To the Editor:
In the Profile of the July 23 issue of The Dartmouth, a couple of items were inadvertently misquoted, and I would like to clarify these for the record. The article asserted that forests were planted over 450 Palestinian villages "in the name of Zionism." The campaign of Zionist tree-planting was not aimed at planting over destroyed Palestinian villages -- it had a very separate origin and a life of its own, implementing Zionism's narratives of Jewish "return to the soil," "making the desert bloom," and asserting literal and symbolic layers of Jewish rootedness and connectedness to the land.
Millions of trees have been planted all over the country as part of this campaign. Of the approximately 450 Palestinian villages destroyed between 1947 and 1949, only some have had state-sponsored forests planted over them -- others have been reconfigured in a wide variety of ways. The "encounter" between these particular instances of planted forests, and Palestinian refugees' alternative readings of the landscape on the same sites, is used in my study as one of many illustrations of how Palestinian and Israeli assertions of rootedness through the literal and symbolic use of trees and landscape sometimes overlap, get in each other's way, and even borrow and appropriate from each other.
