In the past few weeks, forest fires have swept through Israel, forcing people to be evacuated from their homes and destroying thousands of acres of land. Nadav Shragai spoke with some who were happy to see the conflagration:
I found them after encountering a few social-media posts from Palestinians and Arab Israelis. One was the well-known Haifa historian Johnny Mansour, a lecturer at Beit Berl College. Mansour and his colleagues . . . choose to stress what, in their eyes, the fires exposed: the “geographic, historical truth” of what the “Zionist colonial project” was hiding—“sights that no one expected,” Mansour said.
He cited “agricultural terraces that Palestinians worked for decades, the result of the Palestinian peasant’s hard work, sweat, and blood to preserve his land and make a living off it, landscapes that the project of occupation and Zionist uprooting, with its colonial institutions planted with trees to destroy what the peasants created and to hide the land and the characteristics of the region.”
Mansour, who sees the Palestinian national movement and its agricultural expressions as natural, and Zionist forestation as a foreign weed, is not alone in his views. . . . Back during the wildfires of 2016, the Fatah movement adopted a similar stance. . . . Or in other words, “If I can’t have it, neither can you.”
There are plenty of signs that last week’s fires, like waves of wildfires in 2019 and 2016, were at least in part another mutation of Palestinian terrorism. The retired Fire and Rescue Services official Ran Shalaf, who used to head arson investigations for the department, said as much five years ago. Fire and rescue officials, as well as defense officials, are saying exactly the same thing today, and the Public Security Ministry also thinks that many of the fires were arson.
Read more on Israel Hayom: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/if-i-cant-have-it-neither-can-you/