Plant a Tree: Sinjel

The work of the Stop the JNF Plant a Tree project identifies areas of need by working closely with Palestinian farmers. 

Community of Sinjel

Khaled Khalil, aged 45, is a farmer who has lived all his life on family land near Sinjel, to the northeast of Ramallah.  The village of Sinjel, is surrounded by the illegal settlements of Shilo, Shivout, Ma’le Lemova, Eli and Rahail. Israeli settlers seek to cut Palestinians’ connection to the remaining agricultural land they have not yet taken over to expand settlements.

His land is close to the illegal colony/settlement of Ma’le Levona. Originally, Ma’le Lemona was an outpost of the Nahal, a division of the IDF which combined military service with the founding of illegal agricultural outposts.  Outposts are small illegal colonies, intended to pave the way for larger development, as is the case in Ma’le Lemova, now a “communal religious” colony.

The Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem (ARIJ) records that lands were confiscated from 3 Palestinian villages in order to create Ma’la Lemova. The affected villages are: Sinjel, Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya and Abwein.

Against a background of settler encroachment and harassment, Khaled and his family remain resolute in cultivating and holding on to their land.

Statistics:

Illegal colonies are burgeoning.

• Over 650,000 Jewish settlers live on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank
• An additional 220,000 Jewish settlers reside in East Jerusalem
• Over 25,000 Israeli settlers live in the Golan Heights
• As of 2022, there were 140 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem.
• Estimates suggest there are over 170 Israeli illegal outposts in the West Bank.

Illegal colonization is both expanding and becoming institutionalized. Ma’le Lemova is an illustration of this fact: it is one of the 46 illegal outposts and colonies now organised into, and “governed” by, the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, seemingly laying the administrative foundation for a full annexation of Palestine.

Trees planted by Palestinian farmers are a special target for settler violence, symbolizing as they do a dep relationship with the land. Olives are destroyed, set on fire, poisoned or even uprooted to be replanted outside new colonies, disguising the lack of connection of these places to the land.

In the absence of any meaningful resistance from world powers, Israel has intensified its settlement programme. (See the section on the wider struggle below)

The story of Khaled Khalil of Sinjel: “I am sure that if my dad did not have faith in the power of tree planting, we would have lost the land to settlers.”

The accelerated colonization of the Palestinian West Bank has brought destructive changes to the life of Khaled and his family. Khaled’s family farm comprises 83 dunums and lies near the village of Sinjel, northeast of Ramallah. When he was a child, Khaled recalls how his mother and father resisted the settlers trying to encroach on the family’s land. He tells us that today’s settler-saboteurs and their intimidatory tactics are not new:

“Uprooting trees has been used by settlers for decades. When I was a little kid, they would invade our land just the same way as they do now and uproot the trees my father planted. Yet, my father never gave up on cultivating our land over and over again. I am sure that if my dad did not have faith in the power of tree planting, we would have lost the land to settlers.”

Now, it falls to Khaled to carry forward his parents’ struggle to hold onto the land, in turn passing that tradition to his children. For Khaled, tree planting is an inter-generational act of instilling the spirit of resistance and persistence in his children. His father not only passed on the significance of tree planting to him, but also the sense of hope and optimism that this small act is part of a larger struggle for liberation.

And this is not an easy path to follow. Settlers often storm onto Khaled’s land, destroy his crops and trees and steal his farming equipment. Settlers also prevent Khaled from ploughing his land. “When they see me ploughing my land, settlers, usually armed, come and start yelling at me to leave by threatening to shoot at me.”

“On June 16, tens of fanatic Israeli settlers affiliated to the Hilltop Youth invaded my land and uprooted 450 trees. The few trees I thought they had allowed to remain intact were poisoned with chemicals and dried up shortly after the incident.”

Khaled’s story is replicated in the experiences of other farmers in Sinjel, surrounded as it is by five illegal Israeli settlements located to the west and the east of the village: Ma’ale Levona, Eli, Haroa’a, Giv’at Haroa’a and Shilo. 

But Khaled’s story of resistance is also mirrored in the bravery and determination of people whose land is such an integral part of their personal and national identity.

Wider Struggle: The drive to colonise Palestine goes deep in the Zionist psyche. Certain landmark dates stand out in the process: 

• an escalation of settlement-forming after the Oslo Agreements in 1993;
• in 1998, Ariel Sharon urged settlers to “grab the hilltops“, adding,  “Everyone that’s there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.”
• the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza, which enraged fundamentalist settlers, a withdrawal matched by expansion in the West Bank;
• the Nation State Law in 2018 elevated settlement to a constitutional level
• now the radical shift to the extreme right in Netanyahu’s 2022 coalition, has given the green light to yet more colonisation.

Netanyahu’s new coalition – the most fanatically religious and hard-line in Israel’s history – has pledged to legalise wildcat settlement outposts, previously considered illegal even by the Israeli government. Netanyahu has given a commitment to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel”, including “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical names for the West Bank. He also promised to annex the West Bank “while choosing the timing and considering the national and international interests of the state of Israel”.

Additionally, among his administration, central figures are themselves illegal settlers (Itamar Ben Gvir living in Hebron, and Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism Party and co-founder of Regavim living outside Kedumim colony in a house which breaks even the illegal colony’s own master plan). The responsibilities given to these men are chilling: Ben Gvir is the new National Security Minister (despite his convictions for incitement to racial hatred and support for a terrorist group) and Smotrich leads the new ministry overseeing settlement in the West Bank.

Hilltop Youth: Khaled mentioned Hilltop Youth – a loosely affiliated group of Jewish settlers in their teens and 20s who live away from their parents on the hilltops surrounding established settlements. Members of the group have perpetrated so-called “price tag” attacks and are known for their extreme violence against Palestinians.

Some of these youths are yeshiva drop-outs, others are followers of rabbis who find in religious texts, ideological justification for attacks on and even killings of Palestinians. For instance, Forward cites the influence of “The King’s Torah” in which Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur declared, “The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’” applies only “to a Jew who kills a Jew.” Non-Jews, they wrote, are “uncompassionate by nature” and assaults on them “curb their evil inclination,” while infants and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed, since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us.”

The Hilltop Youth, Amana, and Gush Emunim constitute an ideology and set of policies enforced by the Jewish colonial authorities, including the Israeli army, to prohibit Palestinian access to land. At times, Hilltop Youth attacks have drawn some weak criticism from the Israeli establishment as in 2013 when Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, defined price tag attacks as “illegal organizing.” The arson attack carried out by the Hilltop Youth on a Palestinian family in Duma, which resulted in the death of Saad Dawabsha, who was killed alongside his wife and infant son, shows the extent to which some members of this group are prepared to go. 

Hilltop Youth’s outposts are generally supplied with water and electricity, regardless of their status. Under Netanyahu’s new regime, the group may find itself moving from fringe status to a more central role in the state’s official system of oppression.  (See this article in Forward)

A relatively new phenomenon, that of Israeli shepherd outposts is emerging particularly in the Jordan Valley and has been researched and documented by Manal Shqair of Stop the Wall. She charts how these small fundamentalist outposts, supported by Hilltop Youth and the IDF, operate to implement colonial ecological violence, a term used to encapsulate the intended outcome of the disruption inflicted on Palestinian farming communities: to undermine Palestinian social practices, gender roles and responsibilities, collective identity and the material sustenance derived from traditional farming practices. As such, colonial ecological violence is one instrument which activates the logic of elimination which lies at the heart of the Zionist enterprise. (To read more about shepherd outposts and case studies of their adverse impacts on Palestinian farmers, see Manal Shaqair’s article here)

What Plant a Tree has done.

At the start of 2021, our partners, Stop the Wall, helped farmers reach and cultivate their lands that are otherwise threatened by Israeli confiscation. In the villages of Sinjel (Ramallah district), Burqa (Nablus district), Izbit Shufa (Tulkarm district) and Bethlehem Stop the Wall planted 564 olive trees. Every planted tree stands for the steadfastness of Palestinian farmers in the face of a vicious Israeli campaign to eliminate Palestinian existence on their land.

Months later, in October, Stop the Wall supported farmers to harvest their olive trees; the team particularly supported farmers in the villages of Deir Al-Ghusoun (Tulkarm district), Kaffah (Tulkarm district), Al-Ras (Salfit), Eskaka (Salfit), Sinjel (Ramallah), Al-Shwaika (Tulkarm), Burin (Nablus), Deir Istya (Salfit district) and Baqa Al-Sharqiyya (Tulkarm).

Stop the Wall also supports women’s cooperatives to enhance their steadfastness against settler violations and settlement expansion, founding four agricultural cooperatives in Aseera Al- Qebliya and Burin in Nablus district, Kufr Thulth in Qalqilya district, and Sinjel in Ramallah district. See this link to a short film “Guardians of the Mount”.

The women’s testimony illustrates Palestinian analysis of the Zionst attitude to Palestinian land: “Israel considers the farmers’ lands and homes as “reserve lands” for the Israeli settlement project. Imagine that your house, land and crops, your whole life are a “reserve” for the colonial project!” (Words of one of the women in the project)

Grassroots projects help resist the colonial project.

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