Sometimes I get carried away, and write silly stuff. Other times I am
thoughtful...and write silly stuff.
I've been fighting with my computer...and my computer is winning. So
I wrote the annual Christmas Letter, about 2 pages of family chatter.
I've tried not writing it in the past, but along about this time of
the month I receive calls, "Grandpa, don't forget to send me a
Christmas letter". What can I say, my fans want me.
For years I swore I'd never bore the family with an annual letter. I
had two aunts and uncles who wrote short novels each year, expounding
upon all of the good deeds they'd done in the name of the Lord. But
after Cathy and I had been married a year or two, I decided to send
out a more newsy sort of a letter, under the guise of a Christmas
letter. Each year has its own topic. This year is the retirement of
our old faithful friend, our 2003 Ford Sport Trac. After 318 thousand
miles, she's come to the end of dependability. We keep her as our
ranch truck, but she has earned a lighter schedule than the 13 years
we pounded the roads with her.
I have a file with all the letters I've written since 1995, the year
we moved here. Cathy has a file with another 8 letters dating back to
1987. Actually it is fun to read back through the older letters. We
wind up saying things like, "Did that really happen so many years
ago?" It is sort of a family running record. And it's interesting
that when I read an old letter, I begin remembering events that had
totally slipped from my mind.
And now it is time to eat my dinner.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/3/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's an interesting, if unexpected response.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2017 6:31 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] In age of forest fires,
Israel’s law against Palestinian goats proves self-inflicted wound for
Zionism
So God created Adam in His image, and took from Adam a rib out of which He
created Eve.
If that were true, then the result appears as if God had been deep into the
Honey Mead.
Mankind, regardless of when in Time, or regardless of color, or religion,
has always had a base, ugly nature. And yet, sensing that Humans do also
have a higher nature, our religions call out for a "Change of Heart".
The evidence strongly points to the creation of God by Man, in the effort to
extend to all of Mankind the hope that we can overcome our gross nature, and
be Earth's Managers rather than her destroyers.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/2/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This article may seem unimportant to you. But many people whom I have
loved, contributed money for those pine trees that the author
describes. We, everyone who is Jewish, everyone who supported Israel
after the Holocaust, believed what we were told, - that Palestine was
a desert, that the Arabs lived in dusty, poverty stricken villages,
that the Jews would reclaim the land, that we were paying for trees to
help them do that. We didn't know, and most of the people who believed
this, (if they were alive today still would not), that the trees were
planted to camouflage the destruction of villages and to increase the
acidity of the soil so that all the olive trees and fruit trees that
were native to the region, could not grow. We were so easily manipulated,
so credulous.
Miriam
Mondoweiss
In age of forest fires, Israel’s law against Palestinian goats proves
self-inflicted wound for Zionism Jonathan Cook on December 1, 2017
Black goat (Photo: Béria L. Rodríguez @ Wikimedia Commons)
A ban by Israel on herding black goats – on the pretext they cause
environmental damage – is to be repealed after nearly seven decades of
enforcement that has decimated the pastoral traditions of Palestinian
communities.
The Israeli government appears to have finally conceded that, in an
age of climate change, the threat of forest fires to Israeli
communities is rapidly growing in the goats’ absence.
The goats traditionally cleared undergrowth, which has become a
tinderbox as Israel experiences ever longer and hotter summer
droughts. Exactly a year ago, Israel was hit by more than 1,500 fires that
caused widespread damage.
The story of the lowly black goat, which has been almost eliminated
from Israel, is not simply one of unintended consequences. It serves
as a parable for the delusions and self-destructiveness of a Zionism
bent on erasing Palestinians and creating a slice of Europe in the Middle
East.
The 1950 Plant Protection Law, one of Israel’s earliest measures, was
introduced as a way to outlaw the black goat, also known as the Syrian
goat, from large areas of the country. The goats had been the
lifeblood of Bedouin farming communities.
At the time officials declared that the goat was damaging vegetation,
especially millions of pine saplings recently planted as forests.
The trees were fulfilling an important Zionist mission, in the eyes of
Israel’s founding fathers. They were there to conceal the rubble of
more than 530 Palestinian villages the new state had set about
destroying and prevent the return of some 750,000 Palestinians who
were expelled during the
1948 war that founded Israel – what Palestinians call the Nakba,
Arabic for “Catastrophe”.
Close by the ruins of the villages, Israel established hundreds of
exclusively Jewish communities like the kibbutz and moshav to farm the
former lands of the Palestinian refugees.
Both the ban on goats and the mass planting of European pines were
part of Zionism’s efforts to sell the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians
as “environmentalism” – a supposedly green agenda that is now being
exposed as a sham.
Planting pine forests
Jews around the world were encouraged to drop pennies into charitable
“blue boxes” as a donation to help the young state “redeem the land”.
In fact, the money was being mostly used to plant pine forests over
the razed Palestinians villages, making it impossible for the refugees
to return and rebuild their homes.
Additionally, the pine was useful because it was fast-growing and
evergreen, shrouding in darkness all year evidence of the ethnic
cleansing committed during Israel’s creation. And the forests played a
psychological role, transforming the landscape in ways designed to
make it look familiar to recent European immigrants and ease their
homesickness.
Finally, the falling pine needles acidified the soil, leaving it all
but impossible for indigenous trees to compete. These native species –
including the olive, citrus, almond, walnut, pomegranate, cherry,
carob and mulberry – were a vital component of the diet of Palestinian
rural communities. Their replacement by the pine was intended to make
it even harder for Palestinian refugees to re-establish their
communities.
In charge of planting and maintaining these forests was the Jewish
National Fund, an internationally recognised Zionist charity.
Paradoxically, its website extols its work in Israel as “innovators in
ecological development and pioneers in afforestation and fire
prevention”. The JNF claims to have planted some 250 million trees across
Israel.
In an indication of Israel’s success is selling these colonisation
policies as environmentalism, the United Nations lists the JNF as
having expertise in climate change, forestry, water management and
human settlements. The UN also allows the organisation to sponsor
panels and workshops at UN conferences around the world.
In September the JNF attended the UN Convention to Combat
Desertification, where, it noted, it would be “presenting its
activities in creating a greener world”.
Jewish farmer-warriors
The 1950 legislation, also known as the Goat Damage Law, continued
Israel’s land colonisation policies – this time, not against the
Palestinian refugees, but against the small number of Palestinian
communities that had survived the Nakba.
By the end of the 1948 war, some 150,000 Palestinians were still
clinging to their communities, chiefly in the north, in the Galilee,
and in the south, in the semi-desert Negev, or Naqab. In 1952, under
international pressure, these Palestinians were given citizenship.
Many of the surviving Palestinian communities knew little aside from
an agriculture their ancestors had practised in the region for
generations. But Zionism’s credo – that “Hebrew labor” would allow
Jews to “make the desert bloom” and remake themselves as
farmer-warrior “Sabras” – required that Palestinians be displaced from
farming land.
Estimates are that some 70 percent of the land belonging to
Palestinian communities in Israel was seized by the state – and is now
held in trust for Jews around the world. Deprived of land and access
to cheap water for agriculture, most Palestinian citizens were forced
to become casual laborers, many of them working on building sites in the
country’s center.
But one group was seen as a particular threat to the new Zionist ethos
– and especially hard to turn into a captive labour force. The Bedouin
were located in remote locations in the Galilee’s hills and the dusty
plains of the Negev, and their pastoral way of life, herding goats and
sheep, made it hard for Israel to control them.
‘Dunam after dunam’
The connection between the land and the goats – and the central role
both played in maintaining Palestinian identity and reinforcing a
tradition of “sumud”, or steadfastness – was identified early on by
the Zionist movement.
One of its early slogans, referring to an Ottoman unit of land
measurement, was “dunam after dunam, goat after goat”. The goal was to
take Palestine piece by piece, so incrementally and quietly it would
pass unnoticed in the rest of the world.
After the Nakba, Israel turned to aggressive containment policies
against the Bedouin who had not been expelled outside the state’s new
borders. These policies focused on both their lands and herds.
In 1965, the year before military rule over Palestinian citizens
ended, a Planning and Building Law de-recognised almost all Bedouin
communities.
Their homes were declared illegal and they were denied all public
services.
Israel’s goal was to pen the Bedouin up in a handful of urbanised
“townships”, forcing them to abandon agriculture and become casual
labourers in a Jewish economy, like other Palestinian citizens.
The 1950 Plant Protection Law struck an especially hard blow against
the Bedouin. The black goats supplied them with milk for their own use
and for sale, and the hides were used for tents and blankets.
As agriculture minister in the late 1970s, Ariel Sharon stepped up the
campaign against the Bedouin – and similarly preferred to veil his
policies as a bogus concern about ecology.
In his case, he had a private investment in the state’s success in
“Judaising” the Negev and getting rid of most of the Bedouin: in 1972
he had acquired a vast ranch there, covering 4 sq km.
The land had formerly belonged to refugees from the destroyed
Palestinian village of Houg, now imprisoned in Gaza. Palestinian
physician and author Hatim Kanaaneh notes that the village’s only
remaining structure, the mosque, was “serving as the pen for
[Sharon’s] Arabian thoroughbred horses”.
The Green Patrol
Five years after be bought Sycamore ranch, Sharon created the “Green
Patrol”, a paramilitary unit of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority,
whose tasks included seizing and slaughtering the Bedouin’s black goats.
Palestinian community activist Maha Qupty notes that in the first
three years of the Green Patrol’s operations, the number of black
goats was slashed by 60 percent, from 220,000 to 80,000. The patrol’s
practices were so brutal that an official watchdog, the State
Comptroller, censured the unit in his 1980 report.
The number of goats in Israel has fallen much further in recent years.
A report in the Haaretz newspaper noted that by 2013 there were only
2,000 goats still grazing in and around the vast Carmel forest, next
to Haifa, down from 15,000 before the Green Patrol’s establishment.
And it was in that same Carmel Ridge that the danger posed by the goats’
enforced disappearance first became apparent.
The extensive forest hugging the slopes of the Carmel Ridge was
planted to enforce and conceal the expulsion of several Palestinian
villages. But in
2010 the forest was engulfed in flames that ultimately claimed the
lives of
44 people. The majority were warders travelling to Damun prison, where
Palestinian political prisoners are held outside the occupied
territories in violation of international law.
The fire, which raged for four days, required the evacuation of 17,000
people from their homes, including from sections of Haifa.
That blaze was a prelude to much more widespread fires a year ago, at
the end of a long dry summer. Some 1,700 fires were reported across
Israel and the West Bank, many of them in the forests Israel had
planted over the destroyed villages. Haifa was again badly damaged.
Zionism’s self-inflicted wounds
In both the 2010 and 2016 forest fire outbreaks, Palestinian citizens
were accused by police and government officials of being responsible,
despite a dearth of evidence – and convictions – to back up such claims.
Allegations of arson were a useful deflection from the reality: that
the fires were a Zionist own goal. The danger posed by planting
unsuitable European pine forests in the arid conditions of the Middle
East had been aggravated by longer summers, as climate change kicked
in, and by the destruction of the black goats. They had cleared the
vegetation around the trees that prevented the fires from quickly
spreading.
In fact, there had been warnings that these pine forests were a fire
hazard long before the advent of significant climate change. Nearly 20
years ago, I visited a kibbutz on the edge of the Carmel Ridge where
there had been a recent fire.
Nir Etzion sits on the agricultural lands of Ayn Hawd, which was a
rare example of a Palestinian village that had escaped destruction –
in its case, to be reinvented as a Jewish artists’ colony under a similar
name, Ein Hod.
The staff at Nir Etzion told me a familiar and paranoid tale: that
internal Palestinian refugees, living close by, had started the fire
to drive them from their kibbutz. The kibbutzniks overlooked the fact
that the refugees themselves were put in much graver danger by the fire.
As I recounted in my contribution to a book of essays, Catastrophe
Remembered, experts were clear even then that the European pine
forests on the Carmel Ridge were dangerous in the region’s dry
conditions.
‘Repair historic injustice’
But until this month, the dreams of the Zionist movement – of
disappearing all traces of a Palestine that existed before Israel’s
creation – had proved far more potent than the danger of forest fires.
Paradoxically, it has taken Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian member of the
Israeli parliament, to pry his colleagues from their delusions and
face up to the reality of climate change.
Zahalka is the moving force behind the effort to repeal the 1950 law,
justifying its revocation on a study by a good Zionist institution –
the Technion, Israel’s renowned technical university. Its research has
confirmed a wisdom that was obvious to generations of Palestinian
farmers: that the goats graze on dry bushes and shrubs, and thereby
suppress the risk of fires.
Zahalka has stated that the repeal of the 1950 law will “restore the
goat’s lost honor” and “repair a historic injustice” for Palestinian
farmers.
Zahalka has won backing from the agriculture minister, Uri Ariel, and
Ayelet Shaked, the justice minister. Both are tightly linked to the
settler movement, and Ariel is a director of the JNF.
But faced with the scientific evidence and the threat of more fires,
Ariel has climbed down. “Goats are an important factor in fire
prevention, and we want to encourage the act of grazing,” he now says.
Sadly, it has taken Israeli governments nearly 70 years to reverse
their policy of destroying the black goat – a policy that
intentionally sought to wreck Palestinian agriculture, and with it
Palestinian communities, heritage and identity.