The Yatir Forest in present-day Israel is an entirely planted woodland in the desert region referred to by Palestinians as the Naqab and Israelis as the Negev. The four million trees that make up the Yatir were planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) beginning in the 1960s, as part of a long-standing campaign pitching tree plant-ing in Israel to Jews in the United States and elsewhere as a beneficent act of environmentalism and a means of memorializing loved ones.

In reality, the JNF’s forestry workers were accompanied by Israeli police, armed with rubber bullets and tear gas, when they displaced the Bedouin, the pastoral Arab tribes who lived where the trees stand today.

Since 1948, the Israeli government has used afforestation to uproot Palestinian communities like Atir (as Yatir used to be known), to forcibly limit the growth of others, and to hide evidence of yet others already destroyed. Along the way, organizations like the JNF have helped to both finance the operations and launder them to unsuspecting contributors.