Published: 26 August 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
JUDY MALTZ: The not-for-profit behind the project hopes to plant 3,000 trees in the West Bank on land that appears to belong mainly to Palestinian farmers.
Looking south from the West Bank settlement of Har Bracha and across the valley, a large patch of green is conspicuous on the otherwise barren slope. The signpost reveals that it is a forest funded by a Norwegian Christian television station, Vision Norway. This forest is part of the Greening Israel Project.
The big bold letters at the bottom of the signpost identify the name of organisation behind this ambitious project: Hayovel. Founded and run by US evangelicals, Hayovel has for many years been strongly aligned with the Israeli settler movement.
Its plan is to plant 20,000 trees – equivalent to about 1,000 dunams, or 247 acres, of land – every year at sites “located throughout Israel’s central mountain range in the regions of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank],” according to the project website.
But this land is not owned by these evangelicals. Nor does it belong to the settlers of Har Bracha. Virtually the entire plot, according to one of Israel’s foremost experts on West Bank land, belongs to Palestinian farmers from the village of Burin, situated just east of the forest.
“In my 20 years of working in the West Bank, I have confronted innumerable instances of Jews stealing Palestinian land, but never before a case of Christians from the United States stealing Palestinian land,” said Kerem Navot founder Dror Etkes, whose nonprofit group monitors and researches Israeli land policy in the West Bank.
Etkes is able to make this determination based on information his organisation has elicited from the Civil Administration (the Israeli authority that carries out civilian policy in the West Bank) through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry, as well as aerial photos the organisation has commissioned over the years.
FULL STORY ‘Biblical Mandate’: The US Evangelicals Behind the Latest West Bank Land Grab (Haaretz)
Photo: The Greening Israel Project signpost in the West Bank, opposite from the settlement of Har Bracha (Judy Maltz)
