Beware of settlers planting trees: Lucía Gutiérrez Vázquez, Atxu Amann Alcocer, Flavio Martella, ‘Greening the occupation: colonial landscape regulation in Palestine-Israel’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Beware of settlers planting trees: Lucía Gutiérrez Vázquez, Atxu Amann Alcocer, Flavio Martella, ‘Greening the occupation: colonial landscape regulation in Palestine-Israel’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

17May25

Abstract: Historically, the modification of the landscape through afforestation has been instrumentalized in the service of the colonization of the territory. In this context, the construction of green areas in Palestine-Israel in the twentieth century can be interpreted as an exercise of strategic territorial control linked to the Zionist project. The planting of forests under the Forest Ordinance of 1926 in the territory acquired by Israel, the cultivation of olives associated with Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 in the West Bank, and the designation of Parks and Nature Reserves thanks to the National Parks Law of 1998 alongside Order 373 in the West Bank are three interventions that demonstrate the synergy between plantations and prevailing regulations. Through its analysis, this article reveals the landscape as a material result of surveillance technologies and argues that green areas in Palestine-Israel are covertly instrumentalized against rootedness, autonomous reproduction, mobility, self-determination, and the memory of the Palestinian people, masking a colonization strategy according to a model of territorial ethnic cleansing.

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