer to the
occupation of Palestine.

"So what about the conquest you mentioned?" I asked her.
"Why didn't you tell the tourists who lived in the houses
before 1948?" Visibly irritated, Yarkon remarked, "I've
concluded after years of research that there are really
no facts when you discuss this issue. There are only
narratives." She assured me that Ein Hod's Jewish popul-
ation maintained excellent relations with the expelled
residents: "Go ask them. They will tell you how they
feel."

So I did. After following a winding dirt road around a
hillside for several kilometers, I was inside Ayn Hawd,
the Palestinian village. There was no installation art
here, just ramshackle houses, dirt roads, a mosque with
a tall minaret and lots of kids playing in the streets.
Almost immediately some of the town's residents appeared
from their homes to greet me. Abu al-Hisa Moein, a village
council member and schoolteacher, invited me to spend the
rest of the afternoon with his family on a patio beside
his home, which appeared newer and more stately than those
of his neighbors. He told me his ancestors arrived in the
village more than 700 years ago from what is now Iraq. His
relatives who were expelled to Jenin in 1948 told him they
would be too angry to even lay eyes their former homes with
the new occupants inside. When I mentioned the bar built
into the old mosque, Moein shook his head in disgust. "It's
very bad. It's an insult," he said.

Moein took me inside his home for a tour, showing me the
spacious, immaculately clean parlor and the picture window
with a sweeping view of the valley below. He had built the
whole place, he said with pride. Down a hall, his 13-year-
old daughter, Ansam, was reclining on the floor of her room
reading John Knowles' classic bildungsroman, A Separate
Peace. She leapt to attention when I entered and spent the
next ten minutes showing me her library of literature. With
night setting in, Moein and his family took me back on the
patio. There, he unfurled a map of Mandate-era Palestine
and ran his fingers over the names of scores of villages
destroyed on the coast between Jaffa and Haifa by Zionist
forces in 1948. He pointed to towns like Kafr Saba, Qaqun,
al-Tira and Tantura, the site of a horrific massacre of
unarmed Palestinian prisoners on the beach just one
month after the Deir Yassin massacre. Moein was a history
teacher, but Israel had forbidden him from discussing
these events in his classroom, and is in the process of
criminalizing any public observance of them.

As darkness blanketed the hills, I realized that I had lost
track of time. I told Moein that I needed to get back to
Tel Aviv. With that, his wife rushed into the house and
gathered a bundle of grapes she had picked from a tree in
the family's yard, packing it for me in some tupperware
from their kitchen. Then Moein walked me to my car and
hugged me goodbye.

Redeeming the land

By now, both Ein Hod and Ayd Hawd are nearly empty. Most
of their residents have fled for safer ground while the
thousands of pine trees planted to provide Ein Hod's
artists with a sense of solitude are reduced to ash. As
the trees burn, the fire exposes another dimension of
Israel's foundation that it has attempted to bury.

The pine trees themselves were instruments of concealment,
strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF)
on the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the
Zionist militias evacuated and destroyed in 1948. With
forests sprouting up where towns once stood, those who
had been expelled would have nothing to come back to.
Meanwhile, to outsiders beholding the strangely Alpine
landscape of northern Israel for the first time, it seemed
as though the Palestinians had never existed. And that was
exactly the impression the JNF intended to create. The
practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists
referred to as "redeeming the land" was in fact the
ultimate form of greenwashing.

Described by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe as "the quint-
essential Zionist colonialist," the first director of the
JNF, Yossef Weitz, was a ruthless ideologue who helped
orchestrate the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.
Weitz notoriously declared "It must be clear that there
is no room in the country for both peoples ... If the
Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious
for us ... The only solution is a Land of Israel ...
without Arabs ... There is no way but to transfer the
Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer
all of them, save perhaps for [the Palestinian Arabs of]
Bethlehem, Nazareth and the old Jerusalem. Not one village
must be left, not one tribe."

After Weitz's wishes were fulfilled, the JNF planted
hundreds of thousands of trees over freshly destroyed
Palestinian villages like al-Tira, helping to establish
the Carmel National Park. An area on the south slope of
Mount Carmel so closely resembled the landscape of the
Swiss Alps that it was nicknamed "Little Switzerland."
Of course, the nonindigenous trees of the JNF were poorly
suited to the environment in Palestine. Most of the
saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply
do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere,
needles from the pine trees have killed native plant
species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have
seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF's trees go up like
tinder in the dry heat.

But it seems that nothing can stop the JNF's drive to
"green" the land. Even in the parched Negev desert, the
JNF is advancing plans to plant one million trees in a
plot called "GOD TV Forest." To accomplish the highly
unusual feat of foresting a desert, the Israel Land
Administration has ordered the expulsion of the Bedouin
unrecognized village of al-Araqib, home to hundreds of
Israeli citizens who have lived in the area for more
than 100 years and who have served in the army's frontline
tracker units.

The Israeli government has tried time and again to force
the people of al-Araqib into an American Indian reservation-
style "development town," but they have refused. The
village has been razed to the ground by bulldozers on eight
occasions, but each time the residents have rebuilt their
homes, hoping to outlast a ruthless campaign to destroy
their way of life.

What about the strange name for the proposed forest? It
is a reference to GOD TV, a radical right-wing evangelical
Christian broadcasting network that hosts faith-based
fraudsters like Creflo Dollar and rapture-ready fanatics
like Rory and Wendy Alec.

And why is GOD TV bankrolling the JNF's ethnic cleansing
campaign in the Negev desert? According to its website,
"GOD TV is planting over ONE MILLION TREES across the
Holy Land as a miraculous sign to Israel and to the world
that Jesus is coming soon."

In his 1970 short fiction story "Facing the Forest," the
famed Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua portrayed a mute
Palestinian forest watchman who burns down a JNF forest to
reveal the hidden ruins of his former village. Forty years
later, as the JNF forests around Mount Carmel burn, right-
wing Israeli lawmakers have demanded a search for the Arab
who must have sparked the blaze, even though there is no
firm evidence about the cause of the fire. Michael Ben Ari,
a extremist Member of Knesset from the National Union
Party, called for "the whole Shin Bet" -- Israel's domestic
intelligence agency -- to be mobilized to investigate what
the right-wing media outlet Arutz Sheva said "may turn out
to be the worst terror attack in Israel's history."

------------------------------------------------------------

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and best-
selling author. His articles and video documentaries have
appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The
Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com,
Al-Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a
writing fellow for the Nation Institute. His book,
Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered
The Party, is a New York Times and Los Angeles Times
bestseller.

------------------------------------------------------------
Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!
------------------------------------------------------------
Check out Political Videos on the Net at evtv1.com
http://www.evtv1.com/Politics.aspx
------------------------------------------------------------