Scattered across the hills of occupied Palestine, millions of pine trees stand as one of the most visible signs of Israeli colonial ambition.
They were planted from the 1920s onward, first under the British Mandate Forestry Service and then massively expanded by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) after 1948, the Nakba.
After Israel was declared a Jewish ‘homeland’ and around 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes, native trees were systematically uprooted and replaced with pine trees to undermine Palestinian livelihoods.
Today, the ruins of those depopulated villages lie beneath Israeli forests, their stones and terraces swallowed by dense, European-imagined woodland.
But Israeli pine trees don’t belong there, ecologically.
The hills of Palestine have a Mediterranean and semi-arid climate shaped over millennia, home to specific species that can survive there – among them are olive, fig, carob, oak and wild almond.
These are the trees that generations of Palestinian farmers cultivated, that stored water in their bark, that anchored themselves in the limestone soil.
Typical cases of settler colonialism like this one always entail ecocide, the destruction of the environment, according to Palestinian scientist and author Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, a nominee for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
“Like most colonisers, they came to a land that was unfamiliar to them. In this case, Zionist settlers came from Europe to a place that was not European; it had different people, different flora and fauna,” Qumsiyeh tells TRT World.
“So they tried to reshape it to resemble Europe by replacing native species with monocultures of pine trees, which are not suited to this climate of dry summers and are highly susceptible to fire,” Qumsiyeh, founder and director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability and the Palestine Museum of Natural History, adds.
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No one predicted that this artificially constructed, non-native forest system would eventually collapse under its own contradictions.
Today, across occupied Palestine’s planted forests, the picture is one of mass die-off, and the numbers are damning.
“When local communities are displaced, what is lost is an entire system of ecological knowledge, stewardship, and historical interaction with the landscape,” Dr Lucas Ferrante, a researcher at the University of São Paulo with expertise in landscape ecology and land grabbing, tells TRT World.
“As a researcher working on landscape change, territorial dispossession, and the ecological consequences of forced occupation, I see the loss of Palestinian territories not only as a political or humanitarian issue, but also as a profound ecological one.”
Global examples, including the Brazilian Amazon, demonstrate that invasions and the displacement of traditional peoples often trigger ecological damage, from forest degradation to the erosion of sustainable territorial management, according to Ferrante.
A remote-sensing survey of around 100,000 dunams of southern forests, spanning from the Be’eri area to the Yatir Forest, found more than 50 percent mortality among conifers, mainly cypress trees.
The JNF’s own Forest Management chief described the damage as producing “unprecedented tree mortality rates.”
In Carmim Forest, Shikma, Meitar, Lachish, Yatir, Dudaim, and Gerar, the same pattern repeats.
These trees were never suited to the land they were forced into. They shed acidic needles that poison the surrounding soil and provide no firebreak, according to experts.
Olive and citrus trees, by contrast, are fire-resistant; they store water and are leafy, naturally acting as firebreaks against wildfires.
The pines, on the other hand, burn fast and hot.
When fires tore through more than 100 locations across the Judaean Mountains in April 2025, forcing evacuations, injuring dozens, and prompting Israel to declare a national emergency, it was these alien conifers that fuelled the flames.
After the 2021 Jerusalem mountain fires, the charred landscape revealed the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba, along with 400-year-old agricultural terraces once cultivated by Palestinian farmers.
Colonisers don’t only destroy people; they also destroy biological diversity, including species, habitats, and entire ecosystems, according to Professor Qumsiyeh, who cites many examples.
