Kristof: Exploring the future of 2 Israels

NEGEV DESERT, Israel - For generations, Americans and others have been donating trees to Israel through the Jewish National Fund. “Planting a tree in Israel is the perfect way to show you care,” the fund says on its website. An $18 donation buys a tree, turns the desert green, protects the environment and supports an embattled Jewish state.?The fund says it has planted more than 250 million trees in Israel so far.

Yet here in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, it looks more complicated. The Bedouin Arabs, the indigenous inhabitants, say they are being pushed out of their lands by these trees donated by well-meaning contributors.

“Each of those trees is a soldier causing the destruction of our communities, our lives,” Sheikh Sayakh al-Turi, a Bedouin leader, told me. “All those trees are planted on lands of Bedouin who are still living here.”

His son, Aziz, says the Jewish National Fund destroyed hundreds of his own fruit and olive trees and then replanted the area with new trees to push out the Bedouin. “They want to delete our history and plant Jewish history,” Aziz said.

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the president of Rabbis for Human Rights, a group that is helping the Bedouin, backs up these claims.

“JNF does many good things, but this is the dark side,” he said. “Almost anywhere you go in this country where there is a JNF forest, you will find, at its heart, the ruins of an Arab village.”

“I, as a Zionist, believe I have a place here,” Ascherman added, “but I don’t want to be here by displacing Aziz.”

The JNF sees it differently, saying that the fundamental problem isn’t trees but Bedouin poverty. Russell Robinson, the chief executive of the fund, says the JNF follows Israeli law and forestry plans and that it has some programs that directly combat Bedouin poverty.

That’s true, and those anti-poverty efforts seem admirable. Still, I don’t think Americans who have donated trees would feel too good after meeting some of the displaced Bedouin, and the tree-planting raises larger questions: Particularly at a time of hard-line Israeli leadership, how can foreigners support Israel without inadvertently oppressing Arabs?

The Negev Desert is part of Israel itself, not the West Bank, and these Bedouin are Israeli citizens. Yet Israel is pushing the Bedouin off their lands and destroying their homes in ways that would never happen if they were Jewish.

“We have, in many ways, an incredibly strong democracy” notes Ascherman, singling out the vibrancy and range of political debate. Yet it doesn’t always work well for the Arab minority.

It’s also a democracy with contradictions. West Bank Jews vote, but not West Bank Palestinians. A Jewish kid in Chicago has a birthright to Israel, but not a Palestinian child next door whose roots are in Haifa.

The roughly 200,000 Bedouin Arabs reflect the ways in which Israeli democracy falls short. The government doesn’t recognize their land claims and has bulldozed Bedouin villages and then herded them into bleak modern townships that are basically the Israeli equivalent of U.S. Indian reservations.

The Turis’ village, Al Araqib, was bulldozed several years ago. When I spoke to the Bedouin, they were huddled in temporary shacks. And the day after I spoke to them, the authorities knocked those shacks down as well.

On my visit here to the Negev, I faced two Israels. One is the thriving democracy that many of us admire, the one that gives disgruntled Arab citizens free speech and ballots, that treats the wounded Syrians brought across the border, that nurtures a civil society that stands up for the Bedouin. This is the Israel that anyone can support without risking harm to Arabs. Any of us would plant a tree in this Israel. (Indeed, Rabbis for Human Rights has its own tree-planting program.)

Yet the other Israel has been gaining ground. It’s more nationalistic, more militaristic, more determined to push Palestinians off land in the West Bank, more eager to dispatch the United States to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. This is the Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will represent in his address to Congress scheduled for this week.

This is also the Israel that antagonizes many Europeans and Americans. Hard-line policies under Netanyahu are turning support for Israel’s government from a bipartisan issue to a Republican one. A poll of Americans published in December found that 51 percent of Republicans wanted the United States to lean toward Israel, but only 17 percent of Democrats agreed (most didn’t want to lean either way). Increasingly, the constituency in America that most reliably backs the Israeli government may be not Jews but Evangelical Christians.

With the Netanyahu speech coming up, U.S. politicians will be strutting and jostling to prove their “pro-Israel” credentials. So this is a moment to remember that the better question is which Israel to support.

Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for the New York Times.