‘A Land of Rock, Marshes and Sand’? Forests, Orchards and Legal Inequality in Israel/Palestine
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663913493154 |
| Author | Tobias Kelly |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
Review Essay
Social & Legal Studies
22(4) 575–581
‘A Land of Rock,
ª The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
Marshes and Sand’?
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663913493154
Forests, Orchards and
sls.sagepub.com
Legal Inequality in Israel/
Palestine
Tobias Kelly
University of Edinburgh, UK
IRUS BRAVERMAN, Planted Flags: Trees, Land and Law in Israel/Palestine. New York: Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, 2009, 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-521-76002-7,
£66 (hbk)
At the point where the coastal plain of Israel begins to rise up to the hills, lies a small
wooded area known as Canada Park. The park, filled largely with pine trees, is criss-
crossed by hiking trails and on weekends is often full of picnicking Israeli families. Most
of the trees were planted by the money raised by the Jewish National Fund (JNF),
Canada, in the 1970s. The centrepiece of the park is a memorial to over 300 Canadian
and American Jews who have died in Israel’s various wars. Before 1967, most of the area
that is now the park either was in no man’s land or was controlled by the Kingdom of
Jordan. The Latrun salient, as it was sometimes known, stuck out like a thumb into Israel.
In June 1967, during the first few hours of the Six Day War, troops from the Israeli army
took control of the villages of Yallu, Imwas and Bayt Nuba that lay within the salient.
Then, on the second night of the invasion, Israeli military jeeps drove through the vil-
lages and ordered the residents to leave their homes. Over the next few hours, all
12,000 villagers packed up the few belongings they could carry and began to walk east
(Kelly, 2004). The residents were forbidden from returning home, as the area was
declared a closed military zone. From the nearby hills, the newly displaced Palestinians
could see their former houses being blown up by Israeli military engineers.
Walking through Canada Park today, you can still just about make out the remains of
these former Palestinian villages, among the trees and shrubs that have since covered the
Corresponding author:
Tobias Kelly, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building,
George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK.
Email: Toby.kelly@ed.ac.uk
576
Social & Legal Studies 22(4)
ground. If you walk east through the forest, you will eventually come to the Israeli set-
tlement of Mevo Horon, built on the land of the former village of Bayt Nuba, before
coming upon the ‘Separation barrier’, a barbed wire fence three layers deep. On the other
side of the fence, the landscape is markedly different from that of Canada Park. The rel-
atively thick forest of pine trees is replaced by scrubby hill and olive groves tended by
Palestinian villagers. If you had made this journey in the final years of the second inti-
fada, you would have seen pale dusty scars across the hills left by uprooted olive trees.
These trees were removed by the Israeli military in order to provide ‘security’ for Israeli
citizens as they drove through the roads of the West Bank. At the time these words are
written, perhaps 7 or 8 years after the event, there is no obvious sign that the trees were
ever there. The countryside has seemingly returned to its natural state.
There is of course nothing natural about the landscape of Israel/Palestine. Its topography,
and its meanings and implications, has been shaped by intense human intervention, no more
so than in the past 50 years. An examination of the ways in which political and legal pro-
cesses have shaped this landscape takes us to the heart of the region’s conflicts. Irus Braver-
man’s Planted Flags examines how the legal regulation of the ways in which land can and
cannot be used, and in particular, the types of trees that can be planted or uprooted there has
been a central part of the ways in which the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been played out
on the ground. For Braverman, examining olive and pine trees, and the ways in which they
are legally rooted in the soil, helps us get to the heart of the symbolic, emotional and material
dimensions of the ways in which the Israeli state has sought to control the region.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict can be understood as a conflict over access to legal
rights and protections (Hajjar, 2005). Wider conflicts over territory and identity have
often taken shape and been articulated through law. As well as the spectacular acts of
violence that dominated the international newspaper headlines about the region, many
of the key battles are being fought out on a legal terrain, in what Braverman calls, after
the term coined by John Comaroff, a form of ‘lawfare’ (see, e.g., Comaroff, 2001). The
Israeli state has been very careful to extend its control through legal mechanisms. The
presence of the Israeli state in the West...
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