Israel’s Seedlings of Discontent

One of Israel’s most venerated state-building agencies has come under attack from environmentalists, who say the organization’s massive tree-planting efforts have actually harmed the very land it meant to reclaim.

The Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund in 1901 with a mandate to buy land in what was then Palestine as the first step toward creating the Jewish state. Few organizations played a greater role in building Israel or hold a more powerful appeal for Jews around the world. Diaspora Jews have been able to feel a part of the Zionist enterprise by buying a tree through the fund and having it planted on their behalf.

But in a small nation beset by the problems of rapid population growth, urban sprawl, air and water pollution and an acute water shortage, even powerful institutions such as the fund are coming under greater scrutiny from a public increasingly concerned about environmental degradation.

“I don’t mind criticism,” said Yehiel Leket, the fund’s chairman. But environmentalists who recently petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the fund be required to submit its forestry plans for public review “have a will to crucify us,” he said.

In the past 100 years, the fund has developed 250,000 acres of land and planted more than 200 million trees. It controls most of Israel’s nonagricultural open spaces and spends $50 million a year, most of it raised from Jews around the world, to maintain its properties and plant new forests. No one disputes that the fund’s pine forests--sometimes built over the bulldozed ruins of Palestinian villages--have transformed Israel’s harsh landscape, softening rocky crags from the hills outside Jerusalem to the peaks of the Galilee in the north.

Even after Israel became a state, the government continued to leave forestry largely to the fund. Over the years, the organization has also taken on infrastructure projects, such as building reservoirs, recreation areas and memorials.

But environmentalists say that the public has paid dearly for the government’s willingness to leave it up to the fund to decide where, what and how it will plant. “The JNF treats open space as if it were agricultural land,” said Zev Naveh, a professor emeritus of landscape ecology at Haifa’s Technion University. “They plow, burn and spray it. Nobody can control them.”

Last week, the Supreme Court sided with the environmentalists. In a stinging rebuke for the fund, a three-member panel ruled that it must give government planning bodies detailed reports on any new forests that it proposes.

The court ruled that the fund cannot operate as a “state within a state” and that the public must be allowed to comment on its plans and have a chance to demand changes. It gave the fund six months to comply with the order.

“To enclose a balcony, one must announce the intention in public and obtain permission,” Justice Mishael Chesin wrote, “whereas to plan a forest on thousands of dunams [quarter-acres] or destroy trees does not require permission and is done without the public knowing or having the chance to express its opinion.”

The ruling came on a petition brought by the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, which describes itself as the nation’s largest independent environmental organization. The group charged that the fund “acts within the forestation lands as if they were its private holding,” has repeatedly damaged the native landscape and, in some instances, endangered water resources by clearing land with bulldozers, pesticides and controlled burns.

The fund’s long-standing practice of planting mostly single-species forests--until recent years, usually pine--was disastrous, according to experts who testified on the environmental group’s behalf. Millions of the planted trees have succumbed to forest fires and disease--plagues that would have been limited had there been more diversity in the plantings, the experts argued.

Leket, the fund chairman, rejected the group’s accusations. The court, he pointed out, did not rule on the fund’s forestry practices, only on the issue of whether it must submit plans to public agencies of what it intends to plant. The Israel Union for Environmental Defense, he charged, is a radical group whose philosophy “is that we shouldn’t plant at all.”

Nonsense, said Philip Warburg, executive director of the union. His organization, Warburg said, believes in environmentally sustainable development and plantings that emphasize the use of native species. Its quarrel with the fund is over the secrecy of its decision-making process.

“The JNF has been given more license than many other entities by virtue of its very prominent history as a state-building organization,” he said. “This court ruling makes it very clear that the JNF needs to be treated according to the same principles of accountability and transparency that government bodies demand of all other agencies carrying out major government activities.”

Environmental awareness in Israel “has increased substantially in the last half-decade, partly because the problems are so serious,” Warburg said. “People are realizing that these problems are not luxuries that can be delayed. Despite all the security pressures facing Israel, the public is demanding a quality of life commensurate with the country’s standard of living.”

When the Jewish National Fund began its work, the priority was the rapid purchase and development of land as Jews tried to establish their claim here “goat by goat, dunam by dunam,” as early Zionists advocated.

Pine forests were planted because they grew quickly and required little water. Arab villages were bulldozed and ground leveled.

In such an atmosphere, “the Jewish National Fund thought that they could plant any tree they wanted and make any change they wanted,” said Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli author who has written extensively on the battle for land between Arabs and Jews. “They made so many environmental mistakes.”

Leket admits mistakes were made in the past but insists that the fund today works closely with the U.S. Forest Service and practices environmentally sound forestry.

“Until now, we have planted 220 million trees in Israel,” Leket said. “Imagine the country without them.” The fund, he said, is still considering whether to ask the full Supreme Court for a review of the three-member panel’s decision.