Landscape, complicity and partitioned zones at South Africa Forest and Lubya in Israel-Palestine

Abstract

In the historical and ideological contests of settler colonial conquest, the making of “landscape” out of land and territory is a powerful instrument in the visual and discursive constructions of nationalist perspectives. This article examines one such site, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) “South Africa Forest” in the Galilee, Israel-Palestine, cultivated upon Lubya, a destroyed Palestinian village. The article explores the significance of trees in dominant narratives of modern political Zionist discourses and non-Israeli Jewish nationalist discourses, in particular. It examines the modes of complicity to which JNF tree-planting has given rise and argues that a state-aligned seaming of spatial divisions, cognitive boundaries and ideological partitions enables the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe, to be “erased from space and consciousness” (Kadman 2008). The article then turns to the film, The Village under the Forest (2013), which focuses on Lubya and South Africa Forest in order to examine what narrative and visual decisions were made in the film's attempt to address complicity with the erasures and bifurcated spatial imaginaries of Israel-Palestine's landscape.